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John_Maxwell_IV comments on Deregulating Distraction, Moving Towards the Goal, and Level Hopping - Less Wrong
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Do you have any recollection of how you entered this state? Do you remember what it was like to not be this way and how you might have changed?
A bit, yeah. The previous post was supposed to shed some light on this. I used to attach lots of guilt to "unproductive" activity, and I lack the ability to gain long-term satisfaction from these activities. This wasn't a particularly healthy period in my life, but it led me to a schedule where I was at least a little bit productive on a regular basis for a long time. Even after removing the accompanying guilt, I maintain the schedule and I must be productive if I want satisfaction. This goes a long way towards trusting that System 1 will keep making progress without System 2 needing to act as a shepherd.
Thats not the whole answer, though: there's a bit of mindhacking involved, and I have a particularly intense personality. I'll cover these in more detail in the upcoming posts.
I kind of wonder whether taking caffeine or other more interesting stimulants might be a good way to shift ones personality to be more driven & determined... during the most effective periods of my life, I was taking lots of stimulants, and I would be pretty driven even when I wasn't caffeinated. Seems to get me in the habit of thinking strategically and punching through aversions somehow.
I haven't experienced any personality changes of this kind from long-term stimulant use.
A hypothesis about what happened to you: while the stimulants were effective, you got stuff done, which allowed you to shift your whole self-image towards "someone who gets stuff done", thus resulting in a personality change as an indirect effect.
I tried caffeine in early 2011, in the form of plain coffee no more frequently than every third day (so as to avoid building up tolerance/addiction). It seemed to help, but I don't recall any strong evidence that it was better than placebo (and I typically just followed it up by spending the entire time of effect at a piano, which succeeded in getting people to approach me, but not much else).
This came after I'd been on Prozac for a couple months (again, effects may or may not have outperformed placebo, but was weaker than caffeine), which came after a few weeks' trial of Focalin (which appeared to help a ton at 5mg, then stopped being helpful when I went up to 10mg, and wasn't nearly as effective when I went back down to 5mg, which sounds like evidence that the first bit was placebo).