[Warning: speculative advice from pure personal experience/self-analysis]
Right now I am trying the following:
If you are overthinker, it probably means that you are already good at stopping. Try to apply ability to stop to the process of not-doing (being that overthinking or scrolling or doing something that mostly serves as distraction)
After that, find the time and place where you can do stuff safely and just do stuff. Your goal is to shift balance between doing and not-doing towards doing, so you should just lower threshold of starting action. You think you can use a stretch? Stop thinking and stretch. Write serious thoughts on twitter. Cook something or do laundry. Et cetera.
It’s important to be in safe place and time because doing everything you think about is quite dangerous if there are expensive purchases available or unprotected sex/drugs/alcohol.
After that you can move towards doing what you want to do. Keep it “safe” in a sense that you don’t need to, say, write perfect post about your totalizing worldview on Lesswrong. Write a draft. Write to a person you can discuss ideas with and ask LLM for summary of discussion. Do easy tasks around whatever you want to do. It helps me to remember how I was a kid and I just read various science textbooks even if I didn’t get the full understanding of the topic just because reading science stuff is cool.
In the end, if you have executive dysfunction, you are probably going to become tired. While working through tiredness is important, at this point you should recognize tiredness and go rest. In my hypothesis, scrolling is a bad way to rest, because it actually eats up a lot of cognitive power, so you probably should do something unitary and simple (light exercise, simple fiction, etc). Ideally, you should feel like you can work a tiny bit more.
Overall process: stop not-doing—start doing—start doing important stuff—rest—repeat.
My impression is that, unfortunately, there is no centralized mechanism for switching. It’s just multiple different systems in your brain competing in activity and you should try to balance them in timely manner.
Try to apply ability to stop to the process of not-doing
amazing. i just need to turn my tendency towards deconstruction inwards. :p
In my hypothesis, scrolling is a bad way to rest, because it actually eats up a lot of cognitive power
agreed. i archived my twitter last year, but alas, i keep checking lesswrong. (edit: i notice i’m now explicitly noticing when im “scrolling during rest time” and stopping)
[Warning: speculative advice from pure personal experience/self-analysis]
Right now I am trying the following:
If you are overthinker, it probably means that you are already good at stopping. Try to apply ability to stop to the process of not-doing (being that overthinking or scrolling or doing something that mostly serves as distraction)
After that, find the time and place where you can do stuff safely and just do stuff. Your goal is to shift balance between doing and not-doing towards doing, so you should just lower threshold of starting action. You think you can use a stretch? Stop thinking and stretch. Write serious thoughts on twitter. Cook something or do laundry. Et cetera.
It’s important to be in safe place and time because doing everything you think about is quite dangerous if there are expensive purchases available or unprotected sex/drugs/alcohol.
After that you can move towards doing what you want to do. Keep it “safe” in a sense that you don’t need to, say, write perfect post about your totalizing worldview on Lesswrong. Write a draft. Write to a person you can discuss ideas with and ask LLM for summary of discussion. Do easy tasks around whatever you want to do. It helps me to remember how I was a kid and I just read various science textbooks even if I didn’t get the full understanding of the topic just because reading science stuff is cool.
In the end, if you have executive dysfunction, you are probably going to become tired. While working through tiredness is important, at this point you should recognize tiredness and go rest. In my hypothesis, scrolling is a bad way to rest, because it actually eats up a lot of cognitive power, so you probably should do something unitary and simple (light exercise, simple fiction, etc). Ideally, you should feel like you can work a tiny bit more.
Overall process: stop not-doing—start doing—start doing important stuff—rest—repeat.
My impression is that, unfortunately, there is no centralized mechanism for switching. It’s just multiple different systems in your brain competing in activity and you should try to balance them in timely manner.
amazing. i just need to turn my tendency towards deconstruction inwards. :p
agreed. i archived my twitter last year, but alas, i keep checking lesswrong. (edit: i notice i’m now explicitly noticing when im “scrolling during rest time” and stopping)