I was born into the psychosocial slavery of capitalism and taught I had to have a job and money to survive. I grew up in a codependent family and culture. They were also seemingly locked up from denial of the trauma stemming from being molested (saying "That traumatized me" aloud to myself led to a flood of emotions all at once). Anxiety was my normal state, though I didn't know it because I'd been cultivating my addiction since around age 8 & was largely disconnected from my emotions.
#Stayfocused vs cold turkey how to
how to be still and not suffer from boredom).įor me, there were several issues. I still think tuning out and removing distractions is valuable, but it's a good complementary practice.Īddiction is a symptom of something else, usually trauma (which I include forgetting fundamental ways to use the mind as an item, eg. I will say that this takes a little enjoyment away from going truly deep and achieving flow, for example, where you lose your sense of time and become engrossed in the narrative/activity/whatever, but it's a bit of a jiu jitsu move and allows you to fight the world around you less and use it to your advantage a little more. Instead of fighting my increasing tendency to scan for a new dopamine hit, I allow my brain to wander for a moment and then to consider the highest value option, which frequently turns out to be continuing doing what I'm doing so that I gain the advantages and compound interest of depth in an activity and do not incur the cost of context switching. When you do most white collar work, especially as a manager, your job consists largely of filtering a huge number of potential inputs/jobs and focusing intently on the highest value/leverage ones. One counterintuitive trick that has worked for me is to fire up my "manager brain" in daily life. Any news that is not important enough to warrant your attention after it's a week old, is it really worth knowing anyway? That's especially true for news, except for the odd once that you want to know about right now, but I feel like when that happens, word will get to your from other paths, like family, friends and so on contacting you if it's that important. It took time to get here, getting rid of the fear of missing out - which I'm still working on - and understanding that all sorts of things happen in the "now", but almost anything of importance and substance is best "consumed" at a distance - maybe a week or more after it happens. Now I want the long pieces, the books, the journalistic marvels that took years to produce and an hour or more to really go through properly. Before I wanted the quick reads, they felt like I achieved things. One of the things that has really worked for me, other than training the practical side of reading for prolonged amounts of time with focus, is to get used to preferring long pieces instead of the quick fixes that is mostly what's online. I still prefer ending the day falling asleep to the office or something like that. Reading a book in the morning is really a great way to start the day, I find. My normal routine now is to wake up an hour before I have to and read for an hour or so, and then again in the evening read for an hour or so.
It took a long time, but now I can easily read for an hour.
It was a bit boring, really, compared to all the things I "learned" from just skimming hacker news. Then I was looking for the next dopamine fix. I could get myself to sit down with a book and read, and wanted to, very much actually, but could only stomach it for 15-20 minutes.
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