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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How do you stop yourself from just doing stuff constantly?
I'm pretty much always doing something, every minute of the day. This has helped give me a structured and productive life but it also feels unhealthy / manic and at times I'm basically self-inflicting exhaustion.
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. Once I've come up with something new it soon becomes a pretty rigid part of my life. For instance, I used to workout once a day but if I had some extra time I would do a second workout just to be as productive as possible. After enough of this nowadays the second workout feels non-negotiable even though objectively it's pretty unecessary and often I don't have the time. Or if I have a spare moment I'll start cooking meals for the future. Or I used to read fiction when I was younger but now it feels irresponsible to read anything but non-fiction where I can learn something. 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. If someone asks me to participate in something at work or in a social outing I will essentially always say yes regardless of whether I have bandwidth or interest and this results in me having basically no time to myself. I used to try meditation to balance it out but then I turned that into another non-negotiable chore.
The plus side of this is that I'm a productive person, I do well at work, have an active social life, and I guess also have a lot of output on an obscure forum. The downsides are...not devastating or anything, but I generally feel tired and stressed and stretched thin. It seems like an unnatural way to live, but I find the idea of not feeling productive to be almost more exhausting.
I imagine you don't actually want to do nothing but want to do something relaxing, low stress, and not explicitly productive. If that's the case, here are things that work for me:
Some of these require you to be alone with your own thoughts which is uncomfortable the first few times, but you quick get used to it.
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Why fix this at all?
A majority of today's malaise is because people don't do enough things, not too much of them. And I don't necessarily even mean the number or volume of things done, but the psychological aspect of it.
If you sit on your ass and watch youtube for 2 hours, you did something, you did a lot of something. But it feels like you did nothing.
If you are achieving the feeling of doing a lot of things, then congrats.
However, that main failure mode might be that you might be just doing inefficiently, in that case do something about that.
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I was going to suggest getting married or having kids. I'm forced to sit on the couch and watch idiotic television for, often, 2 hours a night.
Idle time doing nothing is overrated. The instagram memes that urge you to "practice self-care" by sitting on your ass all day are public squeals of inferiority and copium.
The maximum amount of unproductive pleasure you should force yourself to partake in is taking time to read before bed or on the couch with your coffee. I, too, toned down my fiction in recent years, and regret having to chew through a ton of dry junk to avoid pleasure. You're allowed to dabble in fun books too. Remember, very little of that non-fiction is going to be useful. My 8-hour slog through the history of Insurance got me a fraction of a brownie point with an executive this one time. Not worth it.
This may be the last bit of adjustment that may be worth making. Get comfortable being silent and thinking, even if someone's not in the bathroom. It can even be planning for the meal you'll cook in the future, but every human should be able to disconnect for the time it takes someone else to pee. No silver bullet besides practice.
Ironically I've thought about doing this for sort of the opposite reason - I figure if I'm going to keep myself busy anyway I might as well be doing something genuinely productive like raising kids haha.
This is something I actually want to start doing, at least before I go to bed, in party because I assume it might also be a healthier way to prepare for sleep than screentime.
Wise words.
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"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? ;)
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:
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
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.
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.
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