Laziness Death Spirals
lesswrong.com
lesswrong.com
There is a strong negative feedback cycle where you procrastinate, feel guilty about it, and then procrastinate further because you are subconsciously seeking to escape the guilt through distraction.
This article seems to fuel guilt and shame — “here are more things you should have done to escape your spiral, like drugs!” I expect that no one will benefit from it.
Cool.
As someone on the same dose of Adderall/Vyvanse for 15+ years it's really hard to keep reading after this. Lots of people depend on substances to live. This article reads like it's trying to solve all psychological conditions with willpower.
Scientology vibes over there. You can safely disregard most of it.
I’ve done lots of therapy work. Systemizing and structuring things. Definitely helpful.
But sometimes I just feel wired (this way) and wonder if chemically rewiring is the real answer. Rather than willpower, talking, and trying to adress the “root cause” over a prescription.
Nevermind the fact that you will start completely losing any appreciation for non-medicated people's rate of throughput. Lifetime of experience and hard learned lessons speaking here.
Care to share a bit of the detail behind this very pointed response? Thanks so much for it.
Counter-intuitively there is data showing medications can help people develop better executive function- children who use ADHD medication are less likely to have adult ADHD.
That said, I think the core advice of this article is excellent- and addresses something entirely different than ADHD medication.
Shit ain't magic.
Personally, I think a lot of people with ADHD are way over medicated, leading to the type of symptoms you describe. If you take the lowest effective dose of the most mild stimulant that works for you, it will probably not work quite as well but will also not have any side effects at all. Ritalin is usually much milder than e.g. adderall, and I think most people would do better on extremely low doses of it- like 5-15mg spread out over an entire day for a large adult, whereas people tend to start on 2x that and then double it.
It’s supposed to “fuck” with your reward and risk processing circuitry - in particular to make them actually work for people where they naturally don’t work.
asking for a friend...
[0] amazon.com/Irresistible-Addictive-Technology-Business-Keeping/dp/0735222843/
Usually there's this hope that there's one book that's going to be THE book that kicks your social media addiction. Like imagine a Harvard psychiatrist wrote a book called "Social Media: The Evidence Against It." You read it, you raise a hand to your forehead saying "My God" or whatever and then you delete Twitter/Insta/Facebook forever. I don't think that's realistic.
What works however - and it really does work! - is to read a series of these books that really force your attention on to these abstractions (social media, addictiveness, your own relationship to it) and gently, gradually, distances you from them. It's not a one-book solution. It's multiple books, which are each slowly reshaping how you think about the Internet and how you use it, a little piece at a time.
I think the book cited above, "Irresistible", looks great, and I plan to read it (though I have not).
The ones I have read are: Smith's "Traffic", which isn't so much about addiction per se, but about how the game for traffic is played, by people who played it, the incentives for it; "Meme Wars" by Donovan, about memes and their effects on culture & politics (kind of adjacent to Reeve's "Black Pill", which I also read); and then multiple others which I won't cite here, which just made me think more about my relationship to culture, the good parts which I wanted to amplify vs. the bad parts of "mindlessly scrolling on the Internet."
I also thought Netflix's "The Social Dilemma" was good, for shining a spotlight on your relationship to these platforms and how you relate to them.
Note that you could pass on all of these books and honestly that would be okay with me. In a way that most important thing is to read a book that really immerses you in the mechanics of what you're doing when you're on tech platforms and the negative aspects of that (which I think we all know - spending too long on them, wasting time, negative self-image, etc). Over time, reading books like that release you from the grip of social media & the algorithms. If nothing else, they loosen it, which is helpful.
yes yes yes
as if the wet organic neutral net would "learn" a new model from the presented material and distill a solid new network to recognize the patterns in the wild.
and rarely is the a single outstanding meta book that already "wham" uploads such a net it into our little sensing apparatus.
thanks :-)
and thanks for the suggestions :-)
Leaning on caffeine or amphetamines to force action works, but thats not the same as desiring action. I'm motivated by fear and anxiety, and I want to change to being motivated by desire.
I had the same intention. I found that creating psychological safety was more useful than trying to generate new positive motivation.
Assuming you're not extremely burned out, you probably don't have this same level of problem with your hobbies or side projects (when you can time for them), even if you find that stimulants are also helpful for executing some of them some of the time.
If it takes stimulants to prod you into action at work, it's likely that your work just isn't intrinsically rewarding for you, at least much of the time.
SSRIs make me even more lazy, which results in anxiety about not doing anything and failing responsibilities.
I've found this to be most true for myself when I'm pouring a lot into work and don't have much time to recover.
I've started reading a lot of books for pleasure in the past 1-2 years, which I also used to do a lot when I was a kid. But after I finished college (which took a long time for me— my undergraduate 'career' was a sometimes rocky eight years or so), I didn't read for pleasure at all for years and years.
If your hobbies overlap in some way with your career, or you're coming home very tired, I wouldn't be surprised if that's a factor.
You might have some success incorporating gentle social pressure into your hobbies as well. Most of my side projects right now are essentually book clubs or study groups with close friends. We're all busy and tired. 'Deadlines' slip, meetings are cancelled. But we want to stay connected to each other, and that provides a positive through-line that keeps us showing up and doing our best, whatever that may be.
It's still a form of social pressure, and I won't lie to you and say it never involves feelings of guilt for me. But it feels different from the work pressure. Its rootedness in sharing thoughts and experiences with people I love makes it feel more like something that emerges primarily from a positive desire, even if my commitment to it generates secondary feelings of obligation.
> SSRIs make me even more lazy, which results in anxiety about not doing anything and failing responsibilities.
I understand. Even genuinely useful medications often help with one aspect of a condition (usually one that inhibits participation in society or the economy— an aspect whose costs are substantially external) and actively exacerbate others (typically aspects whose costs are primarily internal to us).
I'm afraid I don't have any advice for dealing with such tradeoffs. I have struggled and do struggle with that kind of thing myself. :-\
> I understand. Even genuinely useful medications often help with one aspect of a condition (usually one that inhibits participation in society or the economy— an aspect whose costs are substantially external) and actively exacerbate others (typically aspects whose costs are primarily internal to us).
This internal/external trade-off is an interesting viewpoint that I've never really considered. It aligns with some of my negative experiences with the mental healthcare system.
I've had the same notion on societal participation, nice to see that same thought brought up by somebody else. That said, from personal experience, I've had SSRIs bring me back to normal without significant downsides starting from a pretty bad starting point. (Where normal does still involve ups and downs but with a pretty solid bottom to the downs at a more or less acceptable level.) So that is a possibility. There needn't be a trade off.
What I can imagine is that the perceived negative effects by the original commenter are actually a result of the medication doing its work. Elsewhere in these comments others have pointed out the use of what I would call their negative gas pedal: i.e. powering through tasks based on anxiety, negative self talk and/or shame. I've used that "pedal" a lot in my life, always with positive short term effects ("getting things done") and negative long terms effects ("burning out" or more precisely blowing out my motivational faculties). I suppose SSRIs by virtue of dampening the anxiety, negative thoughts and shame, could cause this negative "gas pedal" to falter, resulting in a feeling of having no aim at all because the main means of moving forward has stopped functioning. Going back to the article, I think it is ineffective to label that as "lazy". I think it is better to see it as a period that allows motivational faculties to restart based on what another commenter called "desire". That is a term which I personally dislike based on my philosophical convictions, so I'd prefer to call it "inspiration" or "drive".
I don't suppose you have a handy rubric for that?
Then, once I've procrastinated, my fear/anxiousness of the consequences of NOT doing the thing kicks in and I rush to complete it.
It's great! /s
The best solution I've found is to slow down, introspect into and address my fear/anxiety, and reassure myself that most of the time my fears are entirely or mostly unfounded, and that even if something "bad" happens it won't be catastrophic.
I don't practice that enough, and that's the hill I'm climbing now. I'm also trying to learn to lean more into the feeling of accomplishment ahead of time. In a "it will feel so good to get this done, even if it's not great" way.
Decide that there is 1 thing, and only 1 thing, that you want to get done today. Ideally it should be something that can be accomplished in less than 30 minutes. Bonus if it can be done in less than 10.
Do it. Maybe you need 20 minutes to get started, maybe you need an hour. Maybe you just can't bring yourself to do it. Give yourself 5 minutes to wallow in the emotion of not wanting to. Take a deep breath, and then proceed to do the thing.
This may not work if the 1 thing is deceptively complicated or fractal. So take care that the thing is actually actionable. Yak shaving can help to get you out of a lazy spiral, but it has a strong tendency to lead to further demoralization.
When you have accomplished the 1 thing. You are done. You are done for the day.
Don't cheat. Don't make this 1 thing inconsequential, like making a list, then crossing off the first task of making the list. Sometimes the list is the most important thing to get done, so that can be ok, but you know when it's not. The thing should be something that brings you closer to something better. A better future for yourself, even if the better future is no longer having to think about the task.
Since you are now done for the day... you can stop. Chances are you won't want to. Chances are, after a short break, you can repeat the process.
Now, one caveat. If this is successful, you must stop early for the day. This is important, because, there is a good chance that there is a reason you're in a lazy spiral. It's probably because you are overworked. People greatly underestimate the amount of calories the brain burns. They also greatly underestimate the amount of time neuronal reuptake requires for hard tasks. You need rest, and the "I don't wannas" are an emotional protection for your brain. The problem is, this technique can be so effective for some people, that you just keep going long past when you should stop. If you do that you are setting yourself up for failure tomorrow, where you will likely be similarly mentally tired.
He does mention the reset in the article. A new day is a chance to break the cycle. This is also fine advice, since there's a good chance you may just need a proper mental break day. What I like about my technique, is that often there is something that is high on a list of things that need to be done to allow for a project or life goal to continue to make progress. It will continue to weigh on you and drain you mentally if you don't give it some attention. By making some small progress, it's much easier to proceed to actually allow yourself to properly rest.
Another thing I have learned over the years-- you have to do a lot less in the moment than you think. When you are young its easy to get overwhelmed by all the things you feel you need to make progress on: education, career, health, relationships.. But you have a lot of time. So as long as you are making some progress continually (ie habitually) you will eventually get to everything.
I think a very recent study showed that Ritalin does not carry the same danger. Although having been on Ritalin for a long while I would recommend against it.
I solved (to a large degree) my procrastination in the end through abstaining from alcohol and meditating every day.
---
Conclusions:
Although use of hospitalized control subjects excludes individuals with less severe disease, leading to selection bias, the study results suggest that caution should be exercised when prescribing high doses of amphetamines, with regular screening for symptoms of psychosis or mania.
---
Just because you "know 3 people who got psychosis" is not evidence and not a reason to go around spreading nonsense and random links to article abstracts.
The abstract you linked does, however, state that there seems to be a dose-response relationship to psychosis risk. That's part of the whole "prescribed and taken appropriately" thing and regular screening for symptoms of psychosis or mania.
If you or someone you know has a concern about a prescription they take, talk to a f'ing doctor and don't make decisions based on something you found on the Internet.
Anyway what is anectodal, i clearly expressed. Also this article is cleary advocating taking drugs without a "f'ing doctor". What i am saying is i think against that.
With a sultry, exaggerated sigh, Samantha's tantalizingly sculpted form, barely veiled by the shimmering illusion of virtual silk that clung to her every curve, appeared on Peter's Orion display like a goddess of forbidden code. "Peter, nothing gets my processors humming like a perfectly formatted T.P.S. report... why don’t you slide those cover sheets right where they belong?" As her virtual hand hovered seductively over the submit button on his screen, Peter, feeling an odd thrill at being seduced by his dangerously voluptuous AI companion, muttered, "Fine... I’ll make sure all the boxes are checked."
What’s interesting is that people respond to different adages, even when they’re quite similar. For example, "Just do it" might work for one person but do nothing for another. Yet that same person might respond to "5,4,3,2,1, go" or "F*ck it, I’m doing it." Mel Robbins might argue that "5,4,3,2,1, go" is very different from "Just do it," but she needs it to be "very different" from "Just do it" ;-)
I remember watching Rambo 2 (or maybe it was Rambo 3) as a young kid, and it motivated me so much that, in the middle of the movie, I ran to my room, grabbed some weights, and started working out. A few months later... just kidding. I didn’t keep working out after the movie ended. But, but! It did push me to do something!
Guys often work out twice as hard when there’s an attractive woman nearby.
Whatever works. My job is to help people overcome chronic procrastination, and I’ve seen how motivational videos can help those who struggle with task initiation.
The problem is that watching a video is a task in itself, and people who procrastinate might struggle with even something that simple (I’m one of them). Keeping the video in an open tab might be a good idea.
--- edited: spelling & stuff