Reminds me of the trick of telling yourself "let's give this my full attention for just 5 minutes, and if I still don't want to do it we can move on". I pretty much always end up wanting to keep doing that thing.
I have to use this trick to help manage my ADHD. Of course, just actually starting for 5 minutes is a challenge in itself but while medicated at least I can. Giving myself a time limit as an easy out works wonders, and after 5 minutes I'm probably going to keep going.
To be fair, I only just recently (past month) talked to my doctor and started treating it properly so I'm still in the tweaking the dosage phase.
Suggest thinking as if you already accomplished the thing and then work backwards from there. Start with a feeling of accomplishment and satisfaction, because it’s already done. Now, you just need to do it.
Or whatever approach works for you. Everyone is different.
Looking for other reasons behind procrastination is very important, indeed.
There can be many, many core beliefs that hold you down.
This will sound cliche and 70's pop-psy self-help, but people think about themselves as an adult of age XX and don't realize many core ideas about themselves are not those of an adult, but those of themselves at age 7.
My example is that since my daughter was born I was using on her a blessing my grandma was always using on me, and I did not realize I was miss gendering her -- I was using the masculine form and my daughter eventually asked me about it -- why was I using the masculine form on her -- it then struck me I heard the blessing from my grandma when I was very young and it just became a core part of me.
That's cute, until you realize you internalize A LOT of stuff by the time you're 7 and unfortunatelly it's not always positive stuff.
My father did a lot of good things for me, but he was very competitive, he almost NEVER let me win at anything to the point he became visibly distraught when I was about to win against him, so I struggle to capitalize on my insights, especially when I have strong "about to win" feelings which turned into a life long self-inflicted "Cassandra curse".
https://bookshop.org/p/books/learned-optimism-how-to-change-...
https://bookshop.org/p/books/the-now-habit-a-strategic-progr...
I remember when I started taking ADHD meds and I was like “wow I can focus now” and proceeded to focus with all my might on the wrong thing.
Exactly. Once I got diagnosed, the doctor wanted to remove the SSRI's that had been treating the side effects and not the root cause... but that happened too quickly in my case. I had constant episodes.
After a few months, I had to go back to them while I was still learning about everything, how I had to change habits, what would work now, etc.
This is a scarily common problem. For some reason, a lot of primary care doctors are jumping straight to very high doses of Adderall.
Most patients love the feeling at first. They think they're going to conquer the world and that they've become an entirely new person.
The euphoria never lasts, though. When tolerance erases the euphoria they start complaining that their medication "isn't working any more".
The good practitioners will actually titrate upward: Start with a low dose, then incrementally increase it on future visits.
His response was profound to me: “instead of you reading it how you are, try to understand why the author spent their life, time, and effort to learn that material and then convey it to you. What made them fascinated in it?”
By flipping the script… changed my world
I’ll have to meditate on this a bit more. Thanks for sharing!
What's your current worldview relating to this and the issues you were having with it?
I’ve repeated this to my kids to the point it’s a meme in our house. I find it’s a nice short circuit to “I have no motivation”, b/c “Great, do {thing} and you’ll find the motivation!”
I try not to second-screen when watching movies or TV, and I'm pretty good at it. I know it's a very common thing for people to do these days and it honestly kinda bugs me because at least for me, TV and movies are a shared experience, but video games, at least the ones that I play, are almost always solo experiences.
Anyway, I feel like I just diagnosed myself with ADHD in writing this comment.
Now instead of choosing to open our phones, we have to actively choose NOT to let that muscle memory spring into the action of unlocking the phone. Seems bad.
I know it ends up with me drawing anyways every time and yet lying to myself that I'm not intending to draw works wonders.
Five minutes after warming up I've changed, in the gym and a couple of sets in. I quit maybe 1/20 sessions, and it's shrunk more over the years since, but it was an easy way to fool my brain.
I'm guessing this is different because the main threshold is starting to do the thing. Once you've started it's much less mental effort to keep going and just do the full workout.
Inertia is a good mental model for attention in ADHD. I sometimes tell people that my attention is like a large truck. It can be hard to get it started and up to speed, but once it's up to speed it's hard to stop.
Spending 5 minutes on something is a way of forcing yourself to get started. Once you're up and running it's will be hard to break your attention. For that reason, it's important to choose carefully which things you deliberately spend attention on if you have ADHD.