"Just Suffer Until It Passes"

In the spirit of reversing any advice you hear I would also suggest that sometimes, just waiting and suffering out the problem is a really counterproductive strategy. For example, recently, I had a pretty severe cold, with a fever and a hacking cough that would leave me debilitated for minutes. Now, I could have just laid in bed and suffered through it. And indeed, I did, for a day or so. But when the cold didn't pass on its own, I found that it was way more productive for me to address the symptoms with cough drops, tea, hot soup, and acetaminophen than it was for me to simply wait and try to wait for the problem to go away on its own.

In the same fashion, I find that when I'm in a really bad place, in terms of mental health, trying to suffer through it is often the worst strategy. I use up a ton of willpower forcing myself to not get distracted, which then leaves me feeling drained and unproductive the next day, starting the cycle all over again. I've found that sometimes it's acceptable to have a low productivity day, if you acknowledge to yourself that today will be a low productivity day (or heck, even an entire low-productivity weekend), and then you "reset" and get back into your normal groove the next day.

So what's my advice? I'm not entirely sure. I think I would say that the most helpful thing for me to do has been to set time limits. Try to tough it out for X hours, but after that, rather than grinding one's willpower into a nub trying to brute-force past a problem, accept that the problem will not be solved today. Sometimes, the root cause is insoluble (as was the case with my cold) and the best strategy is to address the symptoms as best as you're able until the root cause resolves itself.

I am quite interested in more info on the universal problem solving journal.

a lot of problems aren't huge problems in-and-of themselves, and it's the flight to distraction and stimulation that compound the problem and create bad ongoing habits

This reminds me of a technique I use sometimes called Doing Nothing, described in this blog post, where instead of what you call 'flying to distraction' , you just don't do anything at all. You say "I don't have to write this paper right now, but I'm also not going to do anything else". You have the freedom to sit there blankly doing nothing at all for as long as you want, and generally it's not long before you stumble upon some new ideas or motivation to carry on.

On this point I sometimes find it helpful practice to lean into the suffering until I suffer so much that it breaks. That is, I lean into the suffering but also discover through the suffering that nothing bad happens other than having a feeling that things should be different, and after enough time this causes an update, which I call the break, where you stop suffering from the pain of whatever it is you feel the urge to not have happening. Overtime this retrains you such that suffering pops up less because it's relearned as a not-effective response to pain, againstness, etc.

Note that you have to be responsible with this and only do it when you have good episteme that you are not incorrectly ignoring a signal you should heed. You're trying to get gnosis to match with episteme with this technique, not just give up feeling pain as suffering in general becomes sometimes pain is a useful signal that something is wrong that you should do something about to avoid getting hurt.

My guess is that this – enduring a problem vs doing something about it – is a best looked at as a spectrum. Most people overall, and many people here, will be biased towards one side, will endure way less frequently than they should, or way less often. But I'm not confident that most are biased in the same direction. In reality, it really super depends on the problem. Enduring can be way better or way worse.

I would therefore not give advise to move in a particular direction, but to be aware that this is a really relevant spectrum and that there's a good chance you might be doing it wrong and should correct for that.

An example for where directions are reversed:

Sometimes you lie down and can't sleep. What do most people do? Get up and do something stimulating.

When I had a chaotic sleep schedule, which was true for over a decade I think, I eventually updated towards doing that more. Initially my intuition said to just lie there until I fell asleep, which almost never worked. On the other hand, I'd have done better just enduring itching until it passes – as early as possible.

It seems like the key to applying this is determining how much your "suffering" is a useful signal vs just noise.

Ex. With my current eating habits, the feeling of hunger is basiclally noise. I'm getting enough to eat, and I feel fine "Suffering until it passes".

Ex. Sometimes when I'm coding I realise that the code I'm about to write is repetative and boring and I anticipate it being a nasty experience. Most of the time, that is a signal that I'm doing it wrong and that there's a much better way to do it, and "suffering until it passes" will result in me not leveling up, and also waste time.

More on the same topic: How to Ignore Your Emotions (while also thinking you're awesome at emotions) [LW · GW] 

While that appears to be a reasonable way to handle suffering, it reeks too much of needless self-torture, especially if it's a physical ailment. If the suffering is mild enough, sure. But I guess if that's the case, if the suffering is mild enough to lapse into being nearly undetectable, it may be easily ignored just without any will.