To some people this may be obvious, but for decades I had no idea that my “laziness” was an expression of anxiety.
Obviously it’s not easy to resolve anxiety, but at least understanding what was happening helped me move toward more consistent freedom of engagement with life.
my dude, your comment just opened my eyes to a possibility that I had not considered previously. Seriously wish I did drugs right now so I could smoke a bowl and stew on it for a couple hours.
is my "I dont' wanna" because I'm actually terrified? it makes so much sense.
Makes sense. Being frozen by fear is among the worst human experiences.
A few things you can do to reduce anxiety directly:
Breathe long and slow. Breathing deep and fast is bad, it will make you hyperventilate. But deep, slow breath will reduce anxiety. I’ve used this to control panic attacks. Works best in a dark room. The key thing is to make the exhalation as long as you possibly can. With some practice, I can now exhale continuously and slowly for over a minute. Doing that for ten minutes, and eventually starts feeling like I’m squeezing a sponge slowly and the liquid that squeezes out is pure relief. Just see how long you can keep slowly, slowly exhaling before you need to inhale again.
Anti-anxiety meds. Not a good long-term solution as they tend to be addictive, but very useful short term for recognizing how it’s anxiety underneath the laziness, and to get enough relief to fix any problems threatening your livelihood
Deliberately approach things you fear. Spiders, heights, conflict, etc. Any time you consciously decide to approach a thing you fear, it will overall reduce your anxiety levels. Like across the board. You go force yourself to look at a spider picture, you will have less fear of doing laundry. Not a joke, it works.
There are other techniques but a big list of techniques isn’t useful to start with. That breathing thing is probably the quickest way to find out how much of the procrastinating is from anxiety. Sit there for five or ten minutes making your exhales as long as possible, and you’ll cut down your anxiety levels very quickly.
That depends on the person. I'm autistic and for me it's just a moment to minimise stimuli and recharge a little bit. No fear involved, just a little overstimulated and in need of a reset.
If it helps, and if you haven't already, I recommend looking into "executive disfunction".
Might not fit your personal experience, but it can be nice to know when there's a name for a problem you're facing.
I've wasted so much time just sitting, doing nothing, feeling overwhelmed. Having a name for that feeling was the first step for me to (at least somewhat) overcome it.
I don't like that news... It doesn't sound wholly wrong but I do focus too much, daydream (it's more getting lost in my own thoughts than dreaming), and I'm very bad at finding things in looking for.
I mean, don’t put too much stock in a label like that. Someone who never curls any weight will experience “bicep dysfunction” in the sense of not being able to sufficiently and consistently move stuff around.
But it’s just atrophy. The brain can and does atrophy. It loves to fucking atrophy. The way to get it to stop atrophying is two things:
Exercise keeps your brain big, dense, and well-connected
Using your brain is necessary to prevent the atrophy. Unfortunately you can’t just use any part of it. You have to use all the parts you want to keep strong.
If your prefrontal cortex isn’t powerful or flexible enough to succeed in life, you can exercise it to make it more effective. Meditation is one thing that does this, for instance.
The mind is naturally full, so it is a workout to empty it. During focused-attention meditation, the prefrontal cortex is working hard to inhibit neocortical activity.
I’ve been diagnosed with ADHD. A temporary period using adderall helped. I think it rewired my brain in a beneficial way. But eventually I quit the adderall.
Long term, the best thing for the my “inability” to focus was finding out what the fuck I truly wanted in my life.
As it turned out, deep dive into what I actually wanted in life revealed some pretty mediocre dreams, some very small stuff, that’s still beyond my grasp.
Men’s work helped me get in touch with my emotions so I could figure out what I wanted in life. It’s not much, but it’s enough to challenge my abilities, and so it’s correctly-shaped to get me moving.
I'm adding to this because I think it came out wrong.
I'm not using mediocre as a pejorative here. I'm saying that I used to be largely paralyzed by life, and my dreams were huge. For a while my goal was "help humanity expand into the stars". Then it switched to "help humanity survive WW3".
But lately it's more like "Have enough cash on hand that I can handle two small crises back to back without losing momentum, and then get the emotional benefits from that sense of security" and "Be around people who make me feel valued and respected".
What I've discovered is that those small dreams motivate me a lot more, because I can actually see how my day to day decisions can affect those things.
My favorite psychology professor always says that the path out of depression starts with "orienting yourself toward the highest good you can conceive of". At first I thought that meant the loftiest goal I could think of.
But I realized that while I can say "Help humanity expadn into the stars" I don't have a concrete, solid image of what exactly that means. It's vague. It's not an image; it's just words.
But those smaller goals, I can actually conceive of them. I can visualize them, and see them concretely. If i try to look higher than that, to my later goals like "having a family" and "being a productive member of the community", I can't see them.
So this "that you can conceive of" I think it really works best when I think of it as "that I can actually visualize and feel".
