Do lots of other folks experience this? I seem to only have self control when it hurts my job or income, and even then, barely.
Most programmers have experienced being so immersed in code that we don't notice time is passing, forgetting to eat or sleep.
It's similar with immersion in social media / food / whatever. We become lost in the activity and lose our sense of self.
I've recently heard of the concept of conscientiousness as a personality trait. People with low conscientiousness tend to procrastinate more, and it's tied to ADHD. Apparently it can be trained. I'm trying (though not really succeeding) to make pauses, take a deep breath and think about "what am I doing right now? What should I be doing instead?". Seems so basic, like I've regressed to being a child who has no self control...
> to make pauses, take a deep breath and think about "what am I doing right now? What should I be doing instead?".
this too can have its pitfalls. In my case, I always feel like I have BOTH too many things that I WANT to do and too many things HAVE to do and whenever I step back and try to look at the bigger picture, I realize that I don't feel like I'm making tangible progress on any of them. And then the anxiety sets in and I feel like, "well, if I'm working this hard and not even keeping up, why am I working at all?" And so I sort of "give up" for a few days or a week and feel even MORE guilty because literally nothing is getting done and I'm getting even further behind.
A lot of the comments I write here may sound like I really have my shit together, but that's just because I have a lot of generalized experience that just basically comes from lots of introspection and time being alive. But I have yet to figure out the one weird trick to being both productive (making progress toward future life goals) and happy (enjoying what I have in the present).
So many of our "wants" are social status goals, or social expectations.
I find it very hard to discriminate my own desires from my unconscious programming by others.
Whenever you feel pressured, try and find the root cause of the pressure?
Just an idea - perhaps damaging but hopefully enabling.
As much as I know I should prioritize it based on urgency, highest impact, what I could delegate etc., if the willpower required to do that is more than the ramifications or not doing it, it can be a losing battle.
On days when I push through a ton of work, I'm energized at the end of the day. Compared to the feeling of guilt that I just wasted a day when there's so much to do and I achieved little. Yet knowing that still just doesn't provide the necessary motivation some days. I've yet to figure out a reliable solution for it.
[1] https://www.simplypsychology.org/big-five-personality.html
[2] https://www.theguardian.com/science/brain-flapping/2013/mar/...
We tend to keep doing what we are already doing (an inertia of sorts). If we are eating, we keep on eating (even if we are not hungry anymore) until an external factor stops us (e.g. the food is over).
Changing states (starting/stopping) is the hardest part, but if you trick yourself somehow to stop it's easy to just put the food aside. The question that remain is how do you stop yourself from doing what you are currently doing? Some people use an "1,2,3 technique", where you just count to yourself and once you reach three you start doing what's needed. Mindfulness also helps, where you take a breath and think exactly what you are doing and why (I am eating, I am putting my hand in the bag of chips, I am bringing the chip to my mouth even if I am not hungry and don't even enjoy it that much, this would just make me feel fat afterwards).
Eating and drinking delicious high calorie things rewards your brain. On an evolutionary time scale, delicious things were relatively rare and often required expending a lot of energy to acquire. In the last 100 years or so, modern technology has shifted the typical diet to be primarily cheap, processed high calorie foods.
If you want to change your behavior, I would suggest calorie counting with a phone app. Do it every meal or snack, before you eat it. Even if you don't restrict yourself, it will make you consciously aware of your intake. You'll naturally start thinking in terms of energy intake rather than sensory intake. You'll also start to be able to correlate your emotional state to your current level of hunger rather than the other way around. "I am so hungry I could eat 300 calories of potato chips!" I did that for a few months recently and lost 8 pounds. I stopped doing it more recently, and have gained 3 back.
If you're a hipster at heart and have free time, you could also start doing more of your own food processing at home. Rather than order a pizza ever again, learn how to make a really good hand stretched pizza dough from scratch. If you really like good coffee, buy a hand grinder and whole beans, or figure out how to roast your own beans.
If you think you're eating unhealthy and having external pressure would help with your self control, maybe just go see a primary care physician and request a cholesterol check and to be screened for non-alcoholic fatty liver disease. If you have indeed been too indulgent and lethargic over an extended period of time, your cholesterol will probably read high, and you probably have fat in your liver that may be causing slightly elevated enzyme levels. A Dr. telling you to try to eat healthy may not be motivating, but quantitative data may be.
Drury reports a conversation with the famed philosopher:
> So the next day when we were alone I asked Wittgenstein to tell me more about Kierkegaard. Wittgenstein: “Kierkegaard was by far the most profound thinker of the last century. Kierkegaard was a saint.” He then went on to speak of the three categories of life-style that play such a large part in Kierkegaard’s writing: the asethetic, where the objective is to get the maximum enjoyment out of this life; the ethical, where the concept of duty demands renunciation; and the religious, where this very renunciation itself becomes a source of joy. Wittgenstein: “Concerning this last category I don’t pretend to understand how it is possible. I have never been able to deny myself anything, not even a cup of coffee if I wanted it. Mind you I don’t believe what Kierkegaard believed, but of this I am certain, that we are not here in order to have a good time.”
This is good for different reasons, such as less additives in your food which might be healthier in the long term, taste, and the pleasure in the activity itself, but is unlikely to help with weight loss. There is little difference in calorie content between two similar pizzas, home made and from a restaurant (assuming you’re not eating Domino’s cheese-stuffed crust style pizzas).
Neapolitan style pizza in particular is very thin crust, and the emphasis is on carefully chosen high quality ingredients rather than quantity. It is significantly less calorie dense than typical American pizza. Eating a whole pizza with toppings might be 1000 calories, while a single slice of cheese pizza from Costco is around 800 calories.
It's also very informative to see for yourself the ingredients going into what you're eating. Buying a can of cake frosting at the store gets you roughly the same outcome as making it from scratch using a whole stick of butter and several cups of sugar, but the latter seems more likely to influence the size of the piece you take, or at least make it obvious why you feel bleh after eating it.
My typical dough recipe has 150g of flour and 5g sugar per pizza, which is about 550 calories. Let's say 250 calories of cheese. Raw tomato sauce isn't even worth counting. So 800 as a baseline for one pizza. Fully loading it with pepperoni might bump it up to 1000.
A few months ago I was trying to restrict myself to 1800 calories per day. We had friends over for pizza one night, and I decided to just not worry about it and gorge myself. I counted it all up before going to bed, though, and my daily intake worked out to be about 1900.
To me, part of it is being mindful. Don't open the bag of chips and then watch a movie or surf the net while munching on them. You will eat the whole bag.
If I mode change from sitting in front of the computer to standing in the kitchen eating the chips and then mode change to back in front of the computer, I don't mindlessly consume the whole bag. But I will still sometimes consume the whole bag.
One thing I have also tried to do is differentiate between "I want chips because I'm hungry" vs "I want chips because I'm craving salt". It's not easy for me to tell the difference. I coat some baby carrots in salt or Old Bay seasoning and munch a few--if that keeps the munchies away, my body wanted salt. If I'm hungry again 15 minutes later, well, my body wants calories.
Nevertheless, I'm mostly in the camp of "Just don't have chips/cookies in the house". It also helps that I learned to bake as a child. I like tasty desserts, and most of what now exists is mostly sugar overload with no flavor. So, a dessert easily sets off my "Is this dessert tasty enough to merit skipping two entire steaks <or insert whatever main course you like> to compensate?" And, if my that activates, the answer is almost always a resounding "No." and I skip dessert.
Unfortunately for me, I found a middle eastern place that does homemade Baklava with a cream filling. It's right next to a Mexican restaurant that I also find quite nice. This is a bad thing for my waistline.
When I first read about willpower being an exhaustible resource, it totally aligned with my experience. A few years later I read that those ego depletion studies had been invalidated and that surprised me. Running out of willpower seems like something I experience.
But it might be something that is subjectively felt, and people then attributed it to be something that depletes. Even if the depletion is invalidated, the subjective feeling might however still be valid. --- If I should suggest another possibility on the spot, I would suggest mental fatigue. You get tired of denying yourself things the same way you get tired of denying your kid pestering you for a treat.
It's not directly depletion, but I could subjectively describe it as a resource getting depleted.
Is there really a mental equivalent to physical exhaustion that leaves us beyond the ability to make a decision? Is that what running out of willpower would be?
On the professional side, my ADHD/OCD makes for some clean code and pedantically-set up servers. Nothing says ADHD/OCD like taking two days to crank out code which some of my colleagues can crank out in half the time. I'm told I'm too pedantic sometimes. Too much of a perfectionist. ADHD can do that to you. I'm happy with my lot in life.
I have failed my whole life, I cannot start shit, I cannot finish anything, I'm just an impulsive monkey who is unfortunately aware of their own situation, stuck inside a body, forced to watch a deadly trainwreck in slow motion.
The little I've achieved has taken me 10x as much time as it would've a normal person. And I'm pissing it all away anyway.
This is hell.
And then I see "everyone in my life is ADHD lolkek" "I'm happy".
Sorry. Glad your case is mild enough.
I know the urge to beat yourself to for it is pretty strong. But the only thing you can do is regroup and try to make the rest of today better. Then start again tomorrow.
You’ve achieved something, right? Maybe it took ten times as long. That’s fine. Just keep at it. Don’t compare yourself to other people, just yourself yesterday. That’s all that can count.
It’s easier said than done. Don’t hate yourself though. Life isn’t easy, you just make the most of it. Take care.
Wouldn't you say that ADHD affects the person, and therefore the type of personality would change the outcome? (In contrast to ADHD defining the person)
Edit:spelling
Be wary however of the more "extreme" advice on keto-like diets. You don't have to stuff yourself with fats, or put a stick of butter in your coffee.
Bad behaviour starts with acknowledgement and the best way to do that is to track what you eat and learn to adapt slowly and develop self discipline. Use a tracker app and set a reasonable daily break even nutritional target and start thinking about what you eat. Slowly substitute better choices in. Eventually you will develop self control.
People want quick fixes but keto just breaks other things.
Unfortunately a lot of people who would be interested in dieting and trying out a keto diet are diabetic. It's not always dangerous, but it's generally not a good diet for diabetic people because of this.
Ketoacidosis is a result of extremely high blood sugar for a prolonged period of time combined with ketosis. The reason this happens is that without insulin your body cannot use the sugar in your blood so your blood sugar keeps going up and your body doesn't get any energy out of it.
What happens when your body is out of fuel for a couple of days? It enters ketosis and starts to burn fat. Ketons mixed with sugar in your blood will acidify blood, this is ketoacidosis. It's an extremely dangerous condition.
However, if a diabetic is on keto diet they will have low blood sugar and their body will enter regular ketosis almost eliminating the need for insulin and ensuring a stable healthy blood sugar.
In other words, a diabetic will end up in ketoacidosis if they're bad at controlling their blood sugar, regardless of their diet. However, if they are on keto diet the chance that their blood sugar will be very high is extremely small. High blood sugar is the killer, not ketosis.
I've been doing a keto diet on and off for a number of years. When I'm in ketosis my blood sugar is steady in 80-100 range and I don't need almost any insulin.
For me it ended in a few days in hospital.
There isn't a persistently high cognitive load on deciding what you can eat, once you master the foundational knowledge of eating low-carb.
It's definitely a thing, you can smell when people are in ketosis
The truly hardest part of all of this in general is finding a suitable form of substitute stimulus that keeps you from being driven to seek your default vices. The unfortunate part is that there are not a lot of accessible/healthy things in life that provide the adequate stimulus that we seek/need in order to feel "okay". We're drawn towards drugs and junk food and etc because it's easy to acquire and satisfies our needs for stimulus in the short term.
In the good I will run couple marathons a month and in the bad I will eat whatever I can find.
I always felt like an outcast, good to hear I am not alone :)
For media consumption it is exactly the same. The good is that I get to the nitty gritty of technical problems. But I also read the unless crap till no end.
I have been able to ditch Twitter, reddit, Facebook and Instagram but I just substitute it with hackernews and YouTube.
HN and youtube still stick. Mostly tutorials, workouts or info videos ( Andrew Huberman, justforfunc, 3blue1brown etc. ) on youtube though.
My default method of weight control is not to have unhealty food and alcohol in the house except for weekends. In the office I only have healthy food available. It works and I have gotten used to it - mainly because my anything goes weekends act as a great pressure release valve.
I don't think we're alone but I doubt that we're "normal."
Personally I find that my self-control is limited to the same extent that my time and energy are limited. If I'm tired, it's harder for me to be disciplined, and the place that I most often tired is at home at the end of the day, when temptation to over eat is at the greatest. I believe there is a fairly substantial body of evidence that shows I am not unusual in this regard. This phenomenon is why groceries stores put candy in checkout lanes, when you are mentally tired from exercising discipline by not picking up the delicious-looking tray of cupcakes in the bakery aisle and thus are most susceptible to temptation.
I think some people can just use willpower to maintain their discipline in every situation, but those people are extreme outliers. Like Navy SEALs or Olympic athletes or other extreme high performers, and not even all of them. Those who can are experts at delayed gratification and are able to visualize what they want and then never deviate from their plan for how to achieve it, regardless of their current emotional state or energy levels. But that is vanishingly rare and often their behavior is a result of some deep trauma (eg someone who is super disciplined about their diet because their dad died early from an obesity-related illness) rather than a positive focus on a certain outcome. The truth is that the vast majority of people just follow their natural inclinations and do whatever is easiest for them. The path of least resistance.
As one such weak-willed person, my approach has been to structure my life to remove temptations, much as the GP comment above described their approach to curating their internet content. For example, I have lived almost exclusively in big cities for my entire life until the last year, when I moved to the middle of nowhere. Which means I can't get takeout food delivered and it's much harder to go out and get ice cream on a whim. Compared to living in a major city where I could get Michelin star restaurant food delivered in a matter of minutes, the temptation is just much, much less powerful. I order my groceries online too, which also dramatically reduces the tendency to impulse buy anything unhealthy (I get to skip the checkout lane with the candy, for one thing). On the other side of the caloric equation, I set up a home gym so that travel time to the gym doesn't become an excuse not to exercise. Basically I add barriers for bad choices and remove them for good ones. I am in the best shape of my life as a result.
I guess what I'm saying is that most people achieve good behaviors in part because of their intentional discipline and in part because their environment is conducive to those behaviors. The real trick is figuring out how to intentionally structure your environment to match whatever behaviors you want. It's effectively borrowing motivation from your peak-energy level periods to provide discipline during periods when you don't have the energy to generate it yourself. It can be incredibly hard to figure out, because you need to know how to change your environment and how you will actually react to that new environment, which isn't always predictable.