The thing about this sort of advice is that to a person in a subclinically depressed mindset it's not using the same language that they understand. It's preaching to the choir.
If you feel good about yourself and you are otherwise healthy then going to the gym, eating well, studying etc are not things that feel bad. They are intrinsically motivating because they make you a better you.
But if you feel bad or you are unwell then you don't give a toss, it's just dopamine fix after dopamine fix to get through today.
But then even if you feel good, not everyone cares about self actualization along the same axes. And then we have limited time, money, energy, ...
I've had experience with this and while it's incredibly difficult to find motivation to go the gym or eat well, I found that achieving even one of these things for even a week - so two-three visits to the gym or four-five salads and veggies instead of snacks - were enough to really boost my morale. Granted, it's no "solution" for depressive mindsets, but it's a step on the right track. We just tend to have this obsession with finding an easy packaged solution, whereas any real problem requires steps upon steps.
Yeah this is good advice, but it isn’t good enough for depressed people. Depending on the person the regular “long” or “medium” paths for dopamine to get released might be simply not available.
So, under depression, you can fight the uphill battle, finish that difficult task …and feel nothing at all. And then feel bad about not feeling good.
I don’t think there’s a single treatment to fix this for everyone, the solution needs to be adapted. In my case other happiness pathways and chemicals besides “task oriented satisfaction” were still open. (Sport felt good. Spending time with family felt good. Time in nature felt good. Healthy food felt good) So I “forced” myself to do a bunch of that. And that gradually unblocked my brain a little, and with some counselling and expectation management, I started feeling good about “doing things”. Still a work in progress.
One metaphor I used to describe my depression was being stuck at the bottom of a hill on a rollercoaster with too much friction. I could push and push and push my way to the top of one hill, but I'd just come to a halt again at the bottom of the next hill.
Not only did it take a lot more effort than usual to get moving on things, the effort I did put in did not result in any long-term momentum, making it really difficult to find motivation to keep trying.
This is the sort of thought pattern that is very possible to change, and for the reader unsure how, I'd highly recommend looking into CBT and similar therapies.
Although I get what you're saying, I challenge that it "won't get through to certain people". I think the advice is pretty common for people in that mindset. It's littered in every best selling self-help books read by millions worldwide (Tony Robbins, Mel Robbins, lots of Robbins for some reason).
It is definitely "life changing" going from a depressive state to a neutral or even positive one. But it seems most people start their self-improvement journey from depressive states they aren't aware of. Break-ups, financial ruin, tragic loss, shitty job, family issues, etc.
While self-actualization is indeed different for us all, there is a common sentiment to it which is being able to realize your full potential. The only way to do that is to constantly work on improving yourself as a person. That gives you much of the newfound sense of "security" and "growth" we all strive for in life.
I'm clinically depressed. I've had suicidal ideation for about twelve years (half my life.) On the rare days when sunlight peeks through and I can see the sky, yeah, working out and taking care of myself make me feel amazing. But most of the time it's just something I do. I don't feel better afterward. There may be a shadow of a thought in the back of my head like "this is making me stronger," but that's about it.
I've read an awful lot of LessWrong guides like the link about, pithily, how to extract more marginal value from your life. The problem is that before doing any of that makes sense I have to stop being so depressed, because every time I do something that's supposed to make me feel good I end up literally wanting to fucking kill myself. When I ask myself what I want out of life, the answer comes back immediately, "I want to die." Depression is this huge boulder that has been keeping me from getting on with my life for years now, and I know this but I'm not strong enough to move it myself. The best I can do is make life in the cave busy.
Before the inevitable replies pour in, I am doing every last thing I physically can about this. I run. I lift. I'm vegetarian and I eat a pretty healthy diet. I'm medicated. I'm in therapy. When I try meditation, it tends to bring me back to the feelings of wanting to die, and that's too much for me to sit with. I'm pursuing ketamine because I'm sick of living like this. I hope it helps me move the boulder.
I hear you. Just know that you are enough. You always will be. I know what you're going through. Also struggled for my whole life with these issues and been through my own dark night of the soul. I've found the ancient philosophies of buddhism, taoism, stoicism(this one most), and many others to help me move this boulder all the way up the hill and not constantly failing like Sisyphus. Part of you does die per-say, you're not the same person as you were previously. People refer to that as an awakening, a self-realization, but I see it as your ego dying in the process. Very common if you think about it from a Greek myth perspective of a hero's journey or even part of Star Wars where the Padawan becomes the Jedi Master.
I don't know if this happens to everyone in life nor will everyone realize it, but finding meaning in life for me meant reading tons of books and getting clarity of what was missing in my life after better understanding self-actualization from many angles. After-all it is the big question we all want an answer to. I think I found that, but I still do suffer through stormy weather here and there and I remind myself that I've gotten through it before, I'll get through it again. I've been through years of depression, and now they are more like weeks if not days.
Highly recommend reasons to stay alive by Matt Haig and man's search for meaning by Viktor Frankl if you haven't read them already.
Wishing you the best and do know that you are enough.
Words follow that I hope might help you or someone else; but might not. I know sometimes the last thing one wants is "yet more advice." These are just things that work for me.
I'm vegetarian and I eat a pretty healthy diet.
Consider adding grass-fed/pasture-raised beef (or even just an occasional not-bottom-tier hamburger) to your diet on occasion. In my twenties I found that eating some high quality protein (better with friends, but even alone) added a small but growing crack in the walls that barricaded my soul.
Also consider drastically different life philosophies/cultures in case the one you're in isn't for you (e.g. the ideas that meditation is a cure-all or that vegetarianism is virtuous are pretty culture-specific). For me that meant leaving conservative religion, but for others it might mean leaving progressive "religion."
Something else that helped me was going into social situations with a slight "idgaf so I'll just be my positive self no matter who might try to shut me down" attitude.
And finally, find any weak link in the vicious feedback cycle and chip away at it. Don't feel bad, but if you do, don't feel bad about feeling bad, but if you do, don't feel ...etc. Put the brakes on the meta-guilt and just be okay with feeling whatever for now, and you can feel something else later.
I don't eat meat because I once butterflied a turkey for dinner, cutting out the backbone and removing the giblets, and I became physically sick when it dawned on me what I was doing. My view is, if I can't butcher something, I probably shouldn't be eating it.
I'm glad you mentioned ketamine because I was about to recommend you psychedelics. I can't say I'm cured from depression -- in fact I'm still extremely close to killing myself -- but mushroom trips have been my saviors. Now I just need to start taking advantage of the improved baseline of mood and openness to experience that lingers for a few days (which is unusually short-lived from what I've researched but still useful) to do these things that are "supposed to feel good" and self-sustain for longer.
Just please do some research as this stuff is not risk-free.
Just wanted to say you’re not alone. I’ve felt like you for 30 some years. Somehow, I just keep going on. I have told myself endless times “just wait one more week”. That’s the only strategy that has worked. Luckily, often enough, I’ll have a day good enough to keep the struggle worth it. But, realistically my life expectancy is still just slightly above 60. What makes it worse is that no one else (except those closest to me) knows - I look pretty “normal” and “happy” because I don’t want to bring down anyone else's mood, but inside I’m feeling pain.
Depression is something I once struggled with. Mushrooms I think actually helped, but I think drugs etc are only going to go so far.
What really helped is that at any moment in time you can take a mental snapshot of your life, in essentially an instant, and from there decide to move up instead of down. A beauty to this, even if you fail to lift yourself, you can do the same thing again at a new moment. FWIW if anything
Nothing worse than helpful advice when you're not in a good state of mind, I agree. Nonetheless, keep going and I hope that one day you can put all this behind you.
It could still be a good advice from the parent. I lived my happiest, most motivated life in a very sunny and warm Mediterranean region, then I moved to a cloud cold North European region and boy oh boy depression started to hit me like a rock, especially during the winter.
The language is a bit glib / inappropriate for something like depression. But behavioral training like this (I commented elsewhere abt it) can be successful even for people experiencing acute, clinical mental health problems. Those techniques aren’t something you’ll learn from an anti procrastination blog, but in the broader context it’s a very sound approach
- personal level fixes: don't dwell in your own darkness, try to seize the few blinking moments of energy and do something with it, anything. It kinda revives that side of your mind.
- social level fixes: the first point had low yields for me, lots of efforts, small returns, sometimes a good day and back to walking on a fine line. But when I got back to work life, even shitty places, there was like a big wave of relief sipping in my system. I theorize that as being connected with and in the same flow as others. Suddenly your brain is exposed to others stimuli that are very very powerful (sleep, diet, .. all realigned overnight without even thinking about it)
I am sorry, not to be a debbie-downer but this kind of "solutinos" seem to only "solve" surface level issues i.e they don't look at emotional reasons why we procrastinate. I belive if you truly want to improve yourself, atleast not procrastinate, you have to look at your emotioanal state. It's effective when you do this at the point of procrastination. Why am i procrastinating? what/how am i feeling? Am i running away from this problem? if i am , why? Anything that probes your emotional state will help you uncover why is it that you're procrastina/ting/te. And, this method might not be the only way, but all paths to deprocrastinate go through your state of emotions.
Agreed, procrastination is a feelings problem and it requires feelings solutions.
Often when I finally start doing the thing I was putting off, the realization will hit me: "this is really hard," or "this feels really bad." I hadn't consciously expected those feelings but they were there under the surface, contributing to the urge to procrastinate.
I remember this article really changing my mindset when I first read it. “Procrastination is an emotion regulation problem, not a time management problem....”
This is not related to the article, but the comments.
In all my years on the internet and on internet based communities, this community never ceases to impress me on how supportive members are of each other. I too have experienced some severe bouts of depression in my lifetime, and to a lesser degree still am experiencing one.
While this community is pretty diverse, I find some solace in reading comment threads like this one, as I sort of assume that most of the people who gravitate towards HN are in a similar mindset as myself. Maybe we’re a group of people who have lived through the evolution of internet and social media, maybe we are all to some degree attempting to practice some sort of limiting our media inputs to those which provide a more meaningful experience in this world, or maybe there are just more realists in this community than the others I’ve been exposed to.
I’m not really sure what it is, but I find these comment threads incredibly helpful to my situation. I’ve limited my “social media” intake to only HN for the past few years, and while I find myself on some days wishing there was something more magical to spend my time on, this community is the only place where I am reminded regularly to go out and do “Something” not because it will make me richer or more attractive or more popular, but simply because I will live a more fulfilling life. Thus being a “magical” community in and of itself.
To add onto this, first start with the premise that you don’t have to do anything at all in life. You can be a bum. Sure it would bother some people but it’s true.
Then spend a few years thinking about things that are truly worth doing. Long term goals that truly excite you which you can build towards.
Don’t do anything just because. Only do things that give you joy or are towards a goal you find exciting. Life is short and don’t waste it on pointless tasks.
Personally, I have found using a visual scoreboard as a really helpful tool to make/break habits. Being able to see streaks clearly and a more concrete representation of the habit (as well as a reminder to keep it up!) is really useful. And I think a paper version trumps an app here quite a bit. It's for more tactile, which makes it feel more real and meaningful.
Despite the way this is presented as a productivity / life hack, the broad principles are backed by good science.
Specifically, the process of positive reinforcement and challenging assumptions is a cornerstone of Cognitive Behavioral Therapy movement in psychology and counseling.
CBT has been shown to be as effective as medications at treating a wide range of mental health issues — depression, anxiety, obsessive compulsive, substance abuse, and so on.
Anecdotally, this type of reinforcement is hard, but worth it. By definition you are trying to retrain your brain to be wired to better habits than it’s trained to now. You’re violating your comfortable response with a decidedly different one. But after you’ve practiced enough, these methods can provide real relief for mental health.
Ah. But I don't enjoy finishing certain tasks, I enjoy doing them. So the most potential enjoyment is gained by never finishing. I don't feel any sense of accomplishment when finishing those tasks.
Most potential enjoyment, perhaps. I think that's more than fine for personal projects (or work projects that don't matter in the company's grand scheme of things).
However, for professional endeavors, I always go back to one of Neil Gaiman's pieces of advice to aspiring authors: "You learn by finishing things."
Yeah. I'd love to finish more things. I like that quote. But at the same time, I don't feel the incentive of accomplishment that the article refers to. Finishing something just feels... empty?
This reminds me so much of achieving level 99 in skill in RuneScape. It takes about 50-200 hours, and most people don’t accomplish it for years. Once you get to 99 you just, teleport somewhere else and move on.
I’m now writing a book about this, for what it’s worth. Thanks for sharing your perspective.
Oh, yeah. I never went to max level in an MMO I used to play. Once you reach max level in a skill tree, there's no more point in exercising that skill. The reward is that you no longer get rewards. So, why bother? The goal of reaching max level (especially over those huge time investments) doesn't make sense. There's no higher enjoyment at max level, and many games even get boring once you get there.
It's a circular incentive. You level up to kill better mobs. You kill mobs to level up. So, unless there's any other reason to kill mobs, the game dies when everyone reaches max level.
Looked that up. Doesn't sound quite right. I enjoy working on things. It's just that actually finishing something doesn't contribute to the enjoyment. So, if there's a task that improves the project but doesn't bring it closer to actually being releasable, I don't feel any incentive in prioritising the other tasks that merely aim to finish the project.
Yes. Even though I have literally a hundred notes on my wall for next projects to build. What if I finish the current one, and then finish all of those? Nothing left to do!
It's real. Now that I think of it, I vaguely remember in early primary school frequently finishing tasks* early, and then having nothing to do, or being put on some time wasting activity. Not very enjoyable. Might be a learned behaviour from that.
*In one instance that I recall, we had these children books for learning to read. While other kids were whispering while reading, I was silent reading them, and much faster than them. (I particularly remember the other kids commenting that I was just pretending to read.) So, I went through the available books.
*Another time we were supposed to underline all the words we didn't understand in a story. Since there were none, I just went through it again a few times and underlined words that looked more difficult just to finish the task. (When the teacher checked it, they just said they knew I already understood those words.) (I suppose "frog" doesn't qualify as a difficult word.)
Solving climate change or hunger generally means having been born ultrawealthy and moving into politics to influence proper policy changes.
They don't fit the tinkering spare time project very well.
Eg. The lowest hanging fruit for improving hunger now is to convince Ukraine to capitulate to Russia so that the grain can flow, but that's only something you can do if you're a hunter Biden or the like
Solving them on a global scale, is likely a bit unrealistic on your own, but there LOTS of ways to work on the problem, especially with low cost home tinkering.
Photovoltaik, desalination, automated greenhouses, etc.
My point is basically, that I never had the fear of being out of projects, when there are so many problems waiting to be solved. My problem was more, picking the realistic ones. But when your goal is the tinkering, than it likely will not hurt failing a unrealistic project and learning in the process.
I am a victim of the religion of self-optimization and productivity for the sake of productivity myself, but in the end you do not have to optimize yourself at all. If you and your family have enough to eat, you are fine. If you are procrastinating something, you can also just decide to not do it. Just live, you are fine.
For some reason, the word "productive" causes some readers to get the wrong message. (I.e. some readers see a blog text mentioning "productivity" and thus it must be some veiled guilt-shaming article.)
People don't try to be productive just for the sake of being productive. People want to improve their lives and productivity is a natural focus of optimization to bring about a quality-of-life improvement.
Your pushback is similar to previous commenters that rejected the idea of "productivity" and I replied in previous comments
To recap one of my comments, even the prehistoric hunter "having enough to eat" is not fine because the hunter still wants to improve the productivity of hunting. Over the last 10000 years, people have continuously improved the productivity of hunting (and farming) so much that today's people like you and I have enough free time to type HN comments -- instead of spending all day chasing after animals to eat.
People naturally want to improve their lives. Some people also want to share ideas on how to improve their lives. It seems the word "productivity" has tainted that discussion.
However, it doesn't change the fact that people still want to reduce the ratio of effort-to-benefit.
Those tribes have been optimizing their hunter-gatherer lifestyle for thousands of years. Like the rest of modernity, they have innovated (increased their productivity) on their practices and their culture and society has evolved.
So I see this point as being evidence to GPs perspective, rather than your own, respectfully.
If you are procrastinating you are probably fine and will not starve. You do not have to hustle. Of course you can, but if it‘s not your thing, just don’t do it. Most of us are not hunter/gatherers.
I read your comment and then skimmed the article. This is how it reads: “ALERT! YOU HAVE PROBLEMS! STEPS 123455789 ARE NEEDED!” And so on. Talk about piling it on. Thanks for your perspective.
I find myself with an idea "oh that's right, I need to do X" and go to find the tab X in my browser with 100+ tabs open, and quite often forget what I was searching for before I find it.
I really ought to remember to write a list. Oh wait I have one, where is that tab again?
I installed an extension to close idle tabs older than 30 minutes. Keeps my tabs tidy because turns out searching for the page is faster than finding the tab among the hundreds.
> If you are procrastinating something, you can also just decide to not do it. Just live, you are fine.
Procrastination can be the thin end of the wedge though and, in extreme cases, deciding not to do things develops into doing nothing, like not going to work, not paying paying bills, not opening letters or answering the phone, and so on...
Not everyone can or should embrace this mindset, not because it’s a bad one per se…. But some people are driven by ambition—ambition to make money, make art, explore, create, etc. We have a lot to be thankful for in todays world and it’s partly due to people who challenged themselves to do more than simply sit back and chill. I look at it this way… some people want to star in the show, not just watch it.
Those are all great motivators. While the article mentions "working on something exciting" it doesn't suggest, well, finding something that motivates you at a fundamental level.
If you're able to just decide not to do the thing, then you're in a much better place. Some of us can get stuck in a loop where we can't decide not to do the thing, but also can't get started on it.
I think, positive feedback is crucial for motivation, but grit gets you through the slow days.
I probably just continued my blogging career, because one of my first articles got over 20k views.
I wrote many of such successful articles in my first year of blogging.
But there were much more that nobody cared about. Most of the stuff I wrote was simply ignored and it felt like I lost my luck. But I kept going on and eventually things got better again.
1. BECOME RELAXED: Take care of the fundamental issues in your life, health, finances, burnout, or whatever else might be preventing you from being relaxed enough to focus your mind. Eat, sleep, and exercise well. Consider this an absolute prerequisite and don't feel guilty about it.
2. FIND MOTIVATION: Get excited about why you started in the first place. Go over the plan from scratch with a co-founder, talk to users, visualize the end goal, use the product, or do whatever it takes to get back some of the initial excitement.
3. BUILD MOMENTUM: Be as self-indulgent as necessary at first. Don't worry about doing the highest priority tasks, just get going. Do whatever part of the project seems most fun/easy/interesting, however trivial. Do whatever it takes to start building back your speed. Once you're at speed, the hard stuff won't be so hard.
Now you're relaxed, motivated, and have momentum so it's full steam ahead!
Fall off the wagon for some reason? Don't waste time feeling bad, just accept it. Then repeat steps 1-3.
Isn't a good thing that a lot of these articles exist? As the number of articles available grows the chance that you share the "issue" with the author is bigger.
I generally agree with the advice. It’s common that any feeling and noticing said feeling begets the same feeling. But do know there is a duality to these feelings. You can make positives out of negatives and vice-versa. This teaches you that one simply cannot exist without the other.
Although I’m a positive person in general, the negative balances us as human. I would argue that “cheerfulness” is the more ideal state of mind being this middle path between the two. It’s the idea of euthymia in which you live regularly without large shifts in mood.
This is often referred to as the professional mindset where you get what you need to get done because you are largely unaffected by how you feel on a given day. This is where many of the cliche “Master your thoughts, master your life” quotes come from because it’s largely true once you experience it. At least my experience with it.
> Imagine how you feel after successfully completing an assignment ahead of time… You feel good, don’t you?
Nope. Whenever I complete an assignment, I feel a great sense of ... nothing. Before work, there's a crippling tension that leads to procrastination. During work, I am focused and not thinking about anything else. Afterwards though, I don't feel relieved or anything, but rather worry about the next thing on the list.
This works for one offs like cleaning up, or filing taxes, but how does one stick to a multi-month or even multi-year project?
For that, it requires faith that everything will work out. It's painfully easy to be skeptical and cynical. In the really old how to succeed books like Think and Grow Rich faith is emphasized as an important attribute to success. These days with endless scoffing at everything, this principle has been forgotten and ridiculed.
4. Think about your thought in a way that makes you feel differently.
5. How does thinking about it differently change your original feelings?
6. What new opportunities are possible by thinking differently?
Not really trying to create something positive as much as showing the possibility for opportunities. Write down your answers as you complete the exercise.
If you need to resort to such silly gimmicks, maybe there is something else that's wrong? Maybe you are depressed and you should seek help? Maybe you are not motivated because you are not in a career you enjoy or you don't like the major you've chosen in school or a family member is sick? If you take a step back and assess the situation rationally, something must be terribly wrong in your life if you need to "create a positive feedback loop to become motivated".
> Maybe you are depressed, not in a career you enjoy, ...
So, as you point out, there are many factors here (some out of our control). And the post offers some strategies. Why is quitting a career better than reframing it more positively?
If you feel good about yourself and you are otherwise healthy then going to the gym, eating well, studying etc are not things that feel bad. They are intrinsically motivating because they make you a better you.
But if you feel bad or you are unwell then you don't give a toss, it's just dopamine fix after dopamine fix to get through today.
But then even if you feel good, not everyone cares about self actualization along the same axes. And then we have limited time, money, energy, ...
Life is complicated, innit.