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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I am currently struggling with holding myself accountable for being reliable and reliably productive. I am having trouble achieving goals that I set for myself and am passionate about (e.g. finish a draft of X project by Y date). The part that makes this challenging for me is as best as I can tell my lack of productivity is downstream of two rare sleep disorders I have. (I was much more productive before these disorders worsened.)
I have a “sleep quality disorder”, which greatly reduces the restorative quality of my sleep, and I have a “sleep schedule disorder”[1], which makes it hard to predict my sleep/wake times on a daily basis.
I am currently pursuing medical treatments for both disorders, and I have had a lot of success treating the sleep quality disorder. Now, there’s roughly an 70% chance each “sleep session” that I will have a normal, restful amount of sleep. This seems to be the point of diminishing returns for treating the sleep quality disorder; more improvement will come only with much more effort.[2]
So now I’m in a state where I follow roughly this algorithm:
This works okay, but I have the following problems:
Currently my plan of attack is basically:
If anyone has any advice or thoughts or brainstorming on how to better manage this, I’d be all ears. I think the lowest hanging fruit right now is working on concrete better ways to improve my habits/routines and make the most of the time I’m productive. So for the short term, I’m trying to find ways to make the most of what I have.
[1] The sleep schedule disorder has been medically diagnosed as non-24 circadian rhythm similar to what Eliezer Yudkowsky has. Mine seems to be more erratic and irregular than his is. The solution that worked for him has not (yet) worked for me, but I'm still tweaking.
[2] I have sought out world-expert level medical advice for the sleep disorders, and we seem to have squeezed all the easy improvement from treatment there.
[3] When the sleep quality disorder was at its worst, I just fell asleep and woke up pretty randomly. Now I'm trying to rebuilt routine around waking up and going to sleep, especially so I can try to find some better objective way of discerning low quality and high quality sleep sessions, so maybe we can debug that further.
(Meta Note: I posted this previously on an earlier Wellness Wednesday thread, but it got eaten by the automatic moderator, so the mods have said it is fine if I repost.)
Probably not the answer you're looking for, but I'm reminded of the great Chicago Bears running back Walter Payton. Payton was notorious for a stubborn, enduring discipline rooted in sky-high self-determination and -esteem, even refusing medical treatment in the face of life-threatening cancer and all the little problems that led up to it (he died at 46); there are definitely continent-sized holes in that methodology. All the same, seeing as you're past the "accepting the legitimacy of modern medicine" phase and into the "mindset and self-discipline" phase, there might be something of use to you in a "fuck it" attitude toward your own capacity for feeling "up for it" or not. Here's how Payton summed up his mantra:
Substitute the football terms for just getting yourself to the office and sitting in your chair, even if that's all that happens. I'm also reminded of a (perhaps more apropos) quote from Fiddler on the Roof lyricist Sheldon Harnick:
And if all else fails, there's no shame in stocking 24-packs of Monster in the fridge. Do whatever you have to do to "get yourself there," then start critically analyzing what's necessary to maintain that level of focus and what's superfluous or harmful.
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