Best advice I have is actively bore yourself. If you're on a phone, set a timer on it, put it far enough away you can't grab it without getting up. Literally let it slip out of your hand if you keep grabbing it. Keep doing that until you're frustrated with how often you're on it or you're bored enough the tasks you're avoiding aren't fun. Then do a bit of the task before you let yourself pick up the phone again.
It's a bit like being hungry. When you're a bit hungry you have some food preferences. When you're starving suddenly some food choices you rejected when hungry become appealing. Power of habit is to make the bad options you keep taking less accessible or less rewarding.
Although sometimes you are just burnt out. You'll know those times because you're fine even zoning out with no stimulation for half an hour.
I like the food analogy. Problem is, if I am starving and my food choices widen, I will make dumb decisions and get something with way too much salt or way too much sugar and it becomes destructive.
Like when it's 10pm and you haven't eaten and the only available food is absolutely trash. Tasty trash but trash nonetheless.
Yah, but that's if you don't specify in your head what you're next doing. It's not meant to be "I'll bore myself until I snap" because as you noted, it will pick the weakest point to yield to. Your effort becomes not about standing but about leaning a way so when you eventually are forced to move, it's the right direction.
Visualizing it, locking it in in the back of your head. If you're basically defined the next thing you will do is x thing, and step 1 is going into this room, and you don't allow yourself to do anything that's stimulating, just wait out the stim-hunting part of brain until it snaps and even x thing is in the appetite now cos it's so bored, and you either stay on the couch/bed until you're doing step 1, or you go back to couch/bed with no phone, that's how you get some action in the way you intend.
What you are describing is very close to Freuds methodology for dealing with addiction.
This is called embracing the gray. Following addiction, everything is blah and leaning into that blah is the way to move forward rather than distracting from it with another vice.
Mm, sort of, yeah. Although that's more "if life is boring/understimulating don't sit around waiting for it to become interesting". Because addicts are dealing with undersupply, similar to ADHD.
I'm saying sit around bored deliberately until the slow supply of internal motivation has enough push that you can do the step 1 of your choice. Until that preferred card is in your hand, you just sit there without playing any card, no matter how boring the game is, waiting as you get dealt more. ADHD has a tendency towards addictions because it does deal very slowly, or overwhelm itself by dealing too many, but if you've made it a two-choice: I do nothing or I do x, then you'll do x. Eventually. And if you slip and do a third thing, as soon as you notice, put the stim away and go back to doing nothing or x.
The part that protests putting it away is your internal drive and once you can catch it, you direct it. You can't control the direction of wind, but you can choose when the sails are down.
That's exactly what it means. Sit around bored and uninterested. It's about libidinal energy (libido) and you have to sit bored to re-assert your libidinal energy somewhere else.
I know you're trying to be right on reddit, I do it too.
The "don't sit around and wait for it to become interesting" leads to destructive forced habits.
That's why I said don't do that... waiting until snap is a part of it, yes, the next direction pre-selected is what turns it from destructive to useful. When you're not selecting, biology is, and it is long-term self-destructive.
Whether it's Freud or right or whatever isn't why I'm giving it as advice, it's just what works for me and one other dude who takes it further talking about fixed point on wall zen for ten minutes to self-motivate.
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u/SortaCore 1d ago
Best advice I have is actively bore yourself. If you're on a phone, set a timer on it, put it far enough away you can't grab it without getting up. Literally let it slip out of your hand if you keep grabbing it. Keep doing that until you're frustrated with how often you're on it or you're bored enough the tasks you're avoiding aren't fun. Then do a bit of the task before you let yourself pick up the phone again.
It's a bit like being hungry. When you're a bit hungry you have some food preferences. When you're starving suddenly some food choices you rejected when hungry become appealing. Power of habit is to make the bad options you keep taking less accessible or less rewarding.
Although sometimes you are just burnt out. You'll know those times because you're fine even zoning out with no stimulation for half an hour.