When I was at university, I was convinced that I wanted to be an investment banker and work on Wall Street. A year later, it took all of about three hours in the cubicle miasma known as State Street for that dream to evaporate. In hindsight, I didn’t want to be a banker as much as I wanted to feel powerful and important. Fortunately, I found other ways to meet those needs.

There was also a period of time when I was convinced that my ex-girlfriend left me because I wasn’t good enough for her and so I had to prove myself to every woman I ever met. But after a lot of over-compensation around other women, I eventually realized that I was fine and much better off without her.

Then there was the idea that every bad emotion I ever experienced was a result of some underlying trauma and that by “working through it,” I was precipitating some sort of transformation in myself. Boy, was that one delusional. (Spoiler alert: Sometimes you feel bad just because you feel bad.)

What I’m getting at is that we’re often poor arbiters of our own emotions and desires. We lie to ourselves. And we do it for one obvious reason: to feel better.

We may not know exactly what we’re lying to ourselves about, but it’s safe to assume that some chunk of what we consider “truth” today is likely nothing more than a defense against some deeper meaning which is painful to accept.

By lying to ourselves we mortgage our long-term needs in order to fulfill our short-term desires. Therefore, one could say personal growth is merely the process of learning to lie to oneself less.

When it comes to uncovering our own BS, many of us rely on similar patterns to protect ourselves. Here are some common patterns I’ve come across in myself and people I’ve worked with:

1. “If I could just X, then my life would be amazing.”

Take your pick of what X is: get married, get laid, get a raise, buy a new car, a new house, a new pet rabbit, floss every Sunday, whatever. Obviously, you’re smart enough that I don’t have to tell you that no one single goal will ever solve your happiness problems permanently. After all, that’s the tricky part about the brain: the “If only I had X, then…” mechanism never goes away.

We’re evolutionarily wired to exist in a state of mild dissatisfaction. It makes biological sense. Primates who are never quite satisfied with what they already have and want a little bit more were the ones who survived and pro-created more often.

It’s an excellent evolutionary strategy, but a poor happiness strategy. If we’re always looking for what’s next it becomes quite difficult to appreciate what is now. Sure, we can alter this wiring a bit through conditioning, learned behaviors and changed mindsets, but it’s an immovable piece of the human condition, something we must always lean against.

So what does that mean? Learn to enjoy it. Learn to enjoy the challenge. Learn to enjoy change and pursuit of one’s higher goals. Relish the chase, so to speak. A big misconception in the self help world is that being satisfied with the present moment and working towards one’s future are somehow contradictory. They’re not. If life is a hamster wheel, then the goal isn’t to actually get anywhere, it’s to find a way to enjoy running.