Laziness death spirals

Other options:

• Writing a to-do list. If the tasks on the list are too daunting, break them apart into smaller tasks.
• Changing location to an unfamiliar place. The less familiar the better. The changed context often makes motivation easier (not sure whether this helps other people).

I previously think I overvalued the model in which laziness/motivation/mood are primarily internal states that required internal solutions. For me, this model also generated a lot of guilt because failing to be productive was a personal failure.

But is the problem a lack of "willpower" or is your brain just operating sub-optimally because you're making a series of easily fixable health blunders?

Are you eating healthy?
Are you consuming large quantities of sugar?
Are you sleeping with your phone on your bedside table?
Are you deficient in any vitamins?
Is you sleep trash because you have been consuming alcohol?
Are you waking up at a consistent time?
Are you doing at least some exercise?

I find time spent addressing this and other similar deficits is usually more productive than trying to think your way out of a laziness spiral. 

None of this is medical advice. My experience may not be applicable to you. Do your own research. I ate half a tub of ice cream 30 minutes ago. 

Another option after acknowledging the spiral is giving yourself 30 minutes to do nothing, and doing a Gendlin’s Focusing / IFS parts work with your emotional fatigue during that time. Perhaps laziness is guilt from not doing things in the last day or two. Perhaps it’s a symptom of long-term mental exhaustion. Either way, if you manage to find the time and are skilled enough in it, that’s one of the best ways to at the very least better understand what’s happening. In some cases, if it’s a very recent emotion, you can even become motivated and productive again in half an hour.

Sleep is a banger reset point for me and therefore doing a nap/yoga nidra and then picking up the day from there if I notice myself avoiding things has been really helpful for me.

Thanks for the post, it was good.

Much of this seems quite plausible and matches my experience, but it seems worded slightly overconfidently. Like, maybe 5 to 10% at most. Lots of points where I went, "well, in your experience, you mean. And also, like, in mine. But I don't think either of us know enough to assert this is always how it goes." I've had issues in the past from taking posts like this a bit too seriously when someone sounded highly confident, so I'm just flagging - this seems like a good insight but I'd guess the model as described is less general than it sounds, and I couldn't tell you exactly how much less general off the top of my head.

But also, it's a pattern I've noticed as well, and have found to be incredibly useful to be aware of. So, weak upvoted.

My yakshaving essay seems relevant here. Especially relevant is the vicious cycle of overload/working-hard/not-yakshaving:

• "Nobody Ever Gets Credit for Fixing Problems That Never Happened: Creating and Sustaining Process Improvement", Repenning & Sterman 2001

Wait for a reset point

Actually, something I do is run toward the next reset point. I know that if I wake up on-time tomorrow having showered and tidied my room, then I'll start the next day well. So I will write off the evening and just give up on my goals today and take melatonin early and make my only goal to start the next day well.

I think I've probably spent the majority of my 42 years of life in a laziness death spiral. ☹️

In other words, aggressively run away from your goals, and reflect on how miserable it is to live that way. The reflection is crucial: if you’re self-forgetful / not mindful about it, you’ll risk staying in that state. Do it for a week or two, reflect on how much it sucks, and in doing so you’ll condition your mind to view the goal as a valuable opportunity to escape that misery (which it is).

When I do this kind of thing, it tends to be called "depressive rumination". Rather than decide "not doing the thing sucks, therefore I should go do the thing", some part of me assumes that "doing the thing" isn't actually an option (because otherwise I would have done it already) and I just stay miserable. On a more general note, I also somehow managed to live for 42 years without gaining the capacity to do something at a time I don't "feel like" doing it, even though a lot of other people tried very hard to instill that capacity in me through force and threats.

In a different context [LW · GW], I once gave a deliberately exaggerated example of one way my motivational system actually works in practice:

Guy with a gun: I'm going to shoot you if you haven't changed the sheets on your bed by tomorrow.

Me: AAH I'M GOING TO DIE IT'S NO GOOD I MIGHT AS WELL SPEND THE DAY LYING IN BED PLAYING VIDEO GAMES BECAUSE I'M GOING TO GET SHOT TOMORROW SOMEONE CALL THE FUNERAL HOME AND MAKE PLANS TELL MY FAMILY I LOVE THEM

Guy with a gun: You know, you could always just... change the sheets?

ME: THE THOUGHT HAS OCCURRED TO ME BUT I'M TOO UPSET RIGHT NOW ABOUT THE FACT THAT I'M GOING TO DIE TOMORROW BECAUSE THE SHEETS WEREN'T CHANGED TO ACTUALLY GO AND CHANGE THEM

The other problem I have is the same one I've had for much of my adult life - I don't know what to do wity my life other than live in a laziness death spiral, because a lot of the common alternatives also seem terrible and I do not know what I want.

You see, 10-year-old me was a hedonist, and probably had a relatively sophisticated philosophy of hedonism for a 10-year-old. He divided the world into "fun", defined as "pleasurable things I do because I choose to, such as play video games", and "work", defined as "anything I'm being forced to do, such as schoolwork or laundry," and his goal in life was to maximize "fun" and minimize "work". He resented school for keeping him away from his video games and thought that having a 40-hour a week job, the way most adults did, must be an even worse fate than being a child in school, because you were still doing "work" on behalf of other people instead of doing the thing that's the most pleasurable, and it takes up even more of your time than school does.

I still have a view of paid employment that equates it with misery and coercion. I don't know how much I can blame my father in particular for this, and I also tried my hardest to avoid internalizing a value system that said that someone who was capable of working for money but preferred not to was a worthless person, but I also spent a long time living under clouds of sentiments like "your parents aren't going to be around to support you forever" and "people who don't work end up homeless and starving" and "people won't respect you for being good at things that don't make money." Instead of working, I spent most of the past 20-ish years as an unpaid family caregiver for sick relatives. I didn't have any close friends I saw in person on a regular basis, and I didn't think Hello, my name is ----, I'm unemployed and live with my parents would actually work on a dating site profile, so I spent a lot of time lonely and feeling bad about myself.

Perhaps ironically, the thing that actually did help me - besides the antidepressant medication I've been on since high school - was when a woman reached out to me online after a brief encounter and ended up becoming my first girlfriend ever and, later, my wife. That was about ten years ago. I couldn't motivate myself on my own behalf, but I could do it for her, and that was enough. Was, because she died last March and I once again am left drifting without a purpose in life. Sigh...

Personally I don't call this 'laziness' but something more like 'losing agency' or 'losing consciousness' or 'being overhwhelmed'.

I very much appreciate this post, because it strongly resonates with my own experience of laziness and willpower. Reading this post feels less like learning something new and more like an important reminder.

small wins in the present make it easier to get bigger wins in the future.

Mildly interesting: In his biography of Deng Xiaoping, Vogel implies he believed the same:

For his civilian breakthrough in consolidation, Deng chose to focus on a project that would quickly both increase production and inspire others. Ever since his guerrilla days, he had believed in fighting small battles that he was sure to win, as a way of encouraging his troops as they prepared for larger battles. In 1975, many of the factories criticized for failing to meet production targets complained that they lacked adequate supplies. Transportation was an obvious bottleneck. Could a success in transportation provide an early victory that would both increase production and demonstrate possibilities for success in other areas?

What are your natural reset points?

I have a Type A personality and feel that I need to be doing something productive at all times. But this behavior can lead to excessive mental fatigue. To combat my cumulative fatigue, I wrote for myself a list of "Coping mechanisms for stress and ways to recover energy" and posted it in my apartment.

The list:

• Walk or lay down to process my thoughts
• Journal
• Yoga or meditate
• Sunbathe
• Call a friend
• Play piano or guitar
   

Curated. I think this is a good pair with "Struggling like a Shadowmoth [LW · GW]", which motivates me to maintain a locus of control and agency over the world. This post is then like "here's a bunch of tips to get that back when you lose it!". I think some of the advice here is good, and also it would be helpful to me (and so probably others) to think for ourselves what works for us here.

Building on the step of analyzing the circumstances, I find it very helpful to ask the zookeeper question:

If someone was keeping an animal as I am keeping myself, what would I think of them?

"Don't treat people worse than we treat critters" seems like it should be a low bar, but very often failing the zookeeper test goes hand in hand with failing other tests presented to me by the circumstances. But the zookeeper test has concrete answers for how to resume passing it, which are often more actionable than other tasks.

I like having a list of small, useful things to do that tend to pay off in the long run, like:

• go to the grocery store to make sure you have fresh fruits and vegetables
• mediate for 10 minutes
• do pushups and sit ups
• journal for 10 minutes

When my brain feels cluttered, it is nice to have a list of time-boxed simple tasks that don’t require planning or assessment.

Even as I’m caught up in lazy activity, I’m making specific plans to be productive tomorrow.

How? I personally can't really make detailed or good plans during lazy mode

Got a project you’ve been excited about but afraid to start? Don’t even think about it—don’t enjoy the fantasy of it; stop telling your friends about it; pretend you never had that intention in the first place.

In other words, aggressively run away from your goals, and reflect on how miserable it is to live that way. The reflection is crucial: if you’re self-forgetful / not mindful about it, you’ll risk staying in that state. Do it for a week or two, reflect on how much it sucks, and in doing so you’ll condition your mind to view the goal as a valuable opportunity to escape that misery (which it is).

As someone who was diagnosed with adult ADD at age 43 in 2019, I thought I knew how my scumbag brain worked. I have daily conversations with similar minded colleagues at work (we call these our informal therapy sessions), however, what my stimulant medication and these therapy sessions fail to address is motivation! I've read countless text and spoken to many people about ADHD and the fact that medication may help you to focus on a task once you start it - but it's curing the "getting started" part that is extremely individualistic. Many people will give tips on how to solve this problem, but until now, none of them have ever come close to addressing my own internal demons. 

What I read on this page today was the magical silver bullet for me. The longer I read, the more tick boxes I checked for my individual circumstances. Better still, having read the solutions provided, I found myself nodding instead of poo pooing them, testing them against my internal monologue of "nah, that won't work for me", and finding that almost ALL of them have come back with positive reactions. This is a first!

In short, I am incredibly happy that I stumbled upon your website today. At age 48, the huge "project" that I have been excitedly telling everyone about is for me to gain a professional certification which is incredibly difficult (and expensive) to obtain. Work have paid the full cost of this venture for me, and I have told everyone that'll listen about how I intend to pass the exam - and that is the fantasy of it. I've spent the past 45 days procrastinating instead of knuckling down with the study review. Nothing has worked...but I can already feel that some of your solutions will be successful, namely the piece "aggressively run away from your goals, and reflect on how miserable it is to live that way". I can actually feel that this reflection technique, combined with some of the Natural recovery methods, will drag me out of this rut! ❤

I enjoyed this article and the linked piece on willpower accumulating. I have for a long time felt intuitively that willpower is not a finite resource per se, and that the more I exercised it the more I had of it. Your way of expressing it as "everytime your willpower wins out, it has a greater chance to win out in the future" has been my experience.

Certainly there is also a sense in which limiting the amount of "mega tasty" things you have to decline on a daily basis is a good idea, because I do think if you constantly put yourself in a position to have to say to no to things that are very enticing, eventually you will fail. 

Perhaps the most salient part of both this and the willpower article is the self-reflection part, which I think is actually at the root of the whole thing. For me, there is a distinct avoidance of any mindfulness of what is happening to me during these spirals. And for many, spirals are a repeating cycle that is connected to a longer term issue.

It's difficult to talk about this stuff, because as you mention it is so subjective that your formulation of it may not resonate with most other people's. I've often wondered to what extent these kinds of processes share key characteristics across populations and individuals, and reading your article I can at least say that my process mirrors yours in all of the important ways.

In terms of practicality, I have found the most important 'mundane' things that can help treat/prevent. death spirals (and foster willpower expression) are:

1. Sleep (non-negotiable, unless you have a baby)
2. Diet (specifically a strong avoidance of simple sugars, and regulation of meal times)
3. Exercise (that includes 3 hours weekly of zone 2 cardio, and some strength training in whatever format)

After that, it comes down to more complex things, like managing your phone use and protecting your mornings/start of day. Obviously a lot has and could be said about these things. But I appreciate the commentary nonetheless, as I think it's important to describe even subjective processes.

Patrick, I find that fasting is a great way to prevent oneself from falling into this spiral. Being in a fasted state helps promote mental focus and, ironically, more physical energy.

Granted, this is more about preventing oneself from falling into the spiral than getting out of it. If you fast daily on a 20:4 regimen, you will spend most of the day in a productive state.

The idea of inertia is excellent, extending the idea of momentum far further (and naturally inspiring thoughts on mass, velocity, etc)

Unlike with obvious epistemic predicates over some generality [ eg "Does it snow at 40 degrees N?", "Can birds heavier than 44lb fly?" - or even more generally the skills of predicting the weather and building flying machines ], to which [parts of] the answers can be usefully remembered as monolithic invariants, obvious deontic predicates over generalities [ eg "Should I keep trying when I am exhausted?", "Will it pay to fold under pressure?" - and the surrounding general skills ] don't have generalizable answers that are independent of one's acute strategic situation. I am not against trying to formulate invariant answers to these questions by spelling out every contingency; I am unsure whether LessWrong is the place, except when there's some motivating or illustrative question of fact that makes your advice falsifiable [ I think Eliezer's recent The Sun is big, but superintelligences will not spare Earth a little sunlight [LW · GW] is a good example of this ].

I find that these situations, doing anything agentic at all can break you out of the spiral. Sports is a good example: you can just do 5 pushups and tell yourself "That's enough for today, tomorrow I'll get back to my full routine".

I'd be interested in reading much more about this. Energy and akrasia as it's popularly called here continue to be my biggest life challenges. High fiber diet seems to help, and high novelty seems to help.

This was an interesting read and points to a simple truth that I think is often forgotten: Newton's first law applies to basically everything in life, not just physical systems. The "resets" you describe are definitely valid but by no means a comprehensive list of "opposing" forces that can help drive you in the other direction to reverse your momentum (in a positive way). The two other main ones that I believe are missing, yet fundamental are: 

- Diet: the food we eat affects our mental/emotional tendencies to procrastinate vs get things done through pretty intricate biological + neuroscientific mechanisms
- Exercise: similar to diet, but perhaps harder to get started 

All these can be thought of as different "forces" that can influence our momentum in one way or the other. Side note: it would be interesting to develop some sort of grounded pyschological theory on how different external stimuli affect our mindspace. Some of it is covered in the Vedas (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gu%E1%B9%87a). 

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 2025. 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?