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).
Jump in the discussion.
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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?
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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