Your complaint is that you do not take obvious steps to move your life forward. There are many possible reasons for that: ADHD, chronic depression, chronic lack of motivation caused by playing video games too much or pursuing another safe easy superstimulus (e.g., LW and other opportunities to learn all the time) too much, being physically tired all the time and not even realizing you are tired all the time, frontal-lobe brain deficits.
What you’ve written here and in 1 or 2 of your previous questions on this site (not even counting the comment I am replying to) increases my likelihood by about a factor of 4 that a main cause is that you have an avoidant attachment style (which is a persistent effect of childhood experiences). An example of something that went into that update is your “As I’m writing this, I realise I’m talking about the phenomenon of avoidance in general much more than about to-do list and similar tools specifically”.
How a condition or “personality style” which is mainly about how you relate to other people can interfere with your ability to do even solitary work is explained here specifically in the 9 or so paragraphs starting at the heading “Inner World” and ending in “The coping strategies that sabotage the information flow from other people also sabotage the information flow inside a single mind.”
Very interesting comment, thanks! What you say about attachment styles is really quite possible, but what you say above that definitely rings a bell. I can’t tell if the causation goes “ADHD/depression/whatever =>> watching YT videos and binge-reading LW and doomscrolling X” or more simply “superstimuli =>> can’t get anythings else done”, but superstimuli are definitely a part of the equation.
Which is an issue: given that I have to spend a significant fraction of my day browsing online reports and things, and given that I seem to have relatively little self-control with that sort of things… how do I stop pursuing safe easy superstimuli all the time, if I can’t just go live in a cave and completely cut my access to it?
I know I’m far from the only one to have this problem, and that many have been trying to solve it, but I’ve never met a solution that worked really well.
Most of the harm in superstimuli comes from the lack of a need for personal effort to obtain the gratification (and the lack of a need to run any risk). Life for a person is supposed to be rewarding and gratifying (or at least to hold out a realistic chance of becoming rewarding and gratifying), but obtaining those rewards is supposed to take effort (and patience, discomfort and some risk or danger).
I personally have found that if I impose on myself the rule that I am not allowed any superstimuli till I’ve done at least a few hours of work that day, what superstimuli I do use seems to prove less harmful to me even though my brain knows that the only reason the reward consistently follows the effort is because of a bullshit rule I’ve imposed on myself as opposed to being an unavoidable property of the environment.
Also, if you can manage (e.g., during a vacation) to avoid superstimuli for a month, your motivation should return to almost-normal or almost-healthy levels if the superstimuli were the cause of the motivational problem because 30 days is about how long it takes for the “dopaminergic” circuits in the brain to return to their normal levels of sensitivity. I.e., a “dopamine fast” can be a good diagnostic tool if you can sustain the fast for a month or at least most of a month.
ADDED. For a while I was keeping my cable modem unplugged till 11 AM every day (and I don’t have any games or porn on my computer). That is not possible in some jobs I realize.
If we define when you usually wake up as 06:00 (regardless of what time everyone else thinks it is) getting light in your eyes between 23:00 and 05:00 tends to sap motivation (the next day and the days after that) via a mechanism well-explored by neuroscientists involving signals sent from the eye to the habenula and then on to the “motivational circuits”—especially blue light and especially especially UV light, which incandescents and fluorescents emit a little of, but LED lights emit none of (so if you might shine a light in the middle of the night, make sure it is an LED light, preferably a yellowish or orange-ish one).
The same exposure to light also makes it harder to get to sleep at normal or healthy hour the next night, which tempts you to keep a light on because lying awake in the dark when you should be sleeping but cannot is boring, which of course perpetuates the cycle.
Avoiding superstimuli and avoiding light in the middle of the night are the first interventions most people should try for increasing “dopamine and consequently motivation and drive”, but there are many other levers you could pull, and Andrew Huberman seems to be an expert on the subject.
Your complaint is that you do not take obvious steps to move your life forward. There are many possible reasons for that: ADHD, chronic depression, chronic lack of motivation caused by playing video games too much or pursuing another safe easy superstimulus (e.g., LW and other opportunities to learn all the time) too much, being physically tired all the time and not even realizing you are tired all the time, frontal-lobe brain deficits.
What you’ve written here and in 1 or 2 of your previous questions on this site (not even counting the comment I am replying to) increases my likelihood by about a factor of 4 that a main cause is that you have an avoidant attachment style (which is a persistent effect of childhood experiences). An example of something that went into that update is your “As I’m writing this, I realise I’m talking about the phenomenon of avoidance in general much more than about to-do list and similar tools specifically”.
How a condition or “personality style” which is mainly about how you relate to other people can interfere with your ability to do even solitary work is explained here specifically in the 9 or so paragraphs starting at the heading “Inner World” and ending in “The coping strategies that sabotage the information flow from other people also sabotage the information flow inside a single mind.”
I have an avoidant attachment style, and have been helped by Heidi Priebe’s Youtube channel.
Very interesting comment, thanks! What you say about attachment styles is really quite possible, but what you say above that definitely rings a bell. I can’t tell if the causation goes “ADHD/depression/whatever =>> watching YT videos and binge-reading LW and doomscrolling X” or more simply “superstimuli =>> can’t get anythings else done”, but superstimuli are definitely a part of the equation.
Which is an issue: given that I have to spend a significant fraction of my day browsing online reports and things, and given that I seem to have relatively little self-control with that sort of things… how do I stop pursuing safe easy superstimuli all the time, if I can’t just go live in a cave and completely cut my access to it?
I know I’m far from the only one to have this problem, and that many have been trying to solve it, but I’ve never met a solution that worked really well.
Most of the harm in superstimuli comes from the lack of a need for personal effort to obtain the gratification (and the lack of a need to run any risk). Life for a person is supposed to be rewarding and gratifying (or at least to hold out a realistic chance of becoming rewarding and gratifying), but obtaining those rewards is supposed to take effort (and patience, discomfort and some risk or danger).
I personally have found that if I impose on myself the rule that I am not allowed any superstimuli till I’ve done at least a few hours of work that day, what superstimuli I do use seems to prove less harmful to me even though my brain knows that the only reason the reward consistently follows the effort is because of a bullshit rule I’ve imposed on myself as opposed to being an unavoidable property of the environment.
Also, if you can manage (e.g., during a vacation) to avoid superstimuli for a month, your motivation should return to almost-normal or almost-healthy levels if the superstimuli were the cause of the motivational problem because 30 days is about how long it takes for the “dopaminergic” circuits in the brain to return to their normal levels of sensitivity. I.e., a “dopamine fast” can be a good diagnostic tool if you can sustain the fast for a month or at least most of a month.
ADDED. For a while I was keeping my cable modem unplugged till 11 AM every day (and I don’t have any games or porn on my computer). That is not possible in some jobs I realize.
This seems like a particularly actionable version of common-sense advice! Thanks a lot, will try
If we define when you usually wake up as 06:00 (regardless of what time everyone else thinks it is) getting light in your eyes between 23:00 and 05:00 tends to sap motivation (the next day and the days after that) via a mechanism well-explored by neuroscientists involving signals sent from the eye to the habenula and then on to the “motivational circuits”—especially blue light and especially especially UV light, which incandescents and fluorescents emit a little of, but LED lights emit none of (so if you might shine a light in the middle of the night, make sure it is an LED light, preferably a yellowish or orange-ish one).
The same exposure to light also makes it harder to get to sleep at normal or healthy hour the next night, which tempts you to keep a light on because lying awake in the dark when you should be sleeping but cannot is boring, which of course perpetuates the cycle.
Avoiding superstimuli and avoiding light in the middle of the night are the first interventions most people should try for increasing “dopamine and consequently motivation and drive”, but there are many other levers you could pull, and Andrew Huberman seems to be an expert on the subject.