10 ms·

If you are in a similar boat, it's likely that when you consider an upcoming dreaded task, there is at least a small part of you that admits the possibility tha

If you are in a similar boat, it's likely that when you consider an upcoming dreaded task, there is at least a small part of you that admits the possibility that you will not do the task. And because there is, and because your brain realizes it, it expends mental energy trying to convince you not to do it. Once you are actually doing the task, or it's done, or you realize that you must start doing it immediately, you suddenly find that while plenty of physical energy may be required, there is almost no mental energy required at all. A trick I've learned is to lie to yourself. Say you're excited to do it, that you can't wait, and that you enjoy it. Your brain is easily convinced if you're willing to let it be. Sometimes this is not the case, because your brain entertains the idea that it can stop doing the activity it doesn't want to do. Once you are able to convince your brain that is not an option, this mental energy is returned to you as well. i.e. Pain is mandatory, but suffering is optional.

sillysaurusx 6y ago
Another mental trick is to repeat to yourself "I'm an interesting person and people like me." It's usually true. Lots of social anxiety evaporates. And sure, sometimes you put yourself in an embarrassing position because of it. But the benefits are worth it.
- adamsea 6y ago
  Amen. Fake it til you make it. Key life skill.
jonathanliu 6y ago
Vonnegut had a great quote along the lines of "we become who we pretend to be".
- psb 6y ago
  I think this was pretty much the topic of one of his books
  - Jtsummers 6y ago
    Mother Night: "We are what we pretend to be, so we must be careful about what we pretend to be."
  - jonathanliu 6y ago
    Heh I didn't know that. I heard/read the quote from Sivers.
- ak39 6y ago
  "Fake it till you make it" meme?
  - Jtsummers 6y ago
    It was used in a similar, but twisted, sense in the book. In the book, Mother Night, the character is working for the US (and the Allies) but under the cover of working for the Nazis. So it's a bit of a twist on "fake it til you make it". In the latter, you pretend to be what you want to be. In the book he's pretending to be what he doesn't want to be, but the consequence is that post-war he's perceived to have been a Nazi (or at least a collaborator).
    - darkerside 6y ago
      And arguably, was.
mortenjorck 6y ago
> A trick I've learned is to lie to yourself. Say you're excited to do it, that you can't wait, and that you enjoy it. Your brain is easily convinced if you're willing to let it be. The technique I finally learned was to attempt to cultivate an enjoyment of the task I didn’t want to do. But I wonder if what you’re suggesting isn't really just a different way of looking at the same thing. You might be “lying to yourself” telling yourself that you’re excited to do something, but the brain will start synthesizing that into what it might indeed find enjoyable about the task. I found I could easily get myself to fold laundry by focusing on the satisfaction of a folded shirt - it sounds silly, but I somehow hooked that process up to the right dopamine trigger, and now I rarely procrastinate this particular chore. The process was similar for exercise. Whether it was “I’m going to tell myself I’ll enjoy this” or “I’m going to find something I enjoy about this” is perhaps not as clear-cut as I originally imagined, but either way, my epiphany was this: I will always find a way to avoid a task I don’t want to do, while I will always find a way to do something I’ve learned to enjoy.
- darkerside 6y ago
  100%. Posting my other post, > When I say to lie, I'm a bit tongue in cheek. I don't really consider it a lie anymore. It's simply a acknowledgment that this task will not be painful the way that I think. It's much more Zen than my initial post made it sound, but I hoped that would help translate to people who are getting started with self discipline.
- quotemstr 6y ago
  > The technique I finally learned was to attempt to cultivate an enjoyment of the task I didn’t want to do There's a fantastic idiom in English to express this idea: "to make virtue out of necessity".
  - big_paps 6y ago
    or : embrace the suck
ajkdhcb2 6y ago
I think this is all abysmal, dangerous advice. The author says to 'become a robot' and you're saying to 'lie to yourself'. It's all very anti-Zen. I think Alan Watts would say it leads to double-binds and discordant psychological feedback loops that will cause you suffering. Your brain isn't a separate part of you. And you should simply be mindful and fully aware of life, do what you want and enjoy doing, when you feel like doing it. No wonder there is such an issue with anxiety and depression when culture seems intent on mind-games that trick people into spending life doing things that they don't really want to do.
- eebynight 6y ago
  You say this as if you have complete control over your thoughts and the content of your sub conscious mind, which you don’t... Half the battle of accomplishing anything in life is priming your subconscious mind with the right line of thinking for the task at hand. If you reframe it that way this is fantastic advice. Edit: I might also add your subconscious mind could very well be considered a separate entity considering it exists out of the full range of your conscious brains influence.
  - ajkdhcb2 6y ago
    It doesn't make any sense to 'control your own thoughts'. It's weird how people seem to picture their 'real self' as some disparate nonphysical entity in their body pulling levers, in this case even separate from the brain and thoughts
    - alex_anglin 6y ago
      You may wish to look in to Cognitive Behavioural Therapy, as it can achieve what you claim makes no sense.
    - FeepingCreature 6y ago
      When people picture a disparate nonphysical entity, it's usually a map-territory effect. Ie. in this case their model of themselves.
Scarblac 6y ago
Sometimes it isn't even a lie. When procrastinating I sometimes have to stop, remind myself that I _enjoy_ programming and figuring out the best way to solve some problem, _this is actually fun_. And then my brain realizes that that's actually true, it's being silly by procrastinating, and I get to work. It's strange that it's necessary, but it is.
- Kuinox 6y ago
  Well, this, but the last step doesnt happen.
  - ooobit2 6y ago
    I've learned in life, both by doing and not doing, that effort is the only metric for success you can control. As far as how you set your expectations, I'd like to propose an experiment: Draw a Punnett square, where X is each possible choice you can make with your time relevant to one variable (work/don't work) and Y is each possible result of the subject of your choice for X (meet deadline/don't meet deadline). You can imagine easily what a p.sq. of these four possible combined outcomes looks like. The point isn't that some of the intersections are impossible (ex. don't work/meet deadline). The point is to notice your ideal outcome (don't work/meet deadline) is: a) impossible, or if not impossible, then b) unlikely, given each intersection has the same general probability of occurrence. In a nutshell, stop expecting the impossible and the improbable. By investing yourself fully in just one of the possible outcomes represented in a p.sq., you will both fail to accept a reasonably good but unfavorable outcome and fail to persist when your ideal outcome appears unachievable.
    - imposter 6y ago
      “You have the right to work, but never to the fruit of work. You should never engage in action for the sake of reward, nor should you long for inaction. ~ The Bhagavad Gita
    - isanybodythere 6y ago
      Hopefully saving someone some time: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Punnett_square https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Punnett_square
agumonkey 6y ago
Instead of lying I'd use the make it fun. Find any reason to make that task enjoyable, flip it around, organize it differently. At work (temporary gig): - manual labour == free workout. Whenever I have to crouch for a file.. I do it in a slow and perfect squat. I grab the file and stay down to strecth, then I go up swift .. I'm happy to have that file because I gained something. Other task like archive defragmenting I tried various ways to find the most agreeable one, then I go full speed. - mundane tasks (print copy, input): I make a chase waste game out of it (what programmers do). I organize the thing to be as lean and fast as possible and turn a 100+ repetitions into a smooth flow .. like a choreography. I time most things to make it a game. Coworkers are shocked (whatever their reasons) but I produce twice in half the time and zero rants coming from my cubicle. For tasks that I really don't like to do.. I gained a mental compartment to remember not to ever trigger that task again. I do it as a debt to my mistake and get done with it.
- tmatthe 6y ago
  Yes I do this too! It's amazing what mindset can do.
  - agumonkey 6y ago
    We could talk about the social version of this. In my job nobody really works, it's an adversarial environment where everybody is hurting so wants to help nobody. A colleague and I did a thing together, the flow of shared tasks when done in friendly spirit helps immensely. Passing stuff between each others. Things happening while you're doing something else. Joining back together.. This should be mandatory in work and what leaders should be doing, ensuring people work in synergy.
- hinkley 6y ago
  You can't rationalize or intellectualize everything. Trying just makes it harder later on when the things you cannot bargain with start piling up, despite all of your engineering attempts to prevent them. Essentially the author is asserting that thinking harder isn't going to fix some classes of problem, no matter how hard you think. Fundamentally, there's a trap. It's a short trip from "I can avoid this if I'm good enough" to "I didn't avoid this, so I'm not good enough (bad)." That's toxic dialog. If this is the way you think about anyone, including yourself, you're not being a good friend, and there will be consequences. And I realize the irony in this statement, but if you like to out-clever problems, you should think about whether you are failing to maintain a diversity of rich, long-term relationships with people. If so, this is probably not a coincidence.
hinkley 6y ago
Some psychologists seem to be okay with the idea of self-bribery to get through difficult tasks. I think culturally some of us are taught that this is a form of weakness, but it just results in things not being done. I don't agree with a lot of Alcoholics Anonymous' philosophy, but the concept of 'white-knuckling' is quite a powerful metaphor for the trap we get into of trying to force ourselves through a difficult activity, and it speaks to a somewhat tortured value judgement around the relative value of doing a task at all versus doing it yourself. Like you'd rather have mold in your house than pay some guy to fix the shingles on your roof. I've consumed as much if not more of my favorite ice cream in the last year, but it tends to be reserved for conscious choices: I'm going to make a difficult phone call or work on my billing, then go for ice cream, rather than whenever I just feel stressed. It is certainly not the only tool I have added to the toolbox, but it complements others and the end results have improved my outlook. And since motivation and mood are spirals (which I think you were trying to say?), that's a big deal.
- ep103 6y ago
  I laughed while reading your response, because I was reading your response while eating a small amount of ice cream, specifically because I was about to go back to purging my day's worth of incoming emails, a task I genuinely hate doing : D
  - knicholes 6y ago
    I found myself doing the same, but I finally got so fed up with it I took action. I'm not sure about the content of your emails, but many of mine were from groups I was following that I had no interest in any longer, from code changes being made to repositories in which I no longer work, or just generic crap that I can't disable. When I get an email I don't care about, I take action to make sure I don't get any more. I unsubscribe if it's a distribution list or some website that bought my email. I throw garbage I can't control into its own folder using Outlook rules. If it's a repo that I don't need, I unfollow it in github.
    - dasil003 6y ago
tmatthe 6y ago
Exactly. If you don't give your brain an option, you can't find a way to not do it. I agree with your point on lying. I have tried it before but it takes a lot of mental effort to trick my brain and even then, it's a precarious situation where one loose thought can bring it all tumbling down.
- hinkley 6y ago
  Part of discipline is not allowing 'in the moment' you to disagree with 'careful planning' you. I know one or two people who have a lot of chaos in their lives who cannot do this. One in particular gets positively defensive if you ask in the car what you plan to accomplish by going into this store. You can hardly call it 'buying extra things' if you refuse to articulate what the expected set of things was in the first place. She spends so much time de-cluttering and often doesn't have money for group activities despite being in essentially the same income bracket. Ten seconds making a plan doesn't have to turn into a whole avoidant 'ruining the experience' vibe of the trip. Also, no store is designed to make you enjoy it. It's merely designed for long- versus short-term ROI, and certain kinds of enjoyment can benefit one or the other. Enjoying a trip to the mall is expensive as hell.
mandliya 6y ago
>> A trick I've learned is to lie to yourself. Say you're excited to do it, that you can't wait, and that you enjoy it. Your brain is easily convinced if you're willing to let it be. I think this is what most of hypnosis or meditation techniques do. They try to bring mind in a more suggestive state and then suggests that you like(or hate) the good(or bad) activity. I have a friend who was a 6 cigarettes a day guy actually quit smoking after few sessions of hypnotherapy. He said his hypnotherapist suggested in sessions that you hate the smell of the smoke, and he started hating it. I had hard time believing it and I remember researching about it.
FiberBundle 6y ago
I never understand this line of reasoning. What do you think is it that comes up with a thought like 'be excited about this task'. When you say that your brain is easily convinced by this you imply that there exists something besides your brain that comes up with thoughts, which makes absolutely no sense at all. It's more likely that your brain just decides a priori to do the task and then comes up with the thought that justifies doing the task.

sillysaurusx 6y ago

Another mental trick is to repeat to yourself "I'm an interesting person and people like me." It's usually true. Lots of social anxiety evaporates. And sure, sometimes you put yourself in an embarrassing position because of it. But the benefits are worth it.

adamsea 6y ago
Amen. Fake it til you make it. Key life skill.

jonathanliu 6y ago

Vonnegut had a great quote along the lines of "we become who we pretend to be".

psb 6y ago
I think this was pretty much the topic of one of his books
- Jtsummers 6y ago
  Mother Night: "We are what we pretend to be, so we must be careful about what we pretend to be."
- jonathanliu 6y ago
  Heh I didn't know that. I heard/read the quote from Sivers.
ak39 6y ago
"Fake it till you make it" meme?
- Jtsummers 6y ago
  It was used in a similar, but twisted, sense in the book. In the book, Mother Night, the character is working for the US (and the Allies) but under the cover of working for the Nazis. So it's a bit of a twist on "fake it til you make it". In the latter, you pretend to be what you want to be. In the book he's pretending to be what he doesn't want to be, but the consequence is that post-war he's perceived to have been a Nazi (or at least a collaborator).
  - darkerside 6y ago
    And arguably, was.

mortenjorck 6y ago

> A trick I've learned is to lie to yourself. Say you're excited to do it, that you can't wait, and that you enjoy it. Your brain is easily convinced if you're willing to let it be. The technique I finally learned was to attempt to cultivate an enjoyment of the task I didn’t want to do. But I wonder if what you’re suggesting isn't really just a different way of looking at the same thing. You might be “lying to yourself” telling yourself that you’re excited to do something, but the brain will start synthesizing that into what it might indeed find enjoyable about the task. I found I could easily get myself to fold laundry by focusing on the satisfaction of a folded shirt - it sounds silly, but I somehow hooked that process up to the right dopamine trigger, and now I rarely procrastinate this particular chore. The process was similar for exercise. Whether it was “I’m going to tell myself I’ll enjoy this” or “I’m going to find something I enjoy about this” is perhaps not as clear-cut as I originally imagined, but either way, my epiphany was this: I will always find a way to avoid a task I don’t want to do, while I will always find a way to do something I’ve learned to enjoy.

darkerside 6y ago
100%. Posting my other post, > When I say to lie, I'm a bit tongue in cheek. I don't really consider it a lie anymore. It's simply a acknowledgment that this task will not be painful the way that I think. It's much more Zen than my initial post made it sound, but I hoped that would help translate to people who are getting started with self discipline.
quotemstr 6y ago
> The technique I finally learned was to attempt to cultivate an enjoyment of the task I didn’t want to do There's a fantastic idiom in English to express this idea: "to make virtue out of necessity".
- big_paps 6y ago
  or : embrace the suck

ajkdhcb2 6y ago

I think this is all abysmal, dangerous advice. The author says to 'become a robot' and you're saying to 'lie to yourself'. It's all very anti-Zen. I think Alan Watts would say it leads to double-binds and discordant psychological feedback loops that will cause you suffering. Your brain isn't a separate part of you. And you should simply be mindful and fully aware of life, do what you want and enjoy doing, when you feel like doing it. No wonder there is such an issue with anxiety and depression when culture seems intent on mind-games that trick people into spending life doing things that they don't really want to do.

eebynight 6y ago
You say this as if you have complete control over your thoughts and the content of your sub conscious mind, which you don’t... Half the battle of accomplishing anything in life is priming your subconscious mind with the right line of thinking for the task at hand. If you reframe it that way this is fantastic advice. Edit: I might also add your subconscious mind could very well be considered a separate entity considering it exists out of the full range of your conscious brains influence.
- ajkdhcb2 6y ago
  It doesn't make any sense to 'control your own thoughts'. It's weird how people seem to picture their 'real self' as some disparate nonphysical entity in their body pulling levers, in this case even separate from the brain and thoughts
  - alex_anglin 6y ago
    You may wish to look in to Cognitive Behavioural Therapy, as it can achieve what you claim makes no sense.
  - FeepingCreature 6y ago
    When people picture a disparate nonphysical entity, it's usually a map-territory effect. Ie. in this case their model of themselves.

Scarblac 6y ago

Sometimes it isn't even a lie. When procrastinating I sometimes have to stop, remind myself that I _enjoy_ programming and figuring out the best way to solve some problem, _this is actually fun_. And then my brain realizes that that's actually true, it's being silly by procrastinating, and I get to work. It's strange that it's necessary, but it is.

Kuinox 6y ago
Well, this, but the last step doesnt happen.
- ooobit2 6y ago
  I've learned in life, both by doing and not doing, that effort is the only metric for success you can control. As far as how you set your expectations, I'd like to propose an experiment: Draw a Punnett square, where X is each possible choice you can make with your time relevant to one variable (work/don't work) and Y is each possible result of the subject of your choice for X (meet deadline/don't meet deadline). You can imagine easily what a p.sq. of these four possible combined outcomes looks like. The point isn't that some of the intersections are impossible (ex. don't work/meet deadline). The point is to notice your ideal outcome (don't work/meet deadline) is: a) impossible, or if not impossible, then b) unlikely, given each intersection has the same general probability of occurrence. In a nutshell, stop expecting the impossible and the improbable. By investing yourself fully in just one of the possible outcomes represented in a p.sq., you will both fail to accept a reasonably good but unfavorable outcome and fail to persist when your ideal outcome appears unachievable.
  - imposter 6y ago
    “You have the right to work, but never to the fruit of work. You should never engage in action for the sake of reward, nor should you long for inaction. ~ The Bhagavad Gita
  - isanybodythere 6y ago
    Hopefully saving someone some time: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Punnett_square https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Punnett_square

agumonkey 6y ago

Instead of lying I'd use the make it fun. Find any reason to make that task enjoyable, flip it around, organize it differently. At work (temporary gig): - manual labour == free workout. Whenever I have to crouch for a file.. I do it in a slow and perfect squat. I grab the file and stay down to strecth, then I go up swift .. I'm happy to have that file because I gained something. Other task like archive defragmenting I tried various ways to find the most agreeable one, then I go full speed. - mundane tasks (print copy, input): I make a chase waste game out of it (what programmers do). I organize the thing to be as lean and fast as possible and turn a 100+ repetitions into a smooth flow .. like a choreography. I time most things to make it a game. Coworkers are shocked (whatever their reasons) but I produce twice in half the time and zero rants coming from my cubicle. For tasks that I really don't like to do.. I gained a mental compartment to remember not to ever trigger that task again. I do it as a debt to my mistake and get done with it.

tmatthe 6y ago
Yes I do this too! It's amazing what mindset can do.
- agumonkey 6y ago
  We could talk about the social version of this. In my job nobody really works, it's an adversarial environment where everybody is hurting so wants to help nobody. A colleague and I did a thing together, the flow of shared tasks when done in friendly spirit helps immensely. Passing stuff between each others. Things happening while you're doing something else. Joining back together.. This should be mandatory in work and what leaders should be doing, ensuring people work in synergy.
hinkley 6y ago
You can't rationalize or intellectualize everything. Trying just makes it harder later on when the things you cannot bargain with start piling up, despite all of your engineering attempts to prevent them. Essentially the author is asserting that thinking harder isn't going to fix some classes of problem, no matter how hard you think. Fundamentally, there's a trap. It's a short trip from "I can avoid this if I'm good enough" to "I didn't avoid this, so I'm not good enough (bad)." That's toxic dialog. If this is the way you think about anyone, including yourself, you're not being a good friend, and there will be consequences. And I realize the irony in this statement, but if you like to out-clever problems, you should think about whether you are failing to maintain a diversity of rich, long-term relationships with people. If so, this is probably not a coincidence.

hinkley 6y ago

Some psychologists seem to be okay with the idea of self-bribery to get through difficult tasks. I think culturally some of us are taught that this is a form of weakness, but it just results in things not being done. I don't agree with a lot of Alcoholics Anonymous' philosophy, but the concept of 'white-knuckling' is quite a powerful metaphor for the trap we get into of trying to force ourselves through a difficult activity, and it speaks to a somewhat tortured value judgement around the relative value of doing a task at all versus doing it yourself. Like you'd rather have mold in your house than pay some guy to fix the shingles on your roof. I've consumed as much if not more of my favorite ice cream in the last year, but it tends to be reserved for conscious choices: I'm going to make a difficult phone call or work on my billing, then go for ice cream, rather than whenever I just feel stressed. It is certainly not the only tool I have added to the toolbox, but it complements others and the end results have improved my outlook. And since motivation and mood are spirals (which I think you were trying to say?), that's a big deal.

ep103 6y ago
I laughed while reading your response, because I was reading your response while eating a small amount of ice cream, specifically because I was about to go back to purging my day's worth of incoming emails, a task I genuinely hate doing : D
- knicholes 6y ago
  I found myself doing the same, but I finally got so fed up with it I took action. I'm not sure about the content of your emails, but many of mine were from groups I was following that I had no interest in any longer, from code changes being made to repositories in which I no longer work, or just generic crap that I can't disable. When I get an email I don't care about, I take action to make sure I don't get any more. I unsubscribe if it's a distribution list or some website that bought my email. I throw garbage I can't control into its own folder using Outlook rules. If it's a repo that I don't need, I unfollow it in github.
  - dasil003 6y ago

tmatthe 6y ago

Exactly. If you don't give your brain an option, you can't find a way to not do it. I agree with your point on lying. I have tried it before but it takes a lot of mental effort to trick my brain and even then, it's a precarious situation where one loose thought can bring it all tumbling down.

hinkley 6y ago
Part of discipline is not allowing 'in the moment' you to disagree with 'careful planning' you. I know one or two people who have a lot of chaos in their lives who cannot do this. One in particular gets positively defensive if you ask in the car what you plan to accomplish by going into this store. You can hardly call it 'buying extra things' if you refuse to articulate what the expected set of things was in the first place. She spends so much time de-cluttering and often doesn't have money for group activities despite being in essentially the same income bracket. Ten seconds making a plan doesn't have to turn into a whole avoidant 'ruining the experience' vibe of the trip. Also, no store is designed to make you enjoy it. It's merely designed for long- versus short-term ROI, and certain kinds of enjoyment can benefit one or the other. Enjoying a trip to the mall is expensive as hell.

mandliya 6y ago

>> A trick I've learned is to lie to yourself. Say you're excited to do it, that you can't wait, and that you enjoy it. Your brain is easily convinced if you're willing to let it be. I think this is what most of hypnosis or meditation techniques do. They try to bring mind in a more suggestive state and then suggests that you like(or hate) the good(or bad) activity. I have a friend who was a 6 cigarettes a day guy actually quit smoking after few sessions of hypnotherapy. He said his hypnotherapist suggested in sessions that you hate the smell of the smoke, and he started hating it. I had hard time believing it and I remember researching about it.

FiberBundle 6y ago

I never understand this line of reasoning. What do you think is it that comes up with a thought like 'be excited about this task'. When you say that your brain is easily convinced by this you imply that there exists something besides your brain that comes up with thoughts, which makes absolutely no sense at all. It's more likely that your brain just decides a priori to do the task and then comes up with the thought that justifies doing the task.