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Comment by adamnemecek | Hacker News Reader

Procrastination is a signal that you hate what you are supposed to be doing. Don't ignore it.

Not always true. I frequently procrastinate on things that I actively enjoy doing and want to do. There are times when I want nothing more than to be doing something and I still procrastinate doing it. This applies to things that aren't work or aren't productive just the same, things that take little effort like watching a series or playing a video game.

Medication does make it a lot better and I don't procrastinate nearly as much as I used to, but before I started taking it, there were times where I'd lie on the sofa with the remote control next to me and I would just stare at the ceiling thinking about watching that movie I've been wanting to watch and I still couldn't bring myself to do it.

Have you considered meditation?

Yes, mediation, mindfulness and several other techniques for controlling emotions were things that we tried with my psychiatrist. Meditation didn't really work for me but mindfulness sure did.

Meditation isn't always for everyone:

https://battlepenguin.com/philosophy/mindful-meditation-is-n...

I know, but consider psychiatric meds perscribed - its generally very risky to mess with one’s head. Ive 700hours in monasteries under my belt, ive seen the dark side of meditation, aswell as its light. I still say take the risk tho.

Mindful is a great tool. It needn't be vipassana. Many People who do vipassana often are at a point where its a last resort before something worse.

Oh yes i did mean mindfulness meditation, i have been to several mindfulness retreats (vipassanas) and used to have ADHD. I find cold showers and a morning/evening mindfulness sit work wonders.

I suppose I should clarify the kind of mindfulness I'm talking about. Basically what I was taught was how to pay attention to what I'm feeling and where those emotions are coming from. This helps a lot with lowering my anxiety and stress levels. Unlike meditation, this isn't something that I stop to do, aside from maybe a brief pause to take a couple of breaths, it's something I do throughout the day when I start feeling bad.

Meditation didn't work for me because it implied taking some time out my day to do it, and that would just and either become a way to procrastinate or something that I would procrastinate doing and contribute to my anxiety.

That aside, I think there's a lot of confusion about the terms "meditation," "mindful mediation" and "mindfulness" and I'm not sure I know the correct way to use them, but the above is what I mean when I say "mindfulness."

the book way of the peaceful warrior, and the word is carpe diem

I don't think it's possible to procrastinate using mindfulness meditation. If you're trying to avoid something, what you're really trying to avoid are the associated emotions. Mindfulness meditation does literally the opposite.

I find that by letting the emotions I'd like to avoid come to my consciousness -- i.e. meditating -- I get used to them. That frequently outright removes my procrastinating problem.

> that I would procrastinate doing and contribute to my anxiety.

You don't have to schedule meditation. Just do it when you feel like it, expand your brief pauses. And if you don't feel like meditating for weeks or months, so be it.

You’re 100% correct.

I find the only thing that comes in the way of meditation is the mind’s attempt to escape while under duress. People tend to prefer to drink, watch something, and even blame others, rather than sit and close eyes and feel.

Thats why i think its important to actually have a meditation buddy to help out with starting, and when its particularly tough.

The more an ego needs to meditate, it seems that it develops more and more aversion - i sort of think its one major cause for many mental pathologies.

I'd pay some seriously good money for some information about how to efficiently meditate with ADD. From my experience, it is a poor tool to improve one's condition, and ADD makes it nigh impossible to efficiently meditate anyway. I have done some googling on that topic and only find lame "meditation for wellbeing" BS all around, but nothing clearly targeted for ADD.

Lookup a 10 day vipassana retreat /with a good teacher/ (important! Bad vipassana can cause psychosis esp. if teacher is rigid. And uve a traumatic past)

In the beginning, you will fight your ego, certain traumas will surface, you learn to accept alot about urself too. The less that disturbs the ego, the calmer it is.

Even to this my meditation is disturbed, but im a much calmer person.

Mind you its complex too, could be a food habits/mild allergy contributing to existing factors. Did you try a water fast with some power coffee?

You can dm me and we can talk more about this.

I don't take medication even though I'm diagnosed with ADD. I guess there is the procrastination from ADD and the one talked about in the article.

The one from ADD makes me do... nothing. I feel paralyzed somehow. I scream at myself in my mind to finally start the task, I know I have to but my body won't move. It's hard to explain.

Then there is the procrastination as described in the article. I think it makes me do something else instead that I have put off, like cleaning or the sudden urge to finally learn a new programming language / framework. Like, I feel better and worse at the same time! I did something productive, at the cost of what I should have done.

They might overlap, I guess.

I definitely understand. As I got older, I found myself doing the first type of procrastination (the do nothing type) more and more, and after talking through some things with my psychiatrist we came to the conclusion that it's because that bad feeling you get after the second type of procrastination (the do something else type) started overpowering the good feeling of doing something, so I would end up paralyzed and doing nothing more often.

Now, on the good days I actually do the things I want to do or need to do, but on the days when I procrastinate, I tend to do the type where I do something else. The days where I get completely paralyzed are far less frequent now. Part of it is the medication but another part was learning to control my guilt and anxiety over not doing what I'm "supposed to." This is why I tell people that medication is not a magic solution to your problems, it'll help but you'll still have bad days and it won't work automatically, you still gotta put in the effort to get better, the medicine will just help a bit with that.

I was diagnosed with ADD later in life. I started medication and it helped the first year. After that it went down hill quite fast. The thing is you can laser focus with medication. This means that if you are a procrastinator for the lack of attention, it helps you quite well. But if you are a procrastinator because of emotional walls (difficult, confronting, boring, etc.), it helps you laser focus on your procrastination tasks and you forget about the main task. YouTube, Gaming & P*rnhub and no other worries in the world.

So medication can help with ADD, but those emotions need to be addressed. I stopped mine after 4 years.

Thank you for this very honest comment. You make me feel less alone.

The beauty of communities like these is that I can make an account and talk about my experiences without tying it to my real identity. Unfortunately I don't have the courage to do that yet, it's easier to be honest when the stakes are low. Somehow, HN also seems a better place to do so, rather than a community dedicated to the disorder. Probably because it's mostly about other things and only occasionally warrants posting about my experiences when the topic comes up instead of being 100% about it.

Wow its scary how much i can relate to your comment. I always procrastinate even on things that i enjoy doing.

> Medication does make it a lot better

If it's not too personal, could you give me a rough idea of what sort of medication you are on? In the last couple of years I started thinking maybe I should try something... Meditation has helped a lot but there are still weeks when my emotions get a bit out of control and nothing gets done.

It took some time to find a combination of medicine that worked for me, and I was pretty lucky as far as that is concerned. So my first bit of advice to anyone considering medicine is to stick with it and follow directions. It's also important to find a psychiatrist who will work with you, in my experience (your mileage will vary) it takes roughly a month or sometimes two to see if something is working, so sticking with it (unless you start having really serious side effects) is important even if it appears not to be working. Also, a good psychiatrist, in my experience, will give you a phone number so you can reach him at almost any time with questions and concerns.

As far as medication itself goes, I started with Atomoxetine (Straterra) and that barely worked for me, I also tried Methylphenidate in extended release form (Concerta) which does work but came with an annoying amount of anxiety. What works best for me is Lisdexamfetamine (Vyvanse), which is basically extended release amphetamine. I take 70mg daily in the morning and it works really well and doesn't produce any side effects for me. 70mg is considered a large dose, but seeing how I can sleep well and even take naps during the day (if I want), and have no anxiety, irritability or tachycardia when taking it, it seems to be an appropriate dose for me. A friend of mine suspected he had ADHD and took a much lower dose of Vyvanse (10 mg), and he was shaky and irritable right away, so in the end his diagnosis wasn't ADHD but depression, which can have similar symptoms.

Also when I started, I took fluoxetine and clonazepam to help with depression and anxiety that was caused by living with untreated ADHD, but I'm not taking that anymore because I don't need to, following doctor's advice, of course, never stop taking anti-depressants by yourself, withdrawal can be harsh if you don't take care and taper the dose off gradually. These helped me keep my mood in the right space so I could get started on working towards fixing my problems. Now I'm just taking Vyvanse, and while the dose might decrease in the future, it's likely that I'll be taking it for the rest of my life, or at least until heart problems make it impossible to keep taking it.

I hope this helps, even if it's more information that you asked for. The point I wanted to make is that while medication is there to help, it doesn't magically make the problems go away (even if the right combination can feel that way), and the same symptoms can mean many different things, so psychiatric medicine can involve a lot of trial and error, especially if you're unlucky. I found it very important to keep careful track of how my state of mind changed as I took the medicine and to report it as accurately as possible to my psychiatrist.

Thank you, that's way more than I could hope for. Great to see it's working for you.

Procrastination is a signal that task makes you feel uncomfortable, but that fear of it can be a result of many issues (boredom, laziness, feeling of incompetence, fear of making what seems as a hard decision, fear of people not liking it, fear of finishing as then you have to move to the next step, etc.). Usually it's far more complex than just "I hate doing it", because there's a deeper reason hidden behind that aversion.

And perhaps the most rational reason of all: because last time I was faced with a similar task I procrastinated and it went away on its own.

You might hate what you are doing in the short term but love what you will gain from doing that in the long term.

Not really. The odds are if hating it now, the odds of you hating it forever are pretty high.

Actually a disturbed ego will hate doing a good thing, and love doing a bad thing. Thats the basis of affective disorders. Is it hate, or is it aversion? The spectrum of emotion isn't a simple thing, and i have seen people change.

You might like the result (like a clean house) but hate starting the process. That's one possibility.

But you could also hate starting (a project for a job you hate) but you keep on doing it, ignoring those feelings, because we all have bills to pay.

I think the second one is what you need to be aware of.

Not sure why youre being downvoted. There us alot of truth to that. Not all cases, but i believe many

Because GP phrased it as being absolute. Yeah, perhaps it's true for some. Frankly, those have it easy - there's a clear path to solving the problem: stop doing what you hate, perhaps first resolving the issue that forces you to do the things you hate.

For me and many others here, procrastination is completely orthogonal to whether you hate something or not. That complicates things, because you can't just switch tasks, or jobs, to solve the problem or even to recover your mental strength.

That advice ignores the fact that we hate most of the things we should do to be healthy. Should we just give up fitness and healthy eating just because we don't like them (in the short term)?

Do you procrastinate On these?

An example might be to quit smoking. Anyone who quits will probably procrastinate that for a while. But no matter how much you are going to hate quitting, smoking just isn’t worth it.

Went through that, can confirm.

i do not favor this example either. to quit smoking is long term commitment to not do something anymore. When i am thinking about procrastination i think about tasks you can be done with. Even if you meant procrastinating before starting to quit i do not think it holds up as a good example because there is no way to be done with it and if i stop i restart at the beginning.

Who doesn't? If we didn't there wouldn't be a whole industry dedicated to helping you do it.

The opposite is true for me - when I have a task I know I'm going to enjoy I put it off for ages because I like the anticipation of doing it.

I also put off tasks I'm not confident about even if I'll like them because I fear the outcome. Failing makes me depressed.

Neither of these are hating the task itself.

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