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:
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Requests for advice and / or encouragement. On basically any topic and for any scale of problem.
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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.
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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.
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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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I’m very similar to you. The only ‘true’ solution for my natural laziness I’ve found is adderall (or, rather, lisdexamfetamine), and I refuse to take it for a variety of reasons/concerns. I have nevertheless achieved some modest career success, largely by convincing myself of the horrible social humiliation by my peers/boss/clients/etc that would follow me not doing work.
I currently drink a lot of caffeine and sometimes play ambient music in the background, but I will have to try the hyperstimulation approach. For motivation, can you give an example of one of the goals that have worked for you?
Getting back to work. Blogging is another great avenue, but there is the following problem...
It's a revolving door of motivation. A single spark lasts 1-2 days, but by day 3 that drive is basically gone and no longer provides energy for action, so you must either augment it or abandon it completely for another goal. In practice, this has meant daydreaming of killer blogposts, starting the research to fill them out, and then giving up by day 3 because the spark is no longer actionable. At which point you drop the project; rinse, repeat.
There is no way to prolong the initial spark, really; you have to augment the desire. This takes daydreaming. If you want to ex. read the Bible you may need to cycle through dozens of distinct motivations, but that doesn't matter so long as it gets done. I'm a beginner to this process so the explanation is pretty bad. Hopefully later this year I'll be able to explain better.
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Can you talk about this a bit more? It's kind of one of the things that stops me trying to get diagnosed.
Edit: I'm worried about drugs burning in neural pathways/endocrine disruption to the point that you can no longer function without drugs. Things would maybe be better off if you just found lifestyle/cognitive behavioral methods of addressing things?
I think it damages the imagination and creativity, certainly it did for me when I was on it, I think it turns people into worker drones. I like the part of me that daydreams, that imagines, even if I wish I could suppress it on occasion. To me ADHD drugs are like the opposite of weed; weed kills motivation but makes me feel relaxed and (ime) creative, ADHD meds make me highly focused (not necessarily productive, to be clear, you could easily channel your adderall usage into playing 14 hours of competitive video games a day or writing 15,000 words of Motte comments) but anxious and earnest.
In addition, there are concerns about long term heart health, increasing tolerance necessitating ever higher doses, and getting to a point where you’d be completely crippled if you no longer had access to the drugs for any reason. I have known several long term (since childhood) users who have at great personal cost/pain weaned themselves off the drugs and I don’t want the same to happen to me. Some people in my life also said I was angrier and less patient on the drugs, and that’s obviously important to me too.
I will say that I’m not necessarily recommending against trying the drugs. They really do work, to an almost unbelievable extent if you’ve never tried serious prolonged-effect stimulants before. But it comes at a price.
Thanks for this.
It's something I've found too. If you stim up (with caffeine say)... there is just thoughts/focus and no daydreaming (and less night dreaming for that matter). You've said it well.
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