10 ms·

Most of the time it's anxiety. You'd be surprised how easy it is to start doing something when you don't feel any kind of pressure. Getting rid of it is hard wo

Most of the time it's anxiety. You'd be surprised how easy it is to start doing something when you don't feel any kind of pressure. Getting rid of it is hard work though, sometimes even harder than doing the thing you're procrastinating about. This gives rise to some interesting cost/benefit discussions. Which only serve to increase the anxiety. Enjoy modern life!

iLoveOncall 3y ago
Maybe for you. I have 0 anxiety, it's just lazyness or instant boredom.
abnercoimbre 3y ago
> Getting rid of it is hard work though Getting rid of what, exactly? The pressure? (Currently procrastinating by the way, on very important things that I keep delaying for some unexplained reason.) Modern life indeed.
- NoPicklez 3y ago
  Well that's entirely dependent on the task. For instance, if you have problems submitting your timesheets on time, it could be due to the fact that you're worried about putting too many hours on the budget. If you remove the worry about putting too many hours on the budget, then you might find yourself doing your timesheets on time. The answer to your question lies in the "unexplained reason" which can actually be explained, that's the hard part.
  - TeMPOraL 3y ago
    > The answer to your question lies in the "unexplained reason" which can actually be explained, that's the hard part. Having struggled with this for almost 20 years now, with little to show for it, I'd say "'unexplained reason' can actually be explained" seems to belong to the same category as "P != NP can actually be proven". Good luck and Godspeed. Maybe I'm more of a clinical case, but for me, whatever I think the source of anxiety is in any given scenario, it's never that. I can eliminate potential sources one by one, dig in recursively, but it only provides very short-lived feelings of relief, lasting seconds to minutes, before anxiety restarts. To make matters worse, the more I spend time on such investigations, the more anxious I get about not working on the actual thing I wanted/was supposed to. The most accurate model/explanation I have for this is: anxiety always comes, unconditionally; any "reason" behind it is just desperate post-hoc rationalization. The only reliable defense I know of is to be doing something so interesting or stimulating that it captures all of the brain's compute and starves the "anxiety process" entirely. Of course, that process will restart as soon as resources for it become available. > For instance, if you have problems submitting your timesheets on time, it could be due to the fact that you're worried about putting too many hours on the budget. If you remove the worry about putting too many hours on the budget, then you might find yourself doing your timesheets on time. I have problems submitting my timesheets on time. It's mostly because it's a boring, mind-dumbing chore, done using a GUI designed to prove that evil exists in this world. Like all modern timesheet tools, this one resists automation too. It's an annoyance that distracts me from the actual work I'm already behind on thanks to anxiety, and thus compounding the latter. Yes, the task takes maybe 5 minutes. Would, if I could focus. But my focus window for mind-dumbingly boring tasks and routines is around 30 seconds; anything more than that requires ongoing, conscious effort. In reality, those 5 minutes usually turn into one hour, by the end of which I'm all dripping from stress-induced sweating. I mean, I could've done my timesheets for the last two weeks four times over, in the time it took me to write this comment. Yet somehow, this comment is up, and the timesheets are not.
    - tgaj 3y ago
      You should read more about ADHD. I don't want to diagnose you but your problems are very similar.
      - TeMPOraL 3y ago
        I am diagnosed. Meds help a lot, but it takes time to catch up with 33 years of dysfunctional coping strategies, some of which interact in surprising (i.e. bad) ways with the sudden improvement in executive functions.
        flir 3y ago
        If you don't mind me asking, can you give some examples of how your coping strategies are clashing with your improved executive function? One I've noticed for myself: I used to leave things until late at night, because I was more "awake" then and the house was silent. The medication's basically forcing me to be a morning person, and that's a hard one to learn.
        TeMPOraL 3y ago
        Sure. Some examples: 1) As I got used to finally being able to decide to do something, and then actually follow through without first having to win a mini-boss fight in my head, my perception of whole classes of tasks shifted - things I assumed were hard, or instinctively avoided, became things I knew I could do. This is good and how it should be, but what I didn't realize is that this state of things is still quite fragile. At some point I overloaded myself with responsibilities, and as I hit my limit, I started to slip up, which cracked my newfound trust in my own reliability - and things quickly spiraled down from there. Even though things got better, and they are better than they were before I was diagnosed, my self-image got seriously damaged. Even after half a year, I still haven't fully recovered. 2) I am a night person. Always have been. Whatever the reason underlying the reasons for this is, the meds didn't do much about it. What they did, however, is allow me to get away with much less sleep. This was super useful when my second daughter was born, as it made it easy for me to take the "first shift", feeding and changing the baby and letting my wife sleep more. Shift the meds schedule around to have one dose at 23:00, and I could do some work and care for the kid until 02:00, then sleep some 5 hours, and feel well-rested in the morning. Of course, this was not sustainable; there were two major bad consequences: - "Sleep debt" kept accumulating, but since it was masked by my carefully-tuned med schedule, it took me way too long to notice I'm getting slower and less focused at everything. - The whole experience broke my internal rhythm that told me when to go to sleep. And with overall improved executive functioning, it only became easier to stay up late. 3) It also took me a while to realize that the meds are "sticky". That is, they make it easy to stay on course - wherever that course lead. While they also make it easier to switch tasks, the improved focus makes it harder to notice that I should switch. As a result, whatever I'm doing when the meds kick in, is what I'll most likely continue to be doing for the next couple hours. Whether that's work, or writing HN comments. 3a) This "stickiness" also makes it easier to waste time going too deep into low-value tangential tasks. Like e.g. that time when I was working on a bug that turned out to be a regex issue - specifically, someone assembled a regex by concatenating some string constants, and didn't notice a subtle bug. As I fixed it, I decided to make sure such bugs don't happen again. I started writing some utility functions, and... few days later, I ended up committing a small library for making regexes via composition, which structurally prevented the class of bugs like the one I was originally fixing. Suffice it to say, those few days could've been better used on some other tasks. After that experience, I learned to pay attention to early signs of going too far off tangents. That's definitely a med problem - before diagnosis, my procrastination would've stopped me from pursuing such tangents too far. (Or, in other words: meds make it easy to do the tasks that, before, I had to fight myself to do - but that fighting also served as a filter, forcing me to repeatedly consider whether the thing is worth doing at all.) All in all, I'm still adjusting. Many of the changes - both positive and negative - take a long time to become apparent.
Zaofy 3y ago
I'm reading this while having my mailbox open on my second screen containing various high priority issues that I should _really_ take care of. Ironically the more I have to do, the less I finish. Luckiyl my adhd meds should kick in in about an hour making it much easier to focus on taking care of things.
- skhm 3y ago
  i'm in more or less exactly the same boat, only i got diagnosed officially with adhd yesterday and wont receive any medication for a few weeks. hoping it's not a misdiagnosis and life becomes a little easier.
  - adindeed 3y ago
    > hoping life becomes a little easier If I was going to be taking meds I would be hoping life becomes a LOT easier, considering the risks to disrupting the body's natural equilibrium. You should be very cautious of any drugs, especially mind-altering that must be taken frequently.
    - thomastjeffery 3y ago
      A change that gets you "a little better" can very significantly impact the rest of your life, when you started at a low baseline.
    - edrxty 3y ago
      To those who come across this, ignore the ableist bullshit. ADHD medications are generally very effective. The biggest side effect is the asinine stigma they bring from people with zero understanding of ADHD or basic biochemistry.
      - smokeydoe 3y ago
        This is very defensive. Of course they are effective, but there are very few studies on the long term effects. Common sense says that dosing your body with neurotoxic amphetamines over a long period is not good for your central nervous system. Take it everyday if you want, but don't pretend to know about the safety of long term use. The drugs own warnings are pretty bad: https://dailymed.nlm.nih.gov/dailymed/drugInfo.cfm?setid=f22635fe-821d-4cde-aa12-419f8b53db81 https://dailymed.nlm.nih.gov/dailymed/drugInfo.cfm?setid=f22...
erlich 3y ago
> Most of the time it's anxiety. My first thought was: you're crazy. But then I thought deeper and as an adult I realized that there is a cost/benefit to everything that somewhat didn't exist as a child. Most of us cannot escape triggers of anxiety anymore. If you have everything you need, and complete freedom, you still can't escape the arrow of time for example. I still think zero pressure doesn't work in the way you think it does. It's exactly something someone says when they are pre-occupied most of the time. It's wishful thinking.
- coldtea 3y ago
  >I still think zero pressure doesn't work in the way you think it does. It's exactly something someone says when they are pre-occupied most of the time. It's wishful thinking. You'd be surprised how much pressure can go down when you have fuck you money and you don't give a fuck about running some business, the "protestant work ethic", or getting more, just spend it and enjoy life. Met a few such types, and they feel zero pressure. You still have inevitable stuff to worry about like relationships and health of course.
  - erlich 3y ago
    > they feel zero pressure But then it's a question of whether they have the motivation to complete the projects they want to. It's really easy not to ship things, and never know where they might have led.
    - coldtea 3y ago
      >But then it's a question of whether they have the motivation to complete the projects they want to. Often they do not give a fuck about projects either. Just living their best life.
- hinkley 3y ago
  The unfortunate thing with procrastination is that the anxiety is bimodal. You avoid doing things because there’s anxiety about fucking it up. Then as the deadline approaches, not finishing at all is a kind of “fucking it up” that is not at all abstract or hypothetical. So now the anxiety of the deadline is focusing you on the task. It’s exhausting for one, and for another when you get a good review on your work you feel like a fraud, because everyone else took weeks to do this and you slammed it out in 6-10 hours.
themodelplumber 3y ago
Some anxiety helps people do things, too. This is where you get people who need deadlines, scheduled milestones, check-ins, or other rituals or anticipated events just so they can get it done. (No shame) IMO the word "anxiety" is now of limited utility as far as human species development goes. Same with "procrastination." People are often caught short by not having appropriately-honed replacements for those words that can help them move to higher heights, while building on what we've all learned about those concepts in the past.
- wruza 3y ago
  In therapy, anxiety is an emotion in the “fear” group, which is one of a few fundamental emotional directions. Once you learn to watch and name your emotions, it becomes pretty clear if you’re anxious or not. So the term itself is correct and universal. But the cause of anxiety is in a big part person-specific and harder to expose. The other part is incorrect brain chemistry, chronic or acute. That said, we have names for some common fears, e.g. caller anxiety. But again, is it universal?
- Cthulhu_ 3y ago
  I'm not sure if you'd call it anxiety then or just... restlessness, control urges, lack of self-discipline, etc; is it healthy to need others on your back to get things done? I mean I get it, I work better in an office setting vs on my own and I've got a lot of issue to unpack, but I can also rationalize it and see that it's not a healthy condition to be in.
- noduerme 3y ago
  I'm pretty sure my respect for people who sit down at a blank page, or pick up the phone and make a difficult call (or even a call to the guy who was supposed to trim the trees last week) stems from my deep reluctance to do the same. Whether you could blame my reluctance on anxiety, apathy, superiority or sheer laziness really depends on the day... but I really do respect those people who slog through their list of to-do items as if it were a job. And they are better at life than I am. Put me in front or a concrete problem, and I'm a fucking monster at solving it. Give me someone's phone number to call and I'd rather spend the rest of the week in a bathtub.
331c8c71 3y ago
So true... I enjoy coding on weekends for work-related projects just because I feel no self-pressure of being productive. I don't do it often but the feeling is there.
edrxty 3y ago
I wish it was easier to focus on psilocybin because in low doses it absolutely obliterates anxiety. Stress becomes a very distant concept that your brain can just brush aside trivially. You can just kinda relax and exist in the present without being distracted by the future.
- kuhzaam 3y ago
  Are you referring to like microdoses (in regards to the difficulty focusing)? Or larger than that?
User_1 3y ago
Seriously, going from someone with serious anxiety to the point of agoraphobia, to someone with relatively normal degrees of anxiety is like turning the difficulty knob on life from "hardcore" to "easy". From "doing nothing every day" to "something is off if I didn't accomplish anything today".
- ulnarkressty 3y ago
  How did you achieve that?
bakuninsbart 3y ago
Agreed, which is why for me the most effective way of starting it is doing something even harder first, but with less anxiety like taking an ice cold shower or doing a math proof. Afterwards I usually feel less anxious and the wall towards starting the task being small enough to jump over.
theonething 3y ago
Often I find myself most productive (about work) during non-work hours. I wonder if has something to do with what you are saying.
hinkley 3y ago
I started taking an off-label prescription (meant for depression, works for attention issues) a while back, and at first the dose was too high. I’d think, “the trash should go out”, which for a procrastinator usually starts a whole internal dialog full of bargaining about how the pickup isn’t for two days so I’ll just take it out the next time I put something in the can and it’ll be fine. And then go back to whatever I was doing or not doing. The first time this happened on the too high dose, the next thing I knew I was standing at the garbage can closing the lid, and wondering how the fuck did that happen? Now I was having side effects too but the feeling of mild disassociation was deeply disturbing, and got stronger when the pills wore off and I could reflect back on the day. So we cut the dose by about 40%. I suspect half of why it works is that anything that treats depression probably also reduces anxiety and self defeating behaviors, in addition to stringing longer lists of tasks together, which is why it works off label for some classes of notorious procrastinators. I was talking to my therapist about this a couple weeks ago (I’m trying something different now and it’s not working), and I asserted that a procrastinator - or at least an adult one - will never willingly take a mind altering substance that 100% eliminates the thought of procrastination because while it’s absolutely not the best part of who we are, it is part of who we are. Ideally for me, and I think for many others, you would hit the point were your brain still says, “we could do this tomorrow!” sometimes, but you choose to ignore that voice and do it anyway.
- vorpalhex 3y ago
  I've never met anyone like this, but imagine if you will someone who can't procrastinate. Not someone who doesn't want to, but someone actually unable to leave something until tomorrow. I think that would raise questions about their wellbeing and health. That seems like they have lost a healthy part of normal function.
  - hinkley 3y ago
    The procrastinator in me wants to agree unreservedly with you. But I know that guy better than anything and I can’t trust him. I suppose that “never procrastinating” could end up looking like a weirder form of stream of consciousness, distracted behavior? Where you mean to go out for drinks but you get stuck yak shaving and then it’s midnight. I’d worry about that guy too. He is wound up way too tight and I think he ends up with a .308 on a clock tower some day.

iLoveOncall 3y ago

Maybe for you. I have 0 anxiety, it's just lazyness or instant boredom.

abnercoimbre 3y ago

> Getting rid of it is hard work though Getting rid of what, exactly? The pressure? (Currently procrastinating by the way, on very important things that I keep delaying for some unexplained reason.) Modern life indeed.

NoPicklez 3y ago
Well that's entirely dependent on the task. For instance, if you have problems submitting your timesheets on time, it could be due to the fact that you're worried about putting too many hours on the budget. If you remove the worry about putting too many hours on the budget, then you might find yourself doing your timesheets on time. The answer to your question lies in the "unexplained reason" which can actually be explained, that's the hard part.
- TeMPOraL 3y ago
  > The answer to your question lies in the "unexplained reason" which can actually be explained, that's the hard part. Having struggled with this for almost 20 years now, with little to show for it, I'd say "'unexplained reason' can actually be explained" seems to belong to the same category as "P != NP can actually be proven". Good luck and Godspeed. Maybe I'm more of a clinical case, but for me, whatever I think the source of anxiety is in any given scenario, it's never that. I can eliminate potential sources one by one, dig in recursively, but it only provides very short-lived feelings of relief, lasting seconds to minutes, before anxiety restarts. To make matters worse, the more I spend time on such investigations, the more anxious I get about not working on the actual thing I wanted/was supposed to. The most accurate model/explanation I have for this is: anxiety always comes, unconditionally; any "reason" behind it is just desperate post-hoc rationalization. The only reliable defense I know of is to be doing something so interesting or stimulating that it captures all of the brain's compute and starves the "anxiety process" entirely. Of course, that process will restart as soon as resources for it become available. > For instance, if you have problems submitting your timesheets on time, it could be due to the fact that you're worried about putting too many hours on the budget. If you remove the worry about putting too many hours on the budget, then you might find yourself doing your timesheets on time. I have problems submitting my timesheets on time. It's mostly because it's a boring, mind-dumbing chore, done using a GUI designed to prove that evil exists in this world. Like all modern timesheet tools, this one resists automation too. It's an annoyance that distracts me from the actual work I'm already behind on thanks to anxiety, and thus compounding the latter. Yes, the task takes maybe 5 minutes. Would, if I could focus. But my focus window for mind-dumbingly boring tasks and routines is around 30 seconds; anything more than that requires ongoing, conscious effort. In reality, those 5 minutes usually turn into one hour, by the end of which I'm all dripping from stress-induced sweating. I mean, I could've done my timesheets for the last two weeks four times over, in the time it took me to write this comment. Yet somehow, this comment is up, and the timesheets are not.
  - tgaj 3y ago
    You should read more about ADHD. I don't want to diagnose you but your problems are very similar.
    - TeMPOraL 3y ago
      I am diagnosed. Meds help a lot, but it takes time to catch up with 33 years of dysfunctional coping strategies, some of which interact in surprising (i.e. bad) ways with the sudden improvement in executive functions.
      - flir 3y ago
        If you don't mind me asking, can you give some examples of how your coping strategies are clashing with your improved executive function? One I've noticed for myself: I used to leave things until late at night, because I was more "awake" then and the house was silent. The medication's basically forcing me to be a morning person, and that's a hard one to learn.
        TeMPOraL 3y ago
        Sure. Some examples: 1) As I got used to finally being able to decide to do something, and then actually follow through without first having to win a mini-boss fight in my head, my perception of whole classes of tasks shifted - things I assumed were hard, or instinctively avoided, became things I knew I could do. This is good and how it should be, but what I didn't realize is that this state of things is still quite fragile. At some point I overloaded myself with responsibilities, and as I hit my limit, I started to slip up, which cracked my newfound trust in my own reliability - and things quickly spiraled down from there. Even though things got better, and they are better than they were before I was diagnosed, my self-image got seriously damaged. Even after half a year, I still haven't fully recovered. 2) I am a night person. Always have been. Whatever the reason underlying the reasons for this is, the meds didn't do much about it. What they did, however, is allow me to get away with much less sleep. This was super useful when my second daughter was born, as it made it easy for me to take the "first shift", feeding and changing the baby and letting my wife sleep more. Shift the meds schedule around to have one dose at 23:00, and I could do some work and care for the kid until 02:00, then sleep some 5 hours, and feel well-rested in the morning. Of course, this was not sustainable; there were two major bad consequences: - "Sleep debt" kept accumulating, but since it was masked by my carefully-tuned med schedule, it took me way too long to notice I'm getting slower and less focused at everything. - The whole experience broke my internal rhythm that told me when to go to sleep. And with overall improved executive functioning, it only became easier to stay up late. 3) It also took me a while to realize that the meds are "sticky". That is, they make it easy to stay on course - wherever that course lead. While they also make it easier to switch tasks, the improved focus makes it harder to notice that I should switch. As a result, whatever I'm doing when the meds kick in, is what I'll most likely continue to be doing for the next couple hours. Whether that's work, or writing HN comments. 3a) This "stickiness" also makes it easier to waste time going too deep into low-value tangential tasks. Like e.g. that time when I was working on a bug that turned out to be a regex issue - specifically, someone assembled a regex by concatenating some string constants, and didn't notice a subtle bug. As I fixed it, I decided to make sure such bugs don't happen again. I started writing some utility functions, and... few days later, I ended up committing a small library for making regexes via composition, which structurally prevented the class of bugs like the one I was originally fixing. Suffice it to say, those few days could've been better used on some other tasks. After that experience, I learned to pay attention to early signs of going too far off tangents. That's definitely a med problem - before diagnosis, my procrastination would've stopped me from pursuing such tangents too far. (Or, in other words: meds make it easy to do the tasks that, before, I had to fight myself to do - but that fighting also served as a filter, forcing me to repeatedly consider whether the thing is worth doing at all.) All in all, I'm still adjusting. Many of the changes - both positive and negative - take a long time to become apparent.

Zaofy 3y ago

I'm reading this while having my mailbox open on my second screen containing various high priority issues that I should _really_ take care of. Ironically the more I have to do, the less I finish. Luckiyl my adhd meds should kick in in about an hour making it much easier to focus on taking care of things.

skhm 3y ago
i'm in more or less exactly the same boat, only i got diagnosed officially with adhd yesterday and wont receive any medication for a few weeks. hoping it's not a misdiagnosis and life becomes a little easier.
- adindeed 3y ago
  > hoping life becomes a little easier If I was going to be taking meds I would be hoping life becomes a LOT easier, considering the risks to disrupting the body's natural equilibrium. You should be very cautious of any drugs, especially mind-altering that must be taken frequently.
  - thomastjeffery 3y ago
    A change that gets you "a little better" can very significantly impact the rest of your life, when you started at a low baseline.
  - edrxty 3y ago
    To those who come across this, ignore the ableist bullshit. ADHD medications are generally very effective. The biggest side effect is the asinine stigma they bring from people with zero understanding of ADHD or basic biochemistry.
    - smokeydoe 3y ago
      This is very defensive. Of course they are effective, but there are very few studies on the long term effects. Common sense says that dosing your body with neurotoxic amphetamines over a long period is not good for your central nervous system. Take it everyday if you want, but don't pretend to know about the safety of long term use. The drugs own warnings are pretty bad: https://dailymed.nlm.nih.gov/dailymed/drugInfo.cfm?setid=f22635fe-821d-4cde-aa12-419f8b53db81 https://dailymed.nlm.nih.gov/dailymed/drugInfo.cfm?setid=f22...

erlich 3y ago

> Most of the time it's anxiety. My first thought was: you're crazy. But then I thought deeper and as an adult I realized that there is a cost/benefit to everything that somewhat didn't exist as a child. Most of us cannot escape triggers of anxiety anymore. If you have everything you need, and complete freedom, you still can't escape the arrow of time for example. I still think zero pressure doesn't work in the way you think it does. It's exactly something someone says when they are pre-occupied most of the time. It's wishful thinking.

coldtea 3y ago
>I still think zero pressure doesn't work in the way you think it does. It's exactly something someone says when they are pre-occupied most of the time. It's wishful thinking. You'd be surprised how much pressure can go down when you have fuck you money and you don't give a fuck about running some business, the "protestant work ethic", or getting more, just spend it and enjoy life. Met a few such types, and they feel zero pressure. You still have inevitable stuff to worry about like relationships and health of course.
- erlich 3y ago
  > they feel zero pressure But then it's a question of whether they have the motivation to complete the projects they want to. It's really easy not to ship things, and never know where they might have led.
  - coldtea 3y ago
    >But then it's a question of whether they have the motivation to complete the projects they want to. Often they do not give a fuck about projects either. Just living their best life.
hinkley 3y ago
The unfortunate thing with procrastination is that the anxiety is bimodal. You avoid doing things because there’s anxiety about fucking it up. Then as the deadline approaches, not finishing at all is a kind of “fucking it up” that is not at all abstract or hypothetical. So now the anxiety of the deadline is focusing you on the task. It’s exhausting for one, and for another when you get a good review on your work you feel like a fraud, because everyone else took weeks to do this and you slammed it out in 6-10 hours.

themodelplumber 3y ago

Some anxiety helps people do things, too. This is where you get people who need deadlines, scheduled milestones, check-ins, or other rituals or anticipated events just so they can get it done. (No shame) IMO the word "anxiety" is now of limited utility as far as human species development goes. Same with "procrastination." People are often caught short by not having appropriately-honed replacements for those words that can help them move to higher heights, while building on what we've all learned about those concepts in the past.

wruza 3y ago
In therapy, anxiety is an emotion in the “fear” group, which is one of a few fundamental emotional directions. Once you learn to watch and name your emotions, it becomes pretty clear if you’re anxious or not. So the term itself is correct and universal. But the cause of anxiety is in a big part person-specific and harder to expose. The other part is incorrect brain chemistry, chronic or acute. That said, we have names for some common fears, e.g. caller anxiety. But again, is it universal?
Cthulhu_ 3y ago
I'm not sure if you'd call it anxiety then or just... restlessness, control urges, lack of self-discipline, etc; is it healthy to need others on your back to get things done? I mean I get it, I work better in an office setting vs on my own and I've got a lot of issue to unpack, but I can also rationalize it and see that it's not a healthy condition to be in.
noduerme 3y ago
I'm pretty sure my respect for people who sit down at a blank page, or pick up the phone and make a difficult call (or even a call to the guy who was supposed to trim the trees last week) stems from my deep reluctance to do the same. Whether you could blame my reluctance on anxiety, apathy, superiority or sheer laziness really depends on the day... but I really do respect those people who slog through their list of to-do items as if it were a job. And they are better at life than I am. Put me in front or a concrete problem, and I'm a fucking monster at solving it. Give me someone's phone number to call and I'd rather spend the rest of the week in a bathtub.

331c8c71 3y ago

So true... I enjoy coding on weekends for work-related projects just because I feel no self-pressure of being productive. I don't do it often but the feeling is there.

edrxty 3y ago

I wish it was easier to focus on psilocybin because in low doses it absolutely obliterates anxiety. Stress becomes a very distant concept that your brain can just brush aside trivially. You can just kinda relax and exist in the present without being distracted by the future.

kuhzaam 3y ago
Are you referring to like microdoses (in regards to the difficulty focusing)? Or larger than that?

User_1 3y ago

Seriously, going from someone with serious anxiety to the point of agoraphobia, to someone with relatively normal degrees of anxiety is like turning the difficulty knob on life from "hardcore" to "easy". From "doing nothing every day" to "something is off if I didn't accomplish anything today".

ulnarkressty 3y ago
How did you achieve that?

bakuninsbart 3y ago

Agreed, which is why for me the most effective way of starting it is doing something even harder first, but with less anxiety like taking an ice cold shower or doing a math proof. Afterwards I usually feel less anxious and the wall towards starting the task being small enough to jump over.

theonething 3y ago

Often I find myself most productive (about work) during non-work hours. I wonder if has something to do with what you are saying.

hinkley 3y ago

I started taking an off-label prescription (meant for depression, works for attention issues) a while back, and at first the dose was too high. I’d think, “the trash should go out”, which for a procrastinator usually starts a whole internal dialog full of bargaining about how the pickup isn’t for two days so I’ll just take it out the next time I put something in the can and it’ll be fine. And then go back to whatever I was doing or not doing. The first time this happened on the too high dose, the next thing I knew I was standing at the garbage can closing the lid, and wondering how the fuck did that happen? Now I was having side effects too but the feeling of mild disassociation was deeply disturbing, and got stronger when the pills wore off and I could reflect back on the day. So we cut the dose by about 40%. I suspect half of why it works is that anything that treats depression probably also reduces anxiety and self defeating behaviors, in addition to stringing longer lists of tasks together, which is why it works off label for some classes of notorious procrastinators. I was talking to my therapist about this a couple weeks ago (I’m trying something different now and it’s not working), and I asserted that a procrastinator - or at least an adult one - will never willingly take a mind altering substance that 100% eliminates the thought of procrastination because while it’s absolutely not the best part of who we are, it is part of who we are. Ideally for me, and I think for many others, you would hit the point were your brain still says, “we could do this tomorrow!” sometimes, but you choose to ignore that voice and do it anyway.

vorpalhex 3y ago
I've never met anyone like this, but imagine if you will someone who can't procrastinate. Not someone who doesn't want to, but someone actually unable to leave something until tomorrow. I think that would raise questions about their wellbeing and health. That seems like they have lost a healthy part of normal function.
- hinkley 3y ago
  The procrastinator in me wants to agree unreservedly with you. But I know that guy better than anything and I can’t trust him. I suppose that “never procrastinating” could end up looking like a weirder form of stream of consciousness, distracted behavior? Where you mean to go out for drinks but you get stuck yak shaving and then it’s midnight. I’d worry about that guy too. He is wound up way too tight and I think he ends up with a .308 on a clock tower some day.