Insight Synthesis

Small tasks pile up quickly. One tip I use is to simply remind myself that if the task takes less than 10 minutes, Its best to get it out of the way right now.

Doing the dishes right after eating or cooking takes about 1-5 minutes tops for 1-2 people’s dishes. It takes about 3x as long to finish the same load if you let food dry onto the dishes overnight.

Doing your dishes encourages others to do theirs as well. You should continue to do at least your own dishes regardless of whether your roommate/partner/family take notice or not.

Taking out the trash takes no more than 2-3 minutes. Before adopting this habit (took awhile) I used to let garbage pile up in my garage and take it out in big batches monthly.

It’s unlikely you would have productively used the 5-10 minutes each task takes. When depressed, anxious or just unproductive, time seems to fly by very quickly. In fact, 10 minutes is a very long time. Adopting a habit of learning something, recreational reading or exercise for 10 minutes a day is a great start.

There are some excellent self-help material out there. Some of it can change lives, or at least instill excellent habits and help one see things in a new light. Think and Grow Rich is a classic. Steve Pavlina’s articles are informational and motivational. Joe Novarro’s books on body language are a must read for everyone. There’s something I noticed about people who don’t get many benefits from self-help.

Self-help books assume that you’re healthy to begin with. How can you Get Things Done when you can’t even change the cat litter less than once a month, or do the laundry or dishes?

These things aren’t easy, but for some people they just aren’t possible. It’s not that one may be physically incapable of doing something, but for people who suffer from depression (clinically, not just occasional sadness,) it’s easy to justify against doing anything. No matter how good this advice is, telling a depression person to exercise daily will never produce results. Telling a depressed person to quit smoking will never produce results. That person may be able to exercise and quit smoking after the depression is taken care of. In this sense, these things would serve as symptoms of depression rather than a cause.

If you’re stuck and you can’t seem to move forward, especially if it has been this way for a prolonged period, I recommend seeking professional help. It takes a lot of courage to get past the stigma of mental illness (it takes about 8 years to diagnose depression, on average) but it doesn’t make sense to loiter through life until it gets bad enough that you will end up seeking professional help anyway.

After the mental illness is being taken care of, the self-help material begins making sense in a new light. It’s no longer just mental masturbation, but begins being actual habits that you can work into your life slowly. Treating the depression will not change the bad habits a person depressed for years may have integrated into his life, but once you treat the illness (either via medication or psychoanalysis, or both) getting things done, exercising on a regular basis, getting over shyness, socializing, etc become feasible, especially after you begin seeing changes occur at such a rapid rate.

When discussing depression and medication, people use the argument that medication is ineffective because they don’t agree with the chemical imbalance theory (that low serotonin causes depression.) Not only is this an obvious logical fallacy, but the chemical imbalance theory is no longer in vogue in the science circle. It hasn’t been in decades. It mainly gained traction because it was used in a few anti-depressant commercials and is now perpetuated by people who are anti-psychiatry and anti-pharmaceauticals.

Many people don’t realize this but we don’t know how many drugs work. It’s pretty irrelevant to the patient. If a drug is safe and effective according to studies, then the drug may be administered to help a patient, regardless of whether we know exactly how it works or not. If we knew enough about depression, then anti-depressant’s wouldn’t cause so many side effects and psychiatry for depression wouldn’t be hit or miss. But these facts don’t disprove that the medications as effective. If you’re depressed, what choice do you really have? You can suffer from depression for another 10 years waiting for new studies and medications, or you can take whatever treatment(s) work today and live a ridiculously higher quality of life.

There are many plausible theories on what causes depression that don’t involve low serotonin. In fact, a drug called Tianeptine is an SSRE—Selective Serotonin Reuptake Enhancer—meaning it works the opposite of SSRIs and it’s as effective for depression. (“SSREs have been demonstrated to be as effective as SSRIs against depression, have a much faster onset of action (immediate), and have a much better tolerability profile”)

Remember that in psychiatry, meds are prescribed based on the patient’s own experiences. Medication is changed, augmented and doses adjusted purely based on how the patient feels. The patient is not tested for having low serotonin or low dopamine. HOW the medication works is irrelevant to most patients and even to most doctors. Doctors may keep up with the latest studies, but to them, their primary goal is making you healthy again.

Let’s look at a scenario:

Jane is depressed. It gets worse over the years, to the point where she lost her job and cannot emotionally work anymore. She’s overwhelmed and chronically fatigued, and cannot bring herself to do much anymore. Just taking out the trash feel’s like a hard day’s work, and most of her time is spent surfing the net or asleep. She can see her life turning to shit day by day, but cannot muster up enough motivation and enthusiasm to do anything about it. She may not be suicidal, but death by atrophy or homelessness is preferred to the efforts of living.

She has friends that insist that prayer, exercise, “going out” and so forth will cure her depression. Jane likes her friends but takes her advice with a grain of salt. They’ve obviously not been depressed, otherwise how do they expect a depressed person to go out and exercise? When you’re overwhelmed, there’s a feeling that there are far bigger things to worry about and philosophize over than going out to exercise.

Things get so bad that Jane considers seeing a doctor. She feels somewhat embarrassed but knows that it’s for her own good.

Jane begins taking Prozac (or Zoloft or Celexa or any other SSRI) and feels even worse for the first 2-3 weeks. She expects this and remains persistent in taking her meds. She wakes up one morning and things begin looking up. Things are different, though she can’t quite put her finger on why. Things aren’t as bad as she had been seeing them the past few months. Living may not feel easy, but it certainly feels feasible. She gets out of bed and her house and room look different. When did it become such a mess? When did she stop caring about the stench coming from the piles of laundry all over her room? Did breakfast always taste this good? She steps outside and notices how beautiful the world is. Trees, people running about, a breeze of fresh air, was the world always like this? Just last week this same scene was monochrome. Today it’s vivid.

Now would it really matter to Jane if the chemical imbalance theory is wrong? If she were to pick up a newspaper that says in bold “Scientists Prove Low Serotonin is NOT the Cause of Depression” would that suddenly make Jane’s world monochrome again?

Jane may feel great and then one day decide to stop taking the meds. Her life goes to shit within 3-6 months. When she starts the medication again, her life is fixed, again. That’s all that really matters to Jane.

Whether the Prozac helps her depression by inducing neurogenesis (growing new neurons,) increasing serotonin, reducing the damage caused by cytokines (stress), whether it’s a placebo, or whether it signals for Zeus to zap Jane’s brain with a lightening bolt, none of that matters. Jane probably doesn’t care how Aspirin, Penicillin, her Ipod or her microwave works. These serve functions to Jane, much like the function to live offered by her anti-depressants.

Spend at least $10+ buying something you really want to eat. The healthier, more expensive, more ethnic – and anything else that may make it easier to justify eating the meal, the better.

Buy this meal, prepare it, unpack it, etc, and then have it sitting in front of you. Oh, and don’t eat it. Just sit.

DO NOT taste any part of the meal. Don’t even taste the ketchup packets.

DO NOT eat anything for the next 8 hours.

DO notice the smell and freshness of it.

DO make note of every justification you’re coming up with. (See list below)

Remember that this is a test of self-control, not healthiness, finances, or anything else. The cost of the meal is the cost of the experiment, not “a waste of money.” Yes there are starving kids in Africa, but when did you give a shit?

This will likely take a few tries, but try to 1up the last meal you failed to resist.

Justifications that may be going through your mind:

• I’m wasting money
• I’m wasting food
• My mom/Gods told me never to throw food out.
• I never tried food from this place
• I never tried this dish/item
• I’m gonna be awake for a long time so I should eat
• I’m hungry. It’s not healthy not to eat
• I need protein (or carbs, or fats, or calories, …)
• I have dry mouth (water is OK but don’t fill yourself up)
• I’m afraid of getting an ulcer (or some other medical condition)
• I just drank coffee, alcohol or <insert other drug>, it’s better if I eat something with these drugs
• I don’t have self-control, who cares?
• I’ll try this again some other time
• Just a bite (1 bite is justified same way as entire meal)

Notice that in the back of your mind, the goal that you will eat the food will remain. What’s stopping you from eating the food is your search for a reasonable justification. The point of the task is to stop this searching and just accept the unwanted end result – no soup for you.

There are no benefits to freaking out. None. Deep breath and a slow exhale.

When you don’t feel like doing something, you may decide to take a nap, or postpone the task to a later day (most likely tomorrow). This seems like sound logic, but it usually disregards the fact that when the time comes to actually do the task, you will not feel anymore desire to do it than, than you did the time you postponed the task. And you will likely postpone it again.

There are situations in which putting things off is OK, or even the best solution at the time (i.e., too drunk, etc), but most of the time, you might be postponing something simply because you haven’t given it much thought yet and have no idea where to begin. The task seems overwhelming, or because the task just provides no immediate pleasure.

“I’m too tired” and “I’ll take a nap” are excellent excuses because we imagine waking up refreshed, energetic and ready to take on anything. This is almost never the case. In fact, when I have a lot of things piled up from the prior week, I definitely don’t want to get out of bed. This becomes worse when more todo-list items, especially ones of high priority, are all reaching their deadlines or are already past due.

Always give tasks a thought on what the exact steps required are to complete the task, and about how long it will take, before postponing it. If it takes less than 10 minutes, why not do it right than and there? It will end up taking much longer than 10 minutes if you’re going to postpone it multiple times and potentially suffer a consequence.

An analogy would be being too lazy to login to pay your credit card bill, but all the while worrying about it, and finally getting a late fee and lower credit score.

(Cleaning and cleaning up in this paper are used interchangeably to refer to restoring a unit or environment to how it was prior to starting a task, including but not limited to water+soap cleaning, such as doing the dishes.)

Cleaning up sucks. It can stop you from starting an otherwise fun project because you don’t want to bother with the clean up. Unfortunately, it’s a necessity — one that many people would never learn to just accept and do without whining. It’s one of those are things that just have to be (done).

Cleaning up is actually a manly thing to do. A major aspect of being a man entails putting emotions aside and doing whatever task needs to be done. Being able to stop yourself from thinking how awful and ‘worthless’ cleaning up might be – whether done in a whiny fashion in which you bitch about how annoying cleaning up is, or done in a state in which you envision devising some clever way to avoid cleaning up: A business plan, an innovation, or any philosophical or logically correct idea – will almost always result in you just getting up and doing the work anyway.

The thought that you have to clean up is easier to accept effortlessly if you tie it into each task you’re doing. It might take 2 minutes to cook Ramen noodles, but it would be erroneous to tell yourself that eating will only take 2 minutes. Though the noodles need to remain in the water for 2 minutes before they are ready, the entire process from opening the cupboard to finishing the dishes takes much longer.

Keeping the entire process from start to finish in mind before you begin will make it easier to quickly accept and finish up anything that needs to be done afterwards. But besides that, cleaning up is actually pretty cool sometimes. Quality cleanliness is an art. Anyone can wiggle a plate left and right under running water and say they did the dishes, but being able to use an efficient amount of water (and no more), the right amount of soap/solution, and devise methods for making finishing the task easier or more efficient, takes practice. And it shows, as you will learn if you live with somebody who’s impatient or simply doesn’t put much effort into cleaning up

It’s something we know deep down but continue to ignore and try to find alternatives for, sort of like physical exercise. We look for tips, shortcuts, medicine to take, people to copy and people to push us. Ultimately, all the experience, wisdom, knowledge we gain, and all the self-help books, will lead us to this same conclusion: Just Do It – it’s the only mantra you need.

Knowing this, begin looking for an answer not on how to be more productive (I just told you how), but on why you avoid things that aren’t enjoyable right now. It’s because you’re not future oriented, and it’s the same reason you don’t exercise on a regular basis. The kids who sat in the back of the class in junior high school and didn’t do any work probably had the same problem. Imagine you’re teaching them why they should suck it up and go to class, and then use the same thing you tell them to motivate yourself to suck it up and just do what needs to be done, right now.

Imagine taking a camcorder and recording yourself for 24 hours on an ordinary day. You could actually get hold of a camera and do this, but this may be difficult as batteries don’t last longer than a few hours, and your camera might not be portable enough to be practical in some situations (mounting it while driving, walking around with it, etc). Just visualizing this scenario works just as well if you put thought and effort into it.

Imagine this in third person; You seeing yourself from the outside, and with no audio (and if you actually do record, play it back on mute).

Your camera is positioned toward your bed and begins recording as soon as you’re up in the morning – up as in conscious, not necessarily fully out of bed. What would you see next? Some people get up right away, but most probably remain in bed fully awake for awhile, pondering the universe and their existence.

Now you go through your morning routine (SSS: shit / shower / shave), and eat, or not. Assuming you sit on the computer to work, what would you see yourself doing? Maybe pausing in between work, browsing random sites, just staring at the screen not doing much.

Imagine the rest of your ordinary day. If you’re a thinker, most of your life only happens in your head. On a muted video, you’re sitting around not doing much, but at that moment in your head, countless thoughts, ideas, worries, and emotions and imagery are happening, and you might not realize that to the rest of the world, you’re just standing still. No action is being taken, and you can finally see why hours go by without much work getting done.