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Wellness Wednesday for November 15, 2023

The Wednesday Wellness threads are meant to encourage users to ask for and provide advice and motivation to improve their lives. It isn't intended as a 'containment thread' and any content which could go here could instead be posted in its own thread. You could post:

  • Requests for advice and / or encouragement. On basically any topic and for any scale of problem.

  • Updates to let us know how you are doing. This provides valuable feedback on past advice / encouragement and will hopefully make people feel a little more motivated to follow through. If you want to be reminded to post your update, see the post titled 'update reminders', below.

  • Advice. This can be in response to a request for advice or just something that you think could be generally useful for many people here.

  • Encouragement. Probably best directed at specific users, but if you feel like just encouraging people in general I don't think anyone is going to object. I don't think I really need to say this, but just to be clear; encouragement should have a generally positive tone and not shame people (if people feel that shame might be an effective tool for motivating people, please discuss this so we can form a group consensus on how to use it rather than just trying it).

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How do you stop yourself from just doing stuff constantly?

"Problems I wish I had" for most of the money in the world haha

In your case, I would advise committing to a specific chunk of time, say an hour or two, which you mentally label as "me time" and steadfastly refuse to do anything remotely describable as productive during it. Maybe get your wife to scold you if you lapse. Specific mental compartmentalization should work better in a highly conscientious individual, but what do I know about that? ;)

It just seems like an unnatural way to live, but I find the idea of not feeling productive to be almost more exhausting.

Being extremely intelligent and talented, running ultra-marathons or winning Nobel Prizes aren't natural either. Consider yourself immensely blessed that your particular eccentricities are highly conducive or even outright optimal for what might loosely be termed as success.

If you had tangible and debilitating results from your diligence and workaholism, such as stress, excessive fatigue or mood swings, I'd advise you to take it more seriously, but in this case my stance is more "this isn't a problem to solve, or worth solving" in the first place.

Edit:

If I don't have work I'll invent new work for myself to do, even if it's just typing up essays for here.

Not that I seem to have much time to read anymore anyway, but if I'm hanging out with someone and they step out to the bathroom I'll pull out my phone and start studying something on Wikipedia or a think tank or whatever. The idea of not filling idle moments with something ostensibly productive is alien to me.

It's funny how these particular behaviors are applicable to me, someone with ADHD, but for entirely opposite reasons. For example, I just spent a few hours studying on Ritalin, and while the drug hasn't worn off completely, here I am procrasturbating by posting on the Motte. Many (most) of my posts, good or bad, are written when writing seems like a refuge from the work I should much more sensibly be doing.

If I'm not busy doing something else or engaged in conversation, you'll be finding me on my phone, binging on Insight Porn, Wikipedia included, but this is because I hate being bored, and for the life of me can't understand people who praise it, be it for its own sake or because it serves as a generator of creative ideas (which I disagree with to a degree).

A great deal of my childhood, before I had omnipresent portable electronics, was spent day dreaming, and I would devour literature of all descriptions voraciously, to the chagrin of my teachers when they caught me reading novels under my desk. Sometimes, when I think life is shit, I remember just how awful it must have been to be so terminally bored, be it in my childhood or as the norm for most of human history.

I'd say I do experience stress and fatigue from it, but definitely not at a debilitating level

It's funny how these particular behaviors are applicable to me, someone with ADHD, but for entirely opposite reasons. For example, I just spent a few hours studying on Ritalin, and while the drug hasn't worn off completely, here I am procrasturbating by posting on the Motte. Many (most) of my posts, good or bad, are written when writing seems like a refuge from the work I should much more sensibly be doing.

Haha I think part of this is because I'm extremely generous with what I consider "productivity," as long as I'm doing something I'll categorize it like that, so that probably includes stuff other people would use to distract themselves. We both just spend more time producing content than consuming it, here at least, which does feel a little different.

In your case, I would advise committing to a specific chunk of time, say an hour or two, which you mentally label as "me time" and steadfastly refuse to do anything remotely describable as productive during it. Maybe get your wife to scold you if you lapse. Specific mental compartmentalization should work better in a highly conscientious individual, but what do I know about that? ;)

I know something like this is most likely the answer, I just have a strange habit of turning "me-time" or relaxation into another comparmentalized scheduled item. It's like on the meta level i just relate to everything I do on a very controlled, regimented level, but hey that's something I can work on too.