chives_yo

I started meditating weekly with a Zen Buddhist group about 4 months before I started taking medication for depression a couple years ago.

Mindfulness is emphasized in CBT (cognitive behavioral therapy). The idea behind this is that depression manifests as distorted thoughts (e.g. "Everyone hates me, I should die."), and the goal is to notice these thoughts and learn to substitute them (eventually automatically) with thoughts that are more productive/positive.

From what I've seen, most meditation practices are very helpful for the "notice the thoughts" part, but, especially in non-religious settings, tend to neglect the "substitute the thoughts" part. Usually what I hear is something like "notice the thought and let it go."

So if the thought "Everyone hates me, I should die" comes up during meditation, you just notice it and let it go. That often provides some relief in the short term (you're no longer actively thinking about dying), but you've done nothing to prevent it from arising again later, and you haven't learned any coping techniques for when similar thoughts won't go away (which can be a symptom during severe episodes). If you have depression or anxiety and want to get into meditation, I would strongly suggest at the very very least researching the principals of CBT in case you find yourself in this situation. I would recommend an app called Woebot. Even better would be to try some actual CBT if you are able.

All that said, I think that for me joining a meditation group was beneficial for me because of the social aspect more so than the actual meditation. This group emphasizes community (sangha) and service pretty heavily. A lot of people get social benefits from other religious communities, but as someone who didn't grow up in a religious household, I find Buddhists super easy to get along with. They tend to be very accepting, especially to newcomers, since they are taught not to make judgements of others. It's comforting to know if I'm going through a rough patch that at least I don't have to worry about people judging me for missing meditation that week.

I don't have ADHD, but since I started WFH I've been having ups and downs in terms of productivity, including a period of a few weeks where I was getting about 2-3 hours of work done per day at most like you describe. I don't know details about what your situation is like, but here's what I did that helps me at least most of the time.

I have my desk/office in a a room that was a storage room/unused office. I ended up removing anything from that room that I found myself doing instead of work: keep my phone in another room, delete bookmarks to blogs/news sites, move my stack of unread books into a different room, etc. Basically I got to a point where if I was sitting in that room, there was nothing to do but work.

The other thing I did was start framing tasks in terms of "doing this will make my life easier tomorrow" rather than thinking about later deadlines or the "big picture" of the project. E.g. "I can't get myself to audit all of these documents today, but if I set up the spreadsheet template it will make my life easier tomorrow." Sometimes when I start something like that I find it leads naturally into doing the actual task, but sometimes not. In those situations, as others have mentioned, it's important to have some self-compassion and try not get caught up in feelings of guilt. I started using an app called Woebot that can help with this. When you tell it you are depressed/anxious/guilty, it helps you look for ways to reframe those thoughts to be more productive.

Also, I have heard of studies that say the average employee is productive for 3-4 hours a day. Consider if you are actually getting less done or if your productive hours are just distributed differently. In an office where you get interrupted regularly it might be more evenly distributed throughout the day compared to if you have the opportunity at home to burn through those hours all in one chunk.

I know personally at least two employees who left REI when they announced plans to move to these headquarters a few years back. Then, remote work wasn't an option for employees and they didn't want to have to start commuting through Bellevue traffic (previous location was in Kent) or move to Bellevue (a significantly more expensive area). The attitude seemed to be that the wealthier people in upper management made the decision to move at the expense of "regular" employees. Glad for their current employees that this is happening, but it seems a little late.

I was listening to a presentation about emotional intelligence in the context of working with children based on stuff from the "Yale Center for Emotional Intelligence". The part of it that was life changing for me was the concept of describing emotions based on a 2D graph. One axis goes from "Negative" -> "Positive" and the other from "Low Energy" -> "High Energy". This makes four "quadrants": negative + low energy (including thing like "sad"), negative + high energy (including things like "angry"), positive + low energy (including things like "relaxed"), and positive + high energy (including things like "excited").

They went on to say that there are times when you want to be in each quadrant because each is suited for different kinds of tasks (e.g. low energy + negative for empathy, high energy + positive for productivity). If you can identify what quadrant you're currently in, there are techniques for moving toward any of the other quadrants depending on what you need to get done. There's actually an app I used for a while where you could pick a point on the grid and it would suggest words to describe how you may be feeling as well as these techniques for moving on either axis.