AdeleneDawner comments on Working hurts less than procrastinating, we fear the twinge of starting - Less Wrong

142 Post author: Eliezer_Yudkowsky 02 January 2011 12:15AM

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Comment author: shokwave 02 January 2011 12:19:16AM *  7 points [-]

being in the middle of doing the work is usually less painful than being in the middle of procrastinating.

Upvoted for this. How had I not figured that out yet?

edit:

reliably solvable problems which reliably deliver experienced jolts of positive reinforcement ... playing a good computer game may do this

Ah. This goes some way towards clearing up my confusion regarding such matters. Whether I was rested after resting always seemed so chaotic to me.

Comment author: AdeleneDawner 02 January 2011 01:38:51AM *  12 points [-]

Whether I was rested after resting always seemed so chaotic to me.

Also notable - at least if you're autistic, but this probably applies to neurotypical people as well - is that the kind of mental energy that you have available to spend on resting - and thus the kind of restful activity that will actually result in a gain in energy - can vary over time. For example, I may find music restful one day, and find the exact same music exhausting to listen to the next, even if I'm equally tired in a general sense on both days. My theory is that this correlates with what other tasks I've been doing recently (though not in the sense that doing a lot of auditory processing will lead me to 'run out' of that kind of energy - more in the sense that if I've been doing nothing that involves auditory processing, that brainbit turns off, and can't be effectively used for recreation), but I haven't tracked the relevant things well enough yet to do more than speculate.

Comment author: AdeleneDawner 03 January 2011 12:16:31AM 1 point [-]

I take it from the upvotes that this is a way of thinking about mental abilities that resonates with people and is novel enough to be useful? Should I write more? I've been poking at the 'chaos' of my brain's variable usefulness at various tasks for a good few years now; if it's a topic of interest I can devote a bit more effort to that for a while and try to come up with a post on it.