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What can help: - visualize yourself as a homeless in your late 40s, abandoned by your wife and kids, no longer recognized/avoided by your friends, destitute, i

by bitL 9y ago

What can help: - visualize yourself as a homeless in your late 40s, abandoned by your wife and kids, no longer recognized/avoided by your friends, destitute, in bad health. It's a likely outcome if you don't learn how to finish things, work on your own projects and make it. Think about it as your default future state you want to avoid - remove distractions while you are working on something. If distractions are your inner ones, contemplate on them for a few minutes and then decide to stick with a task for 2 continuous hours. - put away those sugary foods that wreak havoc on your focus; look up how cancer in obese people looks like and replace their exterior with you; contemplate about how to avoid such a fate - when you are stuck for multiple days, don't keep sitting on the chair; take a walk to a forest, talk to completely different people to allow your brain stop overloading the same "circuitry" - force yourself to have 8 hours of uninterrupted sleep every single day; experiment by going to sleep before 10pm and waking up around 6am - build resilience by doing something you hate for an hour a day. It could be sports, it could be talking to/helping some annoying person, taking a 5 minute cold shower, take a morning run for 30 minutes or doing any useful things you hate to do; simply define the lowest point of the day - "it can't be worse than that" and move off to better things - ignore your past failures, only learn from them. Don't occupy yourself with the past whether it was glorious or awful; you only own the present and shape the future

kortex 9y ago
> visualize yourself as a homeless in your late 40s, abandoned by your wife and kids, no longer recognized/avoided by your friends, destitute, in bad health. However true this might be, I think this is bad advice for someone with OP'S mental architecture. That sort of thinking only reinforces anxiety (the unhelpful kind, not the fire-under-butt kind), loss of locus of control, and imposter syndrome feelings. Otherwise good advice.
- thecatspaw 9y ago
  I kind of do have a similar mental architecture as OP, though a few years younger. This sentence doesnt make me feel anxious or any of the other feelings you mentioned. It makes me go "Yeah sure, as if that will happen". If the threat is not immediate or in the near future, its very easy to just push it aside
sschueller 9y ago
Working out of fear of losing everything will make you miserable and can actually block you from getting things done. I would try to find positive outlooks not negative ones. Reward, not punishment. Your other points however are very helpful.
- bitL 9y ago
  Maybe in the beginning. I've gotten the impression that OP is already beyond this stage where positive reinforcement was necessary and did the first steps, struggling with the subsequent ones. If you studied (natural) reinforcement learning, negative reward seems to be working as well, even in case if all you get are negative rewards (which some researchers/philosophers actually consider as accurate description of life). Even historically, religions used it profoundly, e.g. by default you end up in hell and you have to do much better (up to the point of becoming a hero) to escape - easy coasting won't do it. It's quite fascinating to think this tells us what motivation approaches work on humans as they persisted through evolutionary selection to this day and how one can use them to improve one's condition.

by bitL 9y ago

kortex 9y ago

> visualize yourself as a homeless in your late 40s, abandoned by your wife and kids, no longer recognized/avoided by your friends, destitute, in bad health. However true this might be, I think this is bad advice for someone with OP'S mental architecture. That sort of thinking only reinforces anxiety (the unhelpful kind, not the fire-under-butt kind), loss of locus of control, and imposter syndrome feelings. Otherwise good advice.

thecatspaw 9y ago
I kind of do have a similar mental architecture as OP, though a few years younger. This sentence doesnt make me feel anxious or any of the other feelings you mentioned. It makes me go "Yeah sure, as if that will happen". If the threat is not immediate or in the near future, its very easy to just push it aside

sschueller 9y ago

Working out of fear of losing everything will make you miserable and can actually block you from getting things done. I would try to find positive outlooks not negative ones. Reward, not punishment. Your other points however are very helpful.

bitL 9y ago
Maybe in the beginning. I've gotten the impression that OP is already beyond this stage where positive reinforcement was necessary and did the first steps, struggling with the subsequent ones. If you studied (natural) reinforcement learning, negative reward seems to be working as well, even in case if all you get are negative rewards (which some researchers/philosophers actually consider as accurate description of life). Even historically, religions used it profoundly, e.g. by default you end up in hell and you have to do much better (up to the point of becoming a hero) to escape - easy coasting won't do it. It's quite fascinating to think this tells us what motivation approaches work on humans as they persisted through evolutionary selection to this day and how one can use them to improve one's condition.