> I don't really have any clever advice beyond that, it just sucks.
I found BJ Fogg’s behavior model [0] useful. His model let’s you plot a behavior on a graph. If you create two plots for two behaviors, the one closest to the top-right corner is the one you will do.
Procrastination then is just choosing one behavior over another. Doing nothing over doing something. And you can plot it, and then figure out how you can position the levers (there are only 3) to make “something” the chosen behavior over “staring at the wall”.
His book Tiny Habits goes into more detail about how you might run this diagnostic process. Atomic Habits is also good here for the actionable changes, but I found Fogg’s simple model to be wickedly effective for wrangling my executive dysfunction.
Once you have a habit framework in place, you need a wholistic approach, which I would listen to the 1st question of this Q&A [1] (around 2min mark) for an example of a daily routine (which starts the night before), and in some cases professional help works wonders (therapy, medication, CBT).
In terms of rescue from the acute fog-of-anxiety, I use 3 meditation tools that, if I follow them, have never failed.
One is a general observe-and-dissipate meditation, something like Sam Harris’s course, to build awareness and the ability to pause life for a brief second so you can inject habit loop triggers.
Second is meditation for calm, using modified box breathing to mitigate acute anxiety. In each of the 4 parts of the breath (in, hold, out, hold), wait for the most pleasurable part, and repeat. Something out waiting for the moment of most pleasure is (a) mildly pleasurable and (b) very focusing.
Third is the same as the second, but taking a break after each box breath cycle to pause and acknowledge to yourself that you are moving in the right direction. I added this after hearing a neuroscientist talk about hacking the brain’s reward system using this approach: pick any goal (even if it’s short-term counterproductive), take the smallest possible physical step toward that goal, pause and acknowledge your effort toward moving in the right direction, and repeat. The pause-and-acknowledge step triggers a dopamine response, which he said has the effect of buffering or titrating adrenaline, meaning this cycle is energizing and can be sustained for a very long time compared to an acute adrenaline spike and subsequent crash. Once you get forward momentum you can redirect to a better goal, so the initial goal is rather unimportant. Just building the momentum in this dopamine reward cycle overcomes all of the crushing anxiety, negative self-talk, and so forth.
[0] https://www.behaviormodel.org/
[1] https://impacttheory.libsyn.com/ama-8121-190416-pod-for-post