IMO the word "anxiety" is now of limited utility as far as human species development goes. Same with "procrastination." People are often caught short by not having appropriately-honed replacements for those words that can help them move to higher heights, while building on what we've all learned about those concepts in the past.
That said, we have names for some common fears, e.g. caller anxiety. But again, is it universal?
I mean I get it, I work better in an office setting vs on my own and I've got a lot of issue to unpack, but I can also rationalize it and see that it's not a healthy condition to be in.
Put me in front or a concrete problem, and I'm a fucking monster at solving it. Give me someone's phone number to call and I'd rather spend the rest of the week in a bathtub.
I think it goes well with the anxiety explanation. You are obviously less anxious about things which are just business as usual. I guess my take away would be that if you want to start doing something you find hard, it will get easier and easier as you stick with it, which is pretty nice when you think about it.
I've thought maybe it was her job that led her to it. But I've also wondered if it was something in my blood. See, my father was a lawyer. As a kid I'd sit in his office and listen to him make tough phone calls one after another all day. But when it came time to talk to anyone at all at home, he always made my mother do it. I've found myself doing this with my girlfriend if we want to order food or something. Because I'll simply drink all night and delay the phone call.
So when it comes to any work flag that arises, I'll call my clients obsessively until they pay attention to the problem. But if I need someone to do something for me, I basically almost can't make the call.
In my worldview, when you state that, you don't really believe that. If you did, you would do these things that you think make them better with no effort. If you drop wishful thinking, look at the situation, then it's clear that if you think they are better at life, then the actions they do are better. But if you really believed that you would choose to do them, effortlessly.
Now I know there's plenty of frameworks you can look at things through and plenty of rationalizations, I'm just presenting another one.
So whenever you think it would be better if you would be doing something right now which you are not doing, you have some cognitive dissonance. It's possible to debug it. Sometimes it can go pretty deep, but if you are honest with yourself then after you do the debugging, you should either arrive at the conclusion that it is not better after all, or be doing it.
We are able to hold tons of contradictory beliefs, but only if we don't bring them together to our attention. Then it's just impossible. Cheapest way to resolve these, which often appears automatically, is quick rationalization - creating a special case, "yes, but", "this is different" etc. But when you are honest with yourself and observe yourself, do some debugging, it's impossible to not be doing something you want to be doing (and vice versa).
For me, it often means not that now I want to do these tasks and I'm going at them, rather, I understand that e.g. I think there are more important things in life to me given the wider context and I'm perfectly fine not doing them.
I have not been doing anything I wouldn't want to be doing right now for years. I sometimes needed to question my very basic values and choices to debug it.
Remember that it requires dropping wishful thinking. Wanting sky to be green is just madness, only after you accept that reality is how it is you can find out what you want.
Anxiety can be debugged away.
(Yes, I know - brains, neurotransmitters, amygdala, this is just a random dude's framework, a tool)
That's not my specific problem with phone calls. Phone calls always open up a Pandora's box of more problems. Perhaps if you feel like armchair diagnosing this: I clean my house almost obsessively every day; my desktop has only two text files on it called "Immediate" and "Todo"; my inbox is always cleaned out by 5 or 6pm before I let myself relax. Then I go get fucking wasted and make new friends and end up drinking in parking lots.
But I can't call the fucking tree guy or the mechanic or the accountant. It's not the conversation I'm worried about. It's that I know there will be one new thing on the list.
When the list is cleared, I will be free. I will take my clothes off and walk naked to the airport.
[edit] I just want to clarify: I do think that I'm good at life in my own peculiar way. Just not "good at life" as most people would define it ;)
But suffering is really something different without anxiety. If it's unavoidable anyway there's a peace about it.
And I'm sorry if I come off as an armchair diagnostician, I have no clue about your life obviously, it's just that this kind of thinking made such a big difference to me that it feels bad not sharing it.
My best friend as a kid was raised in Zen Buddhism and we learned to code together. This is the kind of way he would look at it. So I appreciate it.
There is a whole lot of assumptions in that sentence. To start, why would doing the right thing be effortless?
Add to that, if you are in a bad state you are likely to be pessimistic of the outcome of the task which makes it even harder. And fighting that is anything but effortless.
You could argue that when you are in a perfect state stars will align but even if you truly believe that the effort to get to that place will often be nothing but heroic and most people will never achieve it.
So it just feels like moving the goalpost? Which is fine if framing it like that gets you closer to where you want to be. But I'd need more convincing to believe that would be easier (for me).
[edit] I haven't done a lot of therapy, but I sought out an existential therapist in Buenos Aires and saw her weekly for a year while I was there and severely depressed. It helped me get over seeing myself as the center of the narrative, and made me realize everyone else was too trapped in theirs to notice most of the flaws I saw in myself. It also helped me come to terms with how the world being fucked up is neither my fault or something I can fix. But the real, true house on the cliff is unattainable. In the darkest and most honest moments, I'd admit it's not even what I want. As my ex's mother once said, I thrive on crisis. She didn't mean it well.
Because doing things you want to do does not require effort.
Real life example from the past - sewage system problem - I have shit all over the floor in my basement. It's late night next days are some celebrations. I can have this shit all over my floor it can wait for somebody to clean it, or it can just stay there, or I can clean it. You would think cleaning up shit is just that, it sucks regardless. But my experience is different. If you keep repeating to yourself false narration "I don't want to be doing this" that's hell. But after accepting the situation, deciding which option do you want, doing what you want to do is really effortless. Out of all the things this is what I want to be doing right now. If not, I'm not doing it.
Narration matters a lot and it seems pretty straightforward that when you think you don't want to be doing the thing that YOU decided and are doing right now, you have some cognitive dissonance.
(remember - no wishful thinking - thinking I want to have it clean but without doing any actions is no different than taunting yourself that you have no wings)
> no tension between satisfying the world and satisfying your own need
There isn't any. It's enough to try to satisfy your needs and doing what you want. But be observant and introspect.
People who are perceived as egoists are not optimizing for their own well being. You can't be happy when you are surrounded by people who are not happy.
When you want to support some charity and do something for the world, where does it come from? It's you, it's your need. It feels good. Not just a fleeting high, but like a feeling about your life in general. We seem to have that built in.
I mean regardless of the source, just look how it's unnecessarily nested narration. Your needs vs needs of others, where needs of others is what you feel is needed to do for others. It's still your needs, if you think you should be helping others it's you who feels that.
When you look at akrasia, the problem is not that you are not doing something. It's this painful cognitive dissonance. Unresolved conflict in your narration. Both doing the thing is fine and not doing it is fine. But suffering by doing it while telling your self you don't want to do it or not doing it while telling yourself that you do is completely avoidable.
And yeah, I agree about different experiences. Which makes communication funny - same words but two very different contexts and interpreters. Which is why I'm so verbose about the thing I was describing.
All options regarding sewage in your basement takes a lot of effort. Identifying and doing the least sucky option doesn't make it not suck.
I agree that it is helpful to frame it in a way that you choose to do it because its the best way forward. But that has absolutely nothing to do with effort and trying to recalibrate is as effortless does nothing but dilute and dismiss the effort you are putting into it.
Lots of things take effort, some things like workouts can (as with most things, in moderation) be more meaningful the more effort is provided.
> Narration matters a lot and it seems pretty straightforward that when you think you don't want to be doing the thing that YOU decided and are doing right now, you have some cognitive dissonance.
It is just a matter of perspective. You choose to do it because you want it done. It is an axiom. Not liking the situation does not equal cognitive dissonance.
If it helps you to not obsess about something, great. But that is a whole other topic.
To me there's a huge mental shift once you decided 100% on something and there's no questioning it. It may be tiring, but it just flows. This is what I call effortless in this context. Because it does not require any willpower to do it, even if it requires thinking or strength. You are locked in.
I mean whether it's coding or gym, surely you must have experienced it. When you are in the middle of the activity and you are not questioning whether you should be doing it or not.
The state of flow is familiar to most coders. Coding is nice because your mind is so busy building the castle that there is no place to be thinking about yourself. There is just code. So you are not questioning whether coding is something that you currently want to be doing. The same state can be achieved doing just about anything and to me the trick is to make narration without contradictions. Out of all things in the world, given my current life context writing this comment is the thing I want to do the most. Even if nobody reads it.
Btw I don't have that luxury 100% of the time. I can get hang up on the question of what do I actually want (in my case it usually drops down to not being honest with myself regarding the fact that what I really want is more sleep).
Regarding not liking situation, one that you choose to be in. I've had big mental shift from thinking in patterns of "lesser evil" and choosing what you want packages from the reality you are in (i.e. dropping wishful thinking). IT seems subtle but it's not.
"You choose to do it because you want it done. It is an axiom." is the right track. But not liking it, is the same as not liking that the sky is not green. It's fair, you might have preferred the green sky by a lot, but it's so ridiculous that you wouldn't experience anything negative because of that. It's the same with reality you are in and options available to you.
Basically seems pointless to fight with yourself. Maybe you don't really want the long-term task + result package. Or maybe wishful thinking is causing you to fantasize about getting a result without doing the task. (I'm sorry about using second person, seems most straightforward way to communicate it).
I guess there's also some element of narration creating fictional character - e.g. I can't stop playing chess - playing chess is who I am. Which basically is daydreaming again.
And btw it all sound pretty analytical but in practice is mostly value driven. But if necessary, I will debug the stack deeply. Honesty is required. It goes deep and into intimate places. I would leave my wife and kids if I wouldn't want to be with them (and I think that's best for everybody). Given that I do and want them to be happy a lot of stuff follows effortlessly. I think many people are afraid to question these deep assumptions. But it's worth doing it. Otherwise it's castles on sand.
Back when I was starting with debugging I once deeply considered our marriage since I needed to take some trash out :))
My first thought was: you're crazy.
But then I thought deeper and as an adult I realized that there is a cost/benefit to everything that somewhat didn't exist as a child. Most of us cannot escape triggers of anxiety anymore. If you have everything you need, and complete freedom, you still can't escape the arrow of time for example.
I still think zero pressure doesn't work in the way you think it does. It's exactly something someone says when they are pre-occupied most of the time. It's wishful thinking.
You'd be surprised how much pressure can go down when you have fuck you money and you don't give a fuck about running some business, the "protestant work ethic", or getting more, just spend it and enjoy life. Met a few such types, and they feel zero pressure.
You still have inevitable stuff to worry about like relationships and health of course.
But then it's a question of whether they have the motivation to complete the projects they want to.
It's really easy not to ship things, and never know where they might have led.
Often they do not give a fuck about projects either. Just living their best life.
Then as the deadline approaches, not finishing at all is a kind of “fucking it up” that is not at all abstract or hypothetical. So now the anxiety of the deadline is focusing you on the task. It’s exhausting for one, and for another when you get a good review on your work you feel like a fraud, because everyone else took weeks to do this and you slammed it out in 6-10 hours.
Getting rid of what, exactly? The pressure? (Currently procrastinating by the way, on very important things that I keep delaying for some unexplained reason.)
Modern life indeed.
For instance, if you have problems submitting your timesheets on time, it could be due to the fact that you're worried about putting too many hours on the budget. If you remove the worry about putting too many hours on the budget, then you might find yourself doing your timesheets on time.
The answer to your question lies in the "unexplained reason" which can actually be explained, that's the hard part.
Having struggled with this for almost 20 years now, with little to show for it, I'd say "'unexplained reason' can actually be explained" seems to belong to the same category as "P != NP can actually be proven". Good luck and Godspeed.
Maybe I'm more of a clinical case, but for me, whatever I think the source of anxiety is in any given scenario, it's never that. I can eliminate potential sources one by one, dig in recursively, but it only provides very short-lived feelings of relief, lasting seconds to minutes, before anxiety restarts. To make matters worse, the more I spend time on such investigations, the more anxious I get about not working on the actual thing I wanted/was supposed to.
The most accurate model/explanation I have for this is: anxiety always comes, unconditionally; any "reason" behind it is just desperate post-hoc rationalization. The only reliable defense I know of is to be doing something so interesting or stimulating that it captures all of the brain's compute and starves the "anxiety process" entirely. Of course, that process will restart as soon as resources for it become available.
> For instance, if you have problems submitting your timesheets on time, it could be due to the fact that you're worried about putting too many hours on the budget. If you remove the worry about putting too many hours on the budget, then you might find yourself doing your timesheets on time.
I have problems submitting my timesheets on time. It's mostly because it's a boring, mind-dumbing chore, done using a GUI designed to prove that evil exists in this world. Like all modern timesheet tools, this one resists automation too. It's an annoyance that distracts me from the actual work I'm already behind on thanks to anxiety, and thus compounding the latter.
Yes, the task takes maybe 5 minutes. Would, if I could focus. But my focus window for mind-dumbingly boring tasks and routines is around 30 seconds; anything more than that requires ongoing, conscious effort. In reality, those 5 minutes usually turn into one hour, by the end of which I'm all dripping from stress-induced sweating.
I mean, I could've done my timesheets for the last two weeks four times over, in the time it took me to write this comment. Yet somehow, this comment is up, and the timesheets are not.
1) As I got used to finally being able to decide to do something, and then actually follow through without first having to win a mini-boss fight in my head, my perception of whole classes of tasks shifted - things I assumed were hard, or instinctively avoided, became things I knew I could do. This is good and how it should be, but what I didn't realize is that this state of things is still quite fragile. At some point I overloaded myself with responsibilities, and as I hit my limit, I started to slip up, which cracked my newfound trust in my own reliability - and things quickly spiraled down from there. Even though things got better, and they are better than they were before I was diagnosed, my self-image got seriously damaged. Even after half a year, I still haven't fully recovered.
2) I am a night person. Always have been. Whatever the reason underlying the reasons for this is, the meds didn't do much about it. What they did, however, is allow me to get away with much less sleep. This was super useful when my second daughter was born, as it made it easy for me to take the "first shift", feeding and changing the baby and letting my wife sleep more. Shift the meds schedule around to have one dose at 23:00, and I could do some work and care for the kid until 02:00, then sleep some 5 hours, and feel well-rested in the morning. Of course, this was not sustainable; there were two major bad consequences:
- "Sleep debt" kept accumulating, but since it was masked by my carefully-tuned med schedule, it took me way too long to notice I'm getting slower and less focused at everything.
- The whole experience broke my internal rhythm that told me when to go to sleep. And with overall improved executive functioning, it only became easier to stay up late.
3) It also took me a while to realize that the meds are "sticky". That is, they make it easy to stay on course - wherever that course lead. While they also make it easier to switch tasks, the improved focus makes it harder to notice that I should switch. As a result, whatever I'm doing when the meds kick in, is what I'll most likely continue to be doing for the next couple hours. Whether that's work, or writing HN comments.
3a) This "stickiness" also makes it easier to waste time going too deep into low-value tangential tasks. Like e.g. that time when I was working on a bug that turned out to be a regex issue - specifically, someone assembled a regex by concatenating some string constants, and didn't notice a subtle bug. As I fixed it, I decided to make sure such bugs don't happen again. I started writing some utility functions, and... few days later, I ended up committing a small library for making regexes via composition, which structurally prevented the class of bugs like the one I was originally fixing. Suffice it to say, those few days could've been better used on some other tasks. After that experience, I learned to pay attention to early signs of going too far off tangents. That's definitely a med problem - before diagnosis, my procrastination would've stopped me from pursuing such tangents too far.
(Or, in other words: meds make it easy to do the tasks that, before, I had to fight myself to do - but that fighting also served as a filter, forcing me to repeatedly consider whether the thing is worth doing at all.)
All in all, I'm still adjusting. Many of the changes - both positive and negative - take a long time to become apparent.
I don't see it as stickiness, I see it more as effortlessness, because it's so easy to continue working on something, but I recognise the description. I'm dealing with it by exporting the "what am I doing?" question to text - in other words, being really really explicit about my thinking by writing it down. I have a log running in a Slack window that often has things like "ok, we're gonna take a step back, and think about the steps we need to take to accomplish the goal. First we X, then we Y, etc". I'm essentially rubber ducking my executive function.
Luckiyl my adhd meds should kick in in about an hour making it much easier to focus on taking care of things.
If I was going to be taking meds I would be hoping life becomes a LOT easier, considering the risks to disrupting the body's natural equilibrium. You should be very cautious of any drugs, especially mind-altering that must be taken frequently.
The drugs own warnings are pretty bad: https://dailymed.nlm.nih.gov/dailymed/drugInfo.cfm?setid=f22...
>neurotoxic amphetamines
That's deliberately loaded terminology. Amphetamines are neurotoxic but not at the doses used therapeutically (obviously). Everything is neurotoxic at a high enough dose.
>The drugs own warnings are pretty bad
All drugs have pretty bad warnings:
Each year, the side effects of long-term NSAID use cause nearly 103,000 hospitalizations and 16,500 deaths. More people die each year from NSAIDs-related complications than from AIDS and cervical cancer in the United States.
https://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2005/01/050111123706.h...
It’s interesting that we know and appreciate that there will be more work tomorrow and next week, but when you see it in advance, it pushes you to the bed.
One thing that [somewhat] helps me with it is breaking down the next thing into a list of pretty trivial tasks on paper, while leaving the rest at where it came from. Makes you focus on what’s here and now. Out of sight, out of mind. Doesn’t work 100% but helps a little if I manage to forget the rest enough.
The meds help me to actually stay focused on a single thing instead of every distraction completely throwing me off and not getting any work done at all because I'm doing 6 things at once and constantly starting them from beginning
It's not always useful, but it does eventually consume enough resources to starve the anxiety thread and some of these lists end up as the (pre)analysis for the tasks I'm supposed to be working on.
Sometimes I don't get a good list for the task I'm currently expected to solve but I make progress on some other thing that piqued my interest. This helps me justify spending the time on just making lists because not all of it is useless and lessens the anxiety about not getting anything done.
When I do get a good enough list for the thing I'm supposed to be doing I usually feel less anxiety about doing it because I know exactly what I'm supposed to be doing.
Another one : learn to say no -and this is a big one and difficult in some cases- but setting boundaries can help. Some people just never communicate that they are swamped. Ask your manager or higher up on what they consider a good days work and how it differs from your experience.
The first time this happened on the too high dose, the next thing I knew I was standing at the garbage can closing the lid, and wondering how the fuck did that happen? Now I was having side effects too but the feeling of mild disassociation was deeply disturbing, and got stronger when the pills wore off and I could reflect back on the day. So we cut the dose by about 40%.
I suspect half of why it works is that anything that treats depression probably also reduces anxiety and self defeating behaviors, in addition to stringing longer lists of tasks together, which is why it works off label for some classes of notorious procrastinators.
I was talking to my therapist about this a couple weeks ago (I’m trying something different now and it’s not working), and I asserted that a procrastinator - or at least an adult one - will never willingly take a mind altering substance that 100% eliminates the thought of procrastination because while it’s absolutely not the best part of who we are, it is part of who we are. Ideally for me, and I think for many others, you would hit the point were your brain still says, “we could do this tomorrow!” sometimes, but you choose to ignore that voice and do it anyway.
I think that would raise questions about their wellbeing and health. That seems like they have lost a healthy part of normal function.
I suppose that “never procrastinating” could end up looking like a weirder form of stream of consciousness, distracted behavior? Where you mean to go out for drinks but you get stuck yak shaving and then it’s midnight. I’d worry about that guy too. He is wound up way too tight and I think he ends up with a .308 on a clock tower some day.