For naturally struggling people, the main motivation for behavior is the need to get away from bad things. If you give them a productivity or self-help technique, they might apply it to get rid of their largest problems... and then, when the biggest source of pain is gone, they momentarily don't have anything major to flee from, so they lose their motivation to apply the technique. To keep using the technique, they'd need to have positive motivation that'd make them want to do things instead of just not wanting to do things.

This is actually only one of three things that stop naturally struggling people from successfully applying self-help techniques on an ongoing basis.

The first of the other two is simply that, if you're trying to use a self-help technique in order to get away from something, then you are simply perpetuating the negative motivation, so you're still in an essentially struggling state. (I was stuck like that for years.)

Explaining the second requires an explanation about the "mental muscles" concept, but to save time I'll just give a cross-reference and an example. A mental muscle is essentially my term for Marvin Minsky's concept of a brain "resource" (described in his book, "The Emotion Machine"). Examples of mental muscles might be, "explaining how things work" or "figuring out the right answer". In other words, a mental muscle is the brain circuitry that implements a kind of thinking strategy.

Anyway, naturally struggling people tend to favor certain of these patterns at the expense of others, or use them in counterproductive ways. For example, people who spent most of their lives being rewarded for figuring out right answers, and punished for doing things they "don't know how to do yet", will have difficulty applying self-help techniques because they will not want to proceed until they know enough.

However, a fundamental requirement of both positively-motivating techniques and techniques for fixing negative motivations, is that they require you to be curious, and ask yourself questions to which you do not currently know the answer (at least consciously). This can be supremely unsettling to a person who's terrified of not-knowing.

In the “pain brain” mode… this, by the way, is the main reason why people procrastinate, this is the fundamental reason why people put off doing things… because once your brain has one of these crisis overrides it will go, “Okay conserve energy: don’t do anything.”

This was my thinking circa 2008 or so; I have a more refined model of akrasia in general now.

So I would qualify the above quote now by saying that chronic procrastination is almost always the result of a perceived SASS threat (another concept I didn't have yet in '08) associated with the procrastinated task or its outcome. That is, in rough order of frequency:

• A threat associated with failure to complete the task in some way
• A threat associated with successful completion of the task
• A threat associated with the task itself

This may be influenced by selection bias, since people tend to self-select out of the third category before they can become my clients. Either you figure it out pretty easily, or you just avoid getting into situations where you'll have that kind of task. (For example, if you're terrified of initiating conversation with strangers, you probably won't look for a job in door-to-door sales.)

By "SASS threat", btw, I mean specifically that your brain is predicting a situation that it expects to cause a reduction in Status, Affiliation, Safety, or Stimulation below your learned-safe reference levels.

Most of these threat predictions are completely bogus in the modern world, and in any case tend to be based on generalizations from childhood that might be bogus even in the ancestral environment. (The brain prefers to err on the side of safety, though.) They can be cleared up by relatively simple self-reflective techniques to get the emotional brain to notice that they're bogus. (Our brains don't have automatic garbage collection, so they don't re-verify beliefs onece learned, unless it happens situationally. Through reflection, you can easily cause yourself to update, though.)

Another of Eby's theses is that negative motivation is, for the most part, impossible to overcome via willpower.... Therefore attempts to overcome procrastination or akrasia via willpower expenditure are fundamentally misguided.

It would probably be more accurate to say that willpower is negative motivation, or at any rate, a correlate of it. If you are using (what most people call) willpower on an ongoing basis, this is prima facie evidence that you are already being negatively motivated in that moment.

Positive motivation isn't willpower - you just do something you want. And if you didn't have any motivation, you wouldn't be motivated to use willpower, either! Ergo, if you're using willpower, you're responding to a perceived threat, even if you consciously dress it in more socially-acceptable terminology.

For example, instead of "I'm afraid my parents will yell at me or throw me out", our social "far" brain will say, "I want to be a better student and get good grades". And instead of, "I'm afraid people won't like me because I'm an ugly fat loser", it says, "I want to get fit."

This means it's critical to separate these self-deceiving positive spins from your actual threat-based motivation, in order to actually switch off the negative motivation.

In contrast to negative motivation, positive motivation is basically just doing things because you find them fun. Watching movies, playing video games, whatever.

Um, no. Fun is fun. Motivation is the desire to have something good. If I'm hungry, anticipating cooking a nice meal, thinking, "oooh.... I can almost taste it now...", THAT's positive motivation. I may or may not have "fun" making the meal, but I will be positively motivated throughout.

That's an important distinction -- you can easily be positively motivated in the absence of any fun whatsoever.

(Needless to say, these are the endpoints in a spectrum, so it's not like you're either 100% struggling or 100% successful.)

One other refinement I've made since 2008 is that the concept of mental muscles makes it easier to see that being struggling or motivated is a function of which thought processes you're using at a given point in time. At one point, I was under the mistaken belief that there was some sort of switch that got flipped to move you from one to the other, or something to turn on or off semi-permanently.

Now, though, I realize that some of the thinking processes involved in "struggling" are useful in some contexts and not in others. It's a matter of learning which mental muscles are situationally appropriate, and using the ones that help, while relaxing the ones that don't. For example, "finding flaws in advance" is a useful strategy if you have to pass a test or build a bridge -- it's not so useful if your goal is to, say, learn to play a musical instrument, where your flaws can't be known until after you begin making attempts.

So, I now consider "naturally struggling" to simply mean "habitually using the wrong mental muscles for the job at hand, creating self-defeating results".