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> From a distance, procrastination looks like a time management problem. There is growing evidence that it is rather an emotional management problem — a flight response.

It's eye opening how a lot of life struggles turn out to be an emotional management problem at their core: procrastination, addiction, stress.

I wish I had that perspective earlier in my life. It completely changes the solution space from trying random productivity tools to focusing on one's emotions and possibly getting into therapy.

6 comments

Agreed. And furthermore, I am continuously realizing how much my bodily well-being affects my mental state.

I am not suggesting that exercise is the cure for depression, but when it comes to a normal "feeling low", I find that the solution often relates to the body: move, stretch or relax. Same with sleep. If I can't fall asleep I often just need to make myself aware of where I have tension in the body ([link redacted])

On a higher level, diet obviously means a lot and so does air quality. I put an Awair in my office recently and have realized that I wasn't airing out nearly enough. I was basically sitting in a cloud of CO2 which I now realize was also making me feel tired.

Exercise might not be a “cure” for depression, but it’s definitely an excellent treatment for it, potentially on par with pharmaceuticals:

https://www.psychcongress.com/article/evidence-exercise-anti...

In the theory of depression as an attractor state in a dynamical system[1], exercise would be one of many small cures for depression. To cure depression, one would likely have to combine several small cures, none of which would work on their own. For example: diet, exercise, amount of sleep, timing of sleep, pharmaceuticals, behavioural activation, cognitive distortions, social life, life circumstances, as well as any physical health issues which could be contributing to depression.

I no longer have depression, and it was a combination of small factors which did it for me.

1: https://astralcodexten.substack.com/p/ontology-of-psychiatri...

Totally agree with the small factors take: For me, it would be diet, exercise, amount of sleep, sleep time, behavioral activation, translating unhelpful to helpful thoughts, social life, life circumstances, minimizing tempting distractions and having bluetooth music stations available at all times helps tremendously.

Did the removal of thots have anything to do with the curing your depression?

A sense of humour didn't hurt.

Escaping noise pollution, having an empty calendar and removing the phone are 3 things that help me.

I cringe when I think about how I used to seriously consider nootropic drugs while consistently staying up past midnight and hitting snooze and begrudgingly dragging myself from my bed after ~6 hours of sleep.

This seems laughable. An "Awair", to aovid sitting in a cloud of CO2? So what, for millennia of human achievement, it was only by miracle that so many people could stay alert enough to think up anything while sitting in their personal clouds of suffocating CO2 prior to the invention of these office/home air monitoring tools? Really? Sounds like nonsensical faux cutting edge woo to me.

I see.

You get used to it after a while. I've been living in an area with extreme levels of outside air pollution (think Mumbai or Beijing, but much worse) for many years, so my windows are almost always closed shut. I have a CO2 meter and it reports an average of about 2000 ppm. I feel fine, and don't feel any difference to the normal level of 440 ppm. I'm pretty certain it would show on objective cognitive tests, but personally I really don't feel any difference.

This sounds seriously unhealthy. Consider finding different place to live if at all possible. Air pollution is a killer.

If I was in that situation I would consider opening the windows twice a day for 15 minutes, then running a good (and properly sized) air purifier on full blast for an hour.

The sibling comment is right, it doesn't help very much. The CO₂ level goes above 800 ppm (which is already considered unhealthy) in ~20 minutes, rises to ~2200-2400 ppm (depends on wind speed and atmospheric pressure) in the course of a couple of hours, and then just stays there for days on end.

I put all my pollution data into Grafana and it makes making decision when to open (or close) a window that much easier. (Yeah, you have to make a thought-out decision to not feel terrible. It's a whole ceremony.)

Depending on the size of your house/apartment, you'll use up that oxygen in a couple of hours and will be back at 1000+ levels. Plus, there must be some ventilation in OP's setup already, as the CO2 levels are at 2000, and without ventilation they'd just rise until he passes out...

The biggest threat in your case is the PM2.5

In Beijing, the difference before and after the air purifier was enormous in my own experience.

what hardware/software/data are you, or anyone else, using to get these readings?

WHAT???

CO2: Excellent point. After 4 hrs in 30m2, we bathe in 1100ppm. After a night, 1800ppm. Normal levels are 500-600. After living in Australia, I’ve always attributed their taller average to being more outdoors and having well-working ventilation standards for buildings. Low CO2 might do wonders for mental development.

The corollary to that is to understand that when you soothe a negative feeling with a short-term coping mechanism (distraction, drugs...), you prime yourself to feel more of the same in the future. Exposure to the negative feeling and learning to deal with it gradually is far more beneficial as the body learns that it is not so effective.

This is particularly applicable to anxiety-based issues such as OCD but it can help for a variety of problems

This idea rings familiar to me as someone who got into the stoicism trend, but then realized issues with it. The problem isn’t that your house fell down and you lost your job and now you can’t afford therapy, the problem is that you haven’t stopped to think how much worse it could be and how grateful you should feel about how things are right now.

If we can reframe bad management and unfulfilling work into an employee’s emotional problem, then suddenly everything is easier, isn’t it? A good worker takes their medication before coming in, and goes to therapy to learn how to be better at following their manager’s instructions, and takes more medication in the evening to feel good after a long day’s work. Well, I guess there’s nothing new under the sun, these things have been happening to some degree for a while, and especially self-medicating with things like weed and alcohol when not working.

Will having a majority-un-medicated workforce soon put a country at an economic disadvantage? Will the alternative become a cultural relic that some countries fight to preserve through regulation, the way France preserves its traditional cheeses?

The anglo-american repackaging of stoicism is precisely this: just a variation on hustle porn and blaming the individual. The same goes for mindfulness. Both of these industries (yes, they are industries) have been eagerly embraced by the private sector since they make fixing the mood of workers both a quantifiable goal and one where their own responsibility is no longer taken into consideration.

In We by Zamyatin and Brave New World, the non-medicated elements of society eventually rebel against the new order. In our case, the scope of medication is already starting to show its limits so I don't think we will get to the scenario you describe. This sort of life is just too inherently unsatisfying to be masked by meds, not to mention that workers now can directly see just how poor they are compared to their masters and just how much surplus the masters capture.

> The anglo-american repackaging of stoicism is precisely this: just a variation on hustle porn and blaming the individual.

Agreed. I spotted this right at the time when I saw stoicism beginning to be 'productized' via books, journals, podcasts and courses.

Ryan Holiday, who is an author of several stoicism books and even sells "memento mori" coins that you can keep on your person to remember that you will die, happens to be American Apparel's former marketing director.

Incidentally, I learned more from his earlier, non-stoicism book, "Trust Me I'm Lying: Confessions of a Media Manipulator." A prescient book for the current wave of media manipulation.

There’s differences between talk therapy and simply taking psychiatric medication, though.

I prefer to group the interventions based on their methodological intent. Meds and talk sound like they would have radically different outcomes, but if the core intention is just to paper over the worker's reluctance to work, they will tend to have similar effects and consequences over time.

But if all those things happen, that is a good response.

If your house fell down and you lost your job and now you can't afford therapy that does suck, but what are you going to do? Those things happened, you can either just fall into a crumbling mess or appreciate what you still have and focus on the things you can control from that.

Yes, I get what you are saying about management, but if you don't shift the focus onto yourself and self responsibility then you are still doomed yourself, you cannot change how the management react etc, what you can do is either 1) Make it known and try and change that system 2) Get the hell out of there.

Things that can only happen if you acknowledge the situation and take personal responsibility. You have mistaken the stoic framework for something that makes you powerless and a system that allows others to more easily control you.

Yes it could be used in the way you are mentioning but it is not at all meant that way, there are 'preferred indifferences' and a true practitioner of stoic would seek to change that system or remove themselves from it if they could, if they absolutely can't then using these techniques isn't so bad, because it's all you can do, but it would be right and preferred to fix this.

This is a fair defense of stoicism. It addresses my critique nicely.

This seems like an overly dismissive response to individualistic health fads like wellness. Clearly mental health is a widespread issue in this society and merits a widespread push for availability and affordability, and exacerbates problems lower on Maslow’s hierarchy. And besides, if the U.S. was a country that already had the wherewithal for top-down solutions at the scale of guaranteeing widespread access to affordable therapy, it would already be a country so much more advanced and friendlier to communal solutions than the one at present; one could imagine such a country has also made progress on other material concerns such as labor conditions and anomie resulting from the capitalist grind.

> I wish I had that perspective earlier in my life. It completely changes the solution space from trying random productivity tools to focusing on one's emotions and possibly getting into therapy.

Hear, hear. For me, it was also figuring out how to cut out unneeded aggravations from my life.

> cut out unneeded aggravations

Some people? There is a thin line between cutting out people who step onto you, and becoming misanthropic/associal. Since lockdowns I went from 60 friends to ~4, because I can’t stand them and I’ve come to realize their politics directly harm me. But now I’m alone. Working on this, but it is a very thin line.

Well, when it comes to work I think it pays to be a lot more ruthless with cutting out aggravations. But when it comes to friendships, I think the situation is a lot more gray. For me personally, as I've gotten older, I've found that it's rare for me to have close friendships with people who are too politically minded. It's a matter of practicality -- I find myself asking, can this person really hold enough space to tend to our friendship on an ongoing basis, or will it become lopsided and a real downer?

On the other side of that -- I've found that I've also begun to gravitate much more to folks who are either expressly apolitical or who otherwise are willing to set aside their politics and focus more on the people around them. Now, it's true that politics isn't just some purely abstract thing -- it's very concrete, and as you say, sometimes folks have politics that directly harm you and then you can't really maintain friendships with them.

But beyond that, I've gravitated much more to having close friendships with people who simply care about me, and that's it. Another thing I would say is that 4 friends -- if they're truly good, close friends, who will see you through thick and thin -- is quite a lot. I can count maybe 4-8 close friends who I could rely on to that extent, and I consider myself extremely lucky as many folks rarely find even 1-2. If you do have 4 close friends, perhaps consider the silver lining -- sure, you've pared down your circle of interaction, but that also gives you more energy to invest into the friendships that really matter and which sustain you.

My heart goes out to you regardless. That doesn't make this process simple. And having seen a lot of friendships drop in perhaps the same manner you have, I can say (perhaps as you too understand) that it really hurts. It stings. Even if I understand why it happens, and it all logically adds up, it really breaks my hurt. It's okay to feel heartbroken that way. Don't be too hard on yourself. This past year has been extremely hard on everyone. Best of luck.

You pay the price for your politics.

I don't know if this person is saying they disagree with their friends on politics or if the vitriol in their friends' political speech is harmful to them. If the latter, I sympathize: most political conversations today are so filled with hate that "direct harm" to listeners is not unreasonable to claim.

Most of the time, when someone's said something like "their politics directly harm me", it's something like "the policies implied by the positions this guy's professing (or directly advocated for) would have bad effects for me". Could be wrong, obviously- it's a pretty vague phrase. But I'm sympathetoc- if they hold a certain position, and cultivate a certain identity, and that makes certain other positions disgusting to them to the point they cut out friends- good for them, I guess, and I get that being alone isn't pleasant. But that's the price you pay for being the kind of person who responds that way.

I guess presumably he would have gotten new, less offensive friends if the governments of the world hadn't made it illegal.

(How'd he end up friends with these people in the first place?)

I see you getting downvoted for a profoundly true statement. These are sad times.

I think there's a case to be made for cutting out those things, especially ones that aren't directly visible, such as ambient noise.

Many people think you get used to it, and maybe you don't consciously notice it anymore, but I think that the permanent background noise to which many people are exposed in cities contributes to their stress levels. Pretty much everywhere they go, there's constant noise:

* random chatter / noises in the open office

* AC hum / vibrations / etc at the office

* traffic noise, while walking around or taking public transport

* random traffic noise / honks / etc at home if the apartment is close to a street and badly soundproofed

Yep. I work with ear protection on (of the sort you'd use for mowing the lawn) most of the time for precisely this reason. I've found my anxiety levels are much lower after several hours of wearing them.

Even before lockdowns, I found that my sanity levels went up significantly once I started moving to using Etymotic in-ear monitors. I used a fairly cheap pair for commuting and work [1]. The nice thing about them is that even if you don't have any music playing, they're effectively earplugs. And then if you do have music playing, you don't have to turn it up very loud to hear it well, so it's kinda a win win all around.

[1] https://www.etymotic.com/consumer/earphones/mk5.html

You read my mind! I moved out of a big city after lockdowns, and I realized that many of these little ambient noises or mental frictions which I had grown accustomed to -- it turns out that once I cut that out, it reduced my stress levels. I think there are a lot of parallels to draw from there to the workplace or other walks of life.

Figuring exactly this out in my early 20s. The problem is not the productivity framework, the problem is emotional.

> It completely changes the solution space from trying random productivity tools to focusing on one's emotions and possibly getting into therapy

Same thoughts here. I suspect no tomato-based super-agile time management technique has ever turned an inefficient person into an efficient one, long term.

Pomodoro works in theory but ultimately requires a lot of discipline because it's easy to just ignore the timer. Worse, maintaining half an hour of deep focus just doesn't work for some people, especially the types the article describes. Anyway, pomodoro's only advantage if you want to try to maximize the amount of productivity in a day without mentally bogging you down.

What worked best for me is low-overhead simplicity. A notebook. Make it routine to realistically scope out, jot down, divide and conquer tasks. Just a few minutes every morning. No schedule. Take the task and work. Whenever your brain tells you to take a break, just take a break. But just keep on looking at what you aimed to accomplish for the day. That way, you're just mentally thinking about the tasks and not some stupid timer or how you planned it all out on a calendar.

Ultimately, it's about managing emotions, but having this down helps because it clears your mind a little.

That sort of pomodoro stuff only works on unpleasant tasks that don't require too much thought or creativity

I haven't found that to be true. I have used it successfully at various points to help me stay focused on art projects or other work that I was choosing to do that should have been "fun" but that I was still procrastinating over. The two GUI software applications I've made that I consider "finished" (out of a dozen-plus incomplete) have Pomodoro journal pages in one of my notebooks.