| Hi, OP, this one seems right up my alley. What you describe is very much how my life was for most of it. There were other complicating factors in my case, but what you describe was part of it. I have significant executive dysfunction by default, enough so that it nearly killed me in the distant past. And while those struggles are by no means gone or trivial (I am in fact writing this post partly to procrastinate on my work!), they are not things that constantly cripple me anymore. I'm the founder of my own company that, while it may or may not succeed, at least exists under fairly challenging conditions. I don't feel constantly crippled and scared about my ability to handle basic personal growth. I've lost 135 pounds in the last two years. None of these things were possible in the very recent past. So I feel comfortable saying that I have at least somewhat figured out how to overcome some of my innate tendencies. Everything that follows is just my own personal observations. They're the "view from the inside" of how I feel about it. I'm not an academic expert on mental health, but what experts can give you from the outside I can give you from the inside. I also strongly recommend considering medication if you've never tried it (it was life-changing for me despite the fact that it only worked for a short time), but I can't help you with that one. ------ So, let's start with an observation: > I feel I've been stuck both cognitively and emotionally at a late-teen stage...constantly flying at 1000 feet. "Constantly flying at 1000 feet" sounds like inattentiveness. You mention elsewhere you have an ADHD diagnosis, and it's worth thinking about paying attention to your life in the same framing that you think about paying attention to anything else. If it's hard for you to focus on school or relationships or other things, why WOULDN'T it be hard to focus on your own life? As I wrote that paragraph, I was eating my breakfast, and I realized I hadn't been paying attention to the food I was putting into my mouth. I was trying to do several things at once. I consciously stopped writing and took a slow, deliberate bite to try and refocus my attention on my current situation. And when you struggle to pay attention to your experiences, of course you struggle to learn from them or recall them. It's no different from struggling in an English class because your eyes keep skipping over paragraphs without really digesting them, or struggling in a math class because you couldn't sit down to memorize a few formulae. (I didn't personally struggle with these things, but that's because they interest me. Anything that didn't was borderline impossible.) Or to use a more abstract analogy, it's like trying to read a blurry whiteboard from far away - your experiences are dulled, softened, greyed out, by the fact that you can't fully experience them in the first place. More precisely, that you don't fully experience them in the first place by default. ------ > The older I get with no improvement, the more it feels my goals keep drifting farther away. I want to get fit, I want to read more, I want to develop skills, I want to build relationships, I want to be an entrepreneur. I currently do three of these things: I'm maintaining a diet after massive weight loss (328 lbs -> 196 as of my last measurement), I've developed many, MANY skills in recent years and in recent months particularly, and I am the solo founder of an early-stage startup. I don't do the other two: rarely read and I have few relationships. But I have to often remind myself that getting even this far is actually a pretty extraordinary achievement. Most people could not do what I do, and even I couldn't have done it in the very recent past. (I'm not even sure I can do it NOW, but I can at least take a reasonable stab at it.) So the first piece of advice I'd give you is to stop thinking of these things as easy in the abstract. Being an everyday functional human being is already very hard. Losing weight ALONE was a major challenge for me. Growing in my career ALONE was a major challenge for me. And that's normal. Most people have vices they will never overcome. That's not a horrible failing on their part. It's just the nature of being a human being at all. If you've got a job, a few close friends, keep your home in order, and are basically happy with your daily life, you're doing better than the vast majority of people! EVERYONE has the equivalent of those leftovers in the back of the fridge that you'll totally get to any day now. All that being said, there's nothing wrong with wanting to do better than the average and to be more than you are. So how can you do that? Well, for one, your goals are (a) scattered, (b) big, (c) vague, and (d) have ill-defined success criteria. And that's a recipe for killing motivation, even in neurotypical people: - Because they're scattered, your efforts to get started get distributed across all of them. Rather than roll one boulder up a hill, you're trying to roll five boulders up five hills simultaneously. - Because they're big, they seem insurmountable and difficult. And the difficulty of a task tilts your motivation towards inaction. "Start a company" was a gigantic impossible task for me six months ago. But "figure out what I think we should sell and get a working website up" was more manageable. - Because they're vague, it's even harder to connect with concrete actions. You already have trouble focusing on something. But right now you're trying to focus on something that shifts and changes and morphs every time you look at it. - Because they have ill-defined success criteria, you can't connect with the potential rewards of the action. Note the way you phrase it: you want to "be an entrepreneur", not "found a company". You want to "get fit", not "BE fit". Your thoughts are focused on the task and the challenges of it, not on the rewards at the end. That's a key problem with executive function, which we'll get to more in a moment. Note that I am not saying "you're doing it wrong" or "you're screwing up and it's your fault you're not acting". This advice is more akin to "you're trying to build muscle but there's no protein in your diet". Your motivation, which is weak by default, is not being fueled with the things that it needs to have in order to work. That isn't a personal or moral failing on your part. It's a problem with your environment (which I will argue includes your existing thought patterns that you're not consciously enforcing), not with "you", and it's fixable as an environmental problem without you being any less you. (continued in a comment, this post is too long for HN) |
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[from a comment]
> I've been diagnosed with cPTSD, GAD, Depression, and ADHD.
Depression adds to what we were just talking about.
See, one of the key symptoms of depression - or more specifically of major depressive disorder, which is what you're talking about - is that it warps perception. Not to the point of actual delusion, but in a way that works more like mild colorblindness. It's not that you can never see anything positive, it's that in the absence of very strong signal, you'll default to more negative interpretations (in the same way that a mildly colorblind person CAN tell the difference between red and green, but often needs clear contrast and cue to do so).
This was something I fundamentally misunderstood about depression. During my worst years, when someone told me I was depressed, I'd get upset with them. Of course I am! Everything's terrible and unfixable and I'm a horrible human being! Why wouldn't I be depressed?
I didn't understand it until I was on an antidepressant for the first time. (Or rather, after it started working a few weeks in.) For the first time I could remember, I could operate without the constant screaming voice of negativity and pressure towards negative interpretations of everything that, until then, I thought was just "me". But medicated me wasn't not-me. It was just me without a voice that, today, I don't really think of as part of "me". I think of it as a chronic illness I have to manage.
At the end of the last section, I talked about the idea that your thought processes don't focus on the rewards of your actions. What I'd suggest is that that's because, right now, you can't feel them at all. The power of a reward comes from (a) intensity, (b) certainty, (c) proximity, and (d) what I'll call "salience":
- An intense reward is the difference between "making a million dollars" and "getting $20". Obviously, bigger rewards help more.
- A certain reward means the degree to which you think the action will result in the reward. Video games are often appealing because they set up an artificial environment in which certain rewards are always available, for example: if you finish this quest, you WILL get a +6 sword of orc slaying.
- A proximate reward means you don't have to wait too much. The classic marshmallow test is an example of this. I would argue that what it is testing was the innate tendency the study subjects had to discount future rewards, which is a classic symptom of executive dysfunction. And that's because...
- A salient reward is one you can "feel", not just know exists. The more you can feel the reward NOW, the more you can connect the reward to the task, the more the task itself feels inextricable from its reward, the more the task itself takes on the rewarding color. But if you, like me, suffer from executive dysfunction, this is very hard to do!
Depression hurts a, b, and d. It dampens intensity almost by definition - a lack of pleasure from otherwise-pleasurable activities is a key symptom of depression. It lowers certainty because it will underestimate your chances of success (and when you struggle with executive function, there's a vicious cycle of "I won't succeed so why even try?"). And it cripples salience because it fills your consciousness with negative immediate problems and leaves little room for visualizing and enjoying future rewards.
Again, this is not YOU doing something wrong. This is an illness you have that is making things that are easier for others harder for you. It's not impossible to overcome, it just requires more deliberateness.
My advice is this: one, you may or may not be in a position to try to push yourself to do better right now. Depending on your life situation, you may need to rest and work on building a better immediate environment (both externally in your living spaces and internally in your mental landscape first. But once you are ready, pick ONE thing, focus on THAT, and figure out WHAT IT IS YOU WANT from that thing.
To use my recent weight loss as an example, I started losing weight shortly after a chair broke under me. It felt horrible. I felt humiliated by how my body was. That HURT. It provided immediate emotional salience to my weight. And so, when I got a little momentum a few months later, I had the emotional leverage to start dieting and exercising more.
I developed hard rules (exercise by climbing a nearby hill to X height every other day, 2000 calorie hard cap) that gave me a success criterion, where I could feel good as long as I'd done those rules. The task I needed to do was not "lose weight". It was "manage to follow these two rules today". And then tomorrow-me would follow them tomorrow, and the next-day-me would follow them the next day. 784 days later, I'm still following them, because there's an immediate salience to stopping: the second I stop, I won't get it back, and that will hurt IMMEDIATELY. I'll feel terrible if I stop.
I don't diet because I'm motivated, I diet because stopping dieting would hurt more than dieting does. And that's how motivation usually works. I'm going to go do my work after this post because I'll feel immediately terrible if I don't, not because it means I'll get paid for getting someone a job in a month.
(continued in one more comment)