The 99% principle for personal problems

Relatedly: existence proofs can be extremely emotionally important.

I feel skeptical of this in the context of problems in my life. It feels like there's a ton of randomness, so I never have a problem ALL of the time given a certain trigger, I just have the problem a bunch

Huh, yeah, this is basically the opposite of how things work for me?

I get into spirals a lot. I can have a positive spiral: I sleep well, get out of bed feeling rested, start the day with a small easy task, get a feeling of accomplishment, feel more confident about starting a bigger task, eventually get into flow, have a very productive day, by 7pm I'm satisfied and decide to start cooking dinner, so I'm ready to go to sleep at a reasonable hour and have another great day tomorrow.

I also get into negative spirals: I wake up feeling tired because I had a nightmare, pick up my phone and scroll social media in bed, encounter some upsetting news, start playing video games to distract myself, suddenly it's 11pm and I forgot to eat so I stay up late to get groceries and cook, so I don't get much sleep, so the next day I'm tired again and irritated at myself, so I'm more likely to get back on social media...

I can't remember to brush my teeth 99% of the time. If I forget once, then the habit is broken, and I'll forget again tomorrow. Then I'll have forgotten for three days and it won't even be on my mind anymore. Soon it'll be psychologically difficult to think about brushing my teeth because I feel bad about the fact I haven't done it in a week. Negative spirals.

There's just a lot of things in my life that I need to be 100% absolutely consistent with, no exceptions, and it's worth it for me to dip into resources to make that happen. 99% isn't a stable number; it's too easy for it to become 98% and too easy for that to become 1%. If I notice a 100% thing becoming a 99% thing, I need to treat that as very urgent and fix it before a spiral starts.

(Yes, this is very delicate and a terrible system which creates gigantic setbacks in my life whenever there's a change, like needing to move house. But I have to acknowledge that that's how I work so that I can fix it.)

I think your insight is that progress counts--that counting counts.  It's overcoming the Boolean mindset, in which anything that's true some of the time, must be true all of the time.  That you either "have" or "don't have" a problem.

I prefer to think of this as "100% and 0% are both unattainable", but stating it as the 99% rule might be more-motivating to most people.

The LessWrong Review [? · GW] runs every year to select the posts that have most stood the test of time. This post is not yet eligible for review, but will be at the end of 2024. The top fifty or so posts are featured prominently on the site throughout the year.

Hopefully, the review is better than karma at judging enduring value. If we have accurate prediction markets on the review results, maybe we can have better incentives on LessWrong today. Will this post make the top fifty?

Maybe the progress was contingent on them feeling better in some other way, and something as seemingly trivial as sleeping worse brought it back.

Can that really happen to normal adults?

That they go from seemingly fine members of society to despairing emotional wrecks after a single bad sleep?

The only cases I've heard of in real life happen to those who are literally brain damaged, whether from a bad industrial accident, accident/shell shock in military service, overdosing, bad car crashes, botched surgeries, retired football players, etc...