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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For years now, I've considered myself borderline unemployable due to a combo of ADHD and zero motivation. Yet miraculously, I've discovered a routine that addresses both problems and appears to "just work" with zero drugs.
For ADHD, hyper-stimulate yourself all the time. Get a fan, put on a spotify playlist, drink some coffee, get a foot bath, fiddle with some object. Do all of this at the same time and work becomes orders of magnitude easier.
For motivation, design a hyper-specific goal and come up with plans to achieve it. This should be something difficult which takes a lot of thought and planning. You need to constantly renew your motivation by thinking of this goal, and should it ever run out, you need a new one ASAP. Staying motivated requires near daily progress so it can be pretty demanding, but if your goal is something intellectual, that's great since you can think about it wherever. Either way, make sure there's a lot of planning/thought involved since that's what spikes the motivation centers in our brain. You'll also lean into harder and more ambitious tasks over time, since simple one-off successes no longer become rewarding.
@FaibleEstimeDeSoi Yeah, I get you man. I started a Youtube channel up a couple years ago, and it received a nice number of views + recurring commenters. I could easily do it again, but even if it exploded and received a hundred thousand views, it wouldn't feel worth it. Because the whole point is the excitement, the novelty, planning it out, doing something that might not work. When you know it's easy and safe it's not fun anymore.
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?
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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