this post was submitted on 19 Jun 2024
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Huh, I do this all the time…
I did that this morning…
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.
Isn't meditation all about emptying your mind instead of exercising it? Or am I missing something here?
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".
I do this pretty much every morning :D