Create a positive feedback loop to become motivated
deprocrastination.co
deprocrastination.co
If you feel good about yourself and you are otherwise healthy then going to the gym, eating well, studying etc are not things that feel bad. They are intrinsically motivating because they make you a better you.
But if you feel bad or you are unwell then you don't give a toss, it's just dopamine fix after dopamine fix to get through today.
But then even if you feel good, not everyone cares about self actualization along the same axes. And then we have limited time, money, energy, ...
Life is complicated, innit.
It is definitely "life changing" going from a depressive state to a neutral or even positive one. But it seems most people start their self-improvement journey from depressive states they aren't aware of. Break-ups, financial ruin, tragic loss, shitty job, family issues, etc.
While self-actualization is indeed different for us all, there is a common sentiment to it which is being able to realize your full potential. The only way to do that is to constantly work on improving yourself as a person. That gives you much of the newfound sense of "security" and "growth" we all strive for in life.
I'm clinically depressed. I've had suicidal ideation for about twelve years (half my life.) On the rare days when sunlight peeks through and I can see the sky, yeah, working out and taking care of myself make me feel amazing. But most of the time it's just something I do. I don't feel better afterward. There may be a shadow of a thought in the back of my head like "this is making me stronger," but that's about it.
I've read an awful lot of LessWrong guides like the link about, pithily, how to extract more marginal value from your life. The problem is that before doing any of that makes sense I have to stop being so depressed, because every time I do something that's supposed to make me feel good I end up literally wanting to fucking kill myself. When I ask myself what I want out of life, the answer comes back immediately, "I want to die." Depression is this huge boulder that has been keeping me from getting on with my life for years now, and I know this but I'm not strong enough to move it myself. The best I can do is make life in the cave busy.
Before the inevitable replies pour in, I am doing every last thing I physically can about this. I run. I lift. I'm vegetarian and I eat a pretty healthy diet. I'm medicated. I'm in therapy. When I try meditation, it tends to bring me back to the feelings of wanting to die, and that's too much for me to sit with. I'm pursuing ketamine because I'm sick of living like this. I hope it helps me move the boulder.
Nothing worse than helpful advice when you're not in a good state of mind, I agree. Nonetheless, keep going and I hope that one day you can put all this behind you.
I don't know if this happens to everyone in life nor will everyone realize it, but finding meaning in life for me meant reading tons of books and getting clarity of what was missing in my life after better understanding self-actualization from many angles. After-all it is the big question we all want an answer to. I think I found that, but I still do suffer through stormy weather here and there and I remind myself that I've gotten through it before, I'll get through it again. I've been through years of depression, and now they are more like weeks if not days.
Highly recommend reasons to stay alive by Matt Haig and man's search for meaning by Viktor Frankl if you haven't read them already.
Wishing you the best and do know that you are enough.
I find Stoicism interesting, although I try to separate it from the Redditors that make it their whole identity.
I've read Frankl. I'm not familiar with Haig. I'll put it on the list.
I'm vegetarian and I eat a pretty healthy diet.
Consider adding grass-fed/pasture-raised beef (or even just an occasional not-bottom-tier hamburger) to your diet on occasion. In my twenties I found that eating some high quality protein (better with friends, but even alone) added a small but growing crack in the walls that barricaded my soul.
Also consider drastically different life philosophies/cultures in case the one you're in isn't for you (e.g. the ideas that meditation is a cure-all or that vegetarianism is virtuous are pretty culture-specific). For me that meant leaving conservative religion, but for others it might mean leaving progressive "religion."
Something else that helped me was going into social situations with a slight "idgaf so I'll just be my positive self no matter who might try to shut me down" attitude.
And finally, find any weak link in the vicious feedback cycle and chip away at it. Don't feel bad, but if you do, don't feel bad about feeling bad, but if you do, don't feel ...etc. Put the brakes on the meta-guilt and just be okay with feeling whatever for now, and you can feel something else later.
I find seitan to be a wonderful substitute.
Would moving to sunny climes be of any help?
Just please do some research as this stuff is not risk-free.
What really helped is that at any moment in time you can take a mental snapshot of your life, in essentially an instant, and from there decide to move up instead of down. A beauty to this, even if you fail to lift yourself, you can do the same thing again at a new moment. FWIW if anything
So, under depression, you can fight the uphill battle, finish that difficult task …and feel nothing at all. And then feel bad about not feeling good.
I don’t think there’s a single treatment to fix this for everyone, the solution needs to be adapted. In my case other happiness pathways and chemicals besides “task oriented satisfaction” were still open. (Sport felt good. Spending time with family felt good. Time in nature felt good. Healthy food felt good) So I “forced” myself to do a bunch of that. And that gradually unblocked my brain a little, and with some counselling and expectation management, I started feeling good about “doing things”. Still a work in progress.
This is the sort of thought pattern that is very possible to change, and for the reader unsure how, I'd highly recommend looking into CBT and similar therapies.
Not only did it take a lot more effort than usual to get moving on things, the effort I did put in did not result in any long-term momentum, making it really difficult to find motivation to keep trying.
- personal level fixes: don't dwell in your own darkness, try to seize the few blinking moments of energy and do something with it, anything. It kinda revives that side of your mind.
- social level fixes: the first point had low yields for me, lots of efforts, small returns, sometimes a good day and back to walking on a fine line. But when I got back to work life, even shitty places, there was like a big wave of relief sipping in my system. I theorize that as being connected with and in the same flow as others. Suddenly your brain is exposed to others stimuli that are very very powerful (sleep, diet, .. all realigned overnight without even thinking about it)
Not sure you meant the neologism or if it's a typo - but I like the picture it creates. Also agree with your point about productivity and emotinos.
Often when I finally start doing the thing I was putting off, the realization will hit me: "this is really hard," or "this feels really bad." I hadn't consciously expected those feelings but they were there under the surface, contributing to the urge to procrastinate.
I remember this article really changing my mindset when I first read it. “Procrastination is an emotion regulation problem, not a time management problem....”
https://www.google.com/amp/s/www.nytimes.com/2019/03/25/smar...
While this community is pretty diverse, I find some solace in reading comment threads like this one, as I sort of assume that most of the people who gravitate towards HN are in a similar mindset as myself. Maybe we’re a group of people who have lived through the evolution of internet and social media, maybe we are all to some degree attempting to practice some sort of limiting our media inputs to those which provide a more meaningful experience in this world, or maybe there are just more realists in this community than the others I’ve been exposed to.
I’m not really sure what it is, but I find these comment threads incredibly helpful to my situation. I’ve limited my “social media” intake to only HN for the past few years, and while I find myself on some days wishing there was something more magical to spend my time on, this community is the only place where I am reminded regularly to go out and do “Something” not because it will make me richer or more attractive or more popular, but simply because I will live a more fulfilling life. Thus being a “magical” community in and of itself.
Thank you HN community for being the way you are.
Chances are the thing you are procrastinating is inconsequential and maybe isn’t important in the first place, or you haven’t made up your mind yet.
If someone paid you $10 million to do something, you probably would just do it.
If on the other hand someone or society has brainwashed you into doing a low reward task then of course you will procrastinate.
Then spend a few years thinking about things that are truly worth doing. Long term goals that truly excite you which you can build towards.
Don’t do anything just because. Only do things that give you joy or are towards a goal you find exciting. Life is short and don’t waste it on pointless tasks.
This is how I personally found more motivation.
Specifically, the process of positive reinforcement and challenging assumptions is a cornerstone of Cognitive Behavioral Therapy movement in psychology and counseling.
CBT has been shown to be as effective as medications at treating a wide range of mental health issues — depression, anxiety, obsessive compulsive, substance abuse, and so on.
Anecdotally, this type of reinforcement is hard, but worth it. By definition you are trying to retrain your brain to be wired to better habits than it’s trained to now. You’re violating your comfortable response with a decidedly different one. But after you’ve practiced enough, these methods can provide real relief for mental health.
If it is real, I can endlessly supply you with project ideas. You know, how about solving hunger or climate change, if you are too bored ..
*In one instance that I recall, we had these children books for learning to read. While other kids were whispering while reading, I was silent reading them, and much faster than them. (I particularly remember the other kids commenting that I was just pretending to read.) So, I went through the available books.
*Another time we were supposed to underline all the words we didn't understand in a story. Since there were none, I just went through it again a few times and underlined words that looked more difficult just to finish the task. (When the teacher checked it, they just said they knew I already understood those words.) (I suppose "frog" doesn't qualify as a difficult word.)
(That was during first and second grade.)
They don't fit the tinkering spare time project very well.
Eg. The lowest hanging fruit for improving hunger now is to convince Ukraine to capitulate to Russia so that the grain can flow, but that's only something you can do if you're a hunter Biden or the like
Photovoltaik, desalination, automated greenhouses, etc.
My point is basically, that I never had the fear of being out of projects, when there are so many problems waiting to be solved. My problem was more, picking the realistic ones. But when your goal is the tinkering, than it likely will not hurt failing a unrealistic project and learning in the process.
However, for professional endeavors, I always go back to one of Neil Gaiman's pieces of advice to aspiring authors: "You learn by finishing things."
I’m now writing a book about this, for what it’s worth. Thanks for sharing your perspective.
It's a circular incentive. You level up to kill better mobs. You kill mobs to level up. So, unless there's any other reason to kill mobs, the game dies when everyone reaches max level.
I like the simplicity of your description. Can I ask what game you are referring to?
I really ought to remember to write a list. Oh wait I have one, where is that tab again?
To a degree, mass media undermined that foundation.
For some reason, the word "productive" causes some readers to get the wrong message. (I.e. some readers see a blog text mentioning "productivity" and thus it must be some veiled guilt-shaming article.)
People don't try to be productive just for the sake of being productive. People want to improve their lives and productivity is a natural focus of optimization to bring about a quality-of-life improvement.
Your pushback is similar to previous commenters that rejected the idea of "productivity" and I replied in previous comments
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=19592404
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22255557
To recap one of my comments, even the prehistoric hunter "having enough to eat" is not fine because the hunter still wants to improve the productivity of hunting. Over the last 10000 years, people have continuously improved the productivity of hunting (and farming) so much that today's people like you and I have enough free time to type HN comments -- instead of spending all day chasing after animals to eat.
People naturally want to improve their lives. Some people also want to share ideas on how to improve their lives. It seems the word "productivity" has tainted that discussion. However, it doesn't change the fact that people still want to reduce the ratio of effort-to-benefit.
"instead of spending all day chasing after animals to eat."
Actual working hours in small hunter gatherer tribes like the Lakota were more likely around 3-4 hours.
Medieval peasants had to work all day long.
But both experienced starving in winter and spring, in a bad year.
So I see this point as being evidence to GPs perspective, rather than your own, respectfully.
Doing something that makes you unhappy even more because you do it more efficiently doesn't make you happier, only more efficient
Procrastination can be the thin end of the wedge though and, in extreme cases, deciding not to do things develops into doing nothing, like not going to work, not paying paying bills, not opening letters or answering the phone, and so on...
I probably just continued my blogging career, because one of my first articles got over 20k views.
I wrote many of such successful articles in my first year of blogging.
But there were much more that nobody cared about. Most of the stuff I wrote was simply ignored and it felt like I lost my luck. But I kept going on and eventually things got better again.
2. FIND MOTIVATION: Get excited about why you started in the first place. Go over the plan from scratch with a co-founder, talk to users, visualize the end goal, use the product, or do whatever it takes to get back some of the initial excitement.
3. BUILD MOMENTUM: Be as self-indulgent as necessary at first. Don't worry about doing the highest priority tasks, just get going. Do whatever part of the project seems most fun/easy/interesting, however trivial. Do whatever it takes to start building back your speed. Once you're at speed, the hard stuff won't be so hard.
Now you're relaxed, motivated, and have momentum so it's full steam ahead!
Fall off the wagon for some reason? Don't waste time feeling bad, just accept it. Then repeat steps 1-3.
There is no one size fits all solution, it’s a complex issue and is specific to the individual.
It is indeed a complex issue but hearing other people's views/experiences helps it become less so.
Although I’m a positive person in general, the negative balances us as human. I would argue that “cheerfulness” is the more ideal state of mind being this middle path between the two. It’s the idea of euthymia in which you live regularly without large shifts in mood.
This is often referred to as the professional mindset where you get what you need to get done because you are largely unaffected by how you feel on a given day. This is where many of the cliche “Master your thoughts, master your life” quotes come from because it’s largely true once you experience it. At least my experience with it.
Nope. Whenever I complete an assignment, I feel a great sense of ... nothing. Before work, there's a crippling tension that leads to procrastination. During work, I am focused and not thinking about anything else. Afterwards though, I don't feel relieved or anything, but rather worry about the next thing on the list.
For that, it requires faith that everything will work out. It's painfully easy to be skeptical and cynical. In the really old how to succeed books like Think and Grow Rich faith is emphasized as an important attribute to success. These days with endless scoffing at everything, this principle has been forgotten and ridiculed.
2. How does that thought make you feel?
3. Why does it make you feel that way?
4. Think about your thought in a way that makes you feel differently.
5. How does thinking about it differently change your original feelings?
6. What new opportunities are possible by thinking differently?
Not really trying to create something positive as much as showing the possibility for opportunities. Write down your answers as you complete the exercise.
You haven't proved this claim.
> Maybe you are depressed, not in a career you enjoy, ...
So, as you point out, there are many factors here (some out of our control). And the post offers some strategies. Why is quitting a career better than reframing it more positively?