A question that has been asked before, and so may be stupid: What concrete examples are there of gains from CfAR training (or self-study based on LessWrong)? These would have to come in the form of very specific examples, preferably quantitative.

E.g. "I was $100,000 in debt and unemployed for 2 years, and now I have employment earning twice what I ever have before and am out of debt."

"I never had a relationship that lasted more than 2 months, but now am happily married."

"My grade point average went up from 2.2 to 3.8"

"After struggling to diet and exercise for years, I finally got on track and am now in the best shape of my life."

etc.

In the future, I will treat large blocks of free time as being a potential risk, and make sure to fill them up with productive activities.

A few years ago I wasted three continuous months of completely free time just by reading internet. These days it's like: "oh, I wish I had a week just for myself and my plans". But yeah, I am afraid of what a lot of free time could possibly do again. Which is why I wish only for one week, not three months. Problem is, it is technically much easier to get three months (quit the job, find a new one three months later) than one additional week of vacation.

instead I do the easiest, laziest thing instead, which usually means browsing the internet.

The important thing is to realize that you cannot solve this problem without learning to avoid internet. So make that your #1 priority, and focus on it fully.

I tried something similar recently, and now I only read internet on weekends. Even that feels like too much; I should try to make it just one day of the weekend. (Previous diaries: here and here, 5 weeks already.)

swearing every night that I would totally be a different person, berating myself when I failed, using physical impediments to prevent myself from failing (...) keeping a journal in which I listed (...) why goals were not being met

The thing that all these strategies have in common is that they are attempting to promote the positive emotion.

Are you serious? What exactly is the positive emotion of berating yourself? If you really mean it, I guess you simply have no idea about what a positive emotion feels like.

one concept that stood out to me was this idea that happiness doesn't exist; there is simply the absence of negative emotions

Also, chocolate cakes don't exist; there is simply the absence of non-chocolate non-cakes. And it feels really good, trust me.

There is some half-truth in that saying, and it is this: positive and negative emotions don't mix well. If you win a lotery and break your leg at the same time, the pain from the broken leg will probably consume all your attention. Negative emotions can push away the positive ones. Therefore, to be able to focus on the positive emotions, you first have to get rid of the negative ones.

It's like if you want to hear the birds singing, first you have to turn off your radio. But that doesn't mean the singing of the birds is merely the absence of the radio.

When I detect negative thoughts, I will focus all my attention on the sensations I am experiencing present moment, starving the negative emotions of the brainpower they need. (...) The way to prevent your mind from thinking unwanted thoughts is to focus your mind so intently on another, different thought that there is no space left for the first thought.

That feels to me like instead of turning off the radio, you turn on the TV even louder. And then you don't hear the radio. (But you also don't hear the birds. But that's okay, because they don't really exist; they are just the absence of the radio.)

Again, there is some good part in this: Not focusing on the negative thoughts, not repeating them... that's good. If it helps to reduce their frequency, do it. I just feel there should also be some cognitive component in this, like: understanding why those negative thoughts are wrong, or at least useless.

Last time I posted on one of these rationality journals it was about 9 months ago. I said I was going to go on a couple month long bike trip. I'd been having a lot of trouble setting and meeting goals, and after failing so many important goals ended up pretty depressed, so I decided to just not set goals anymore and just peddle my bike for a while.

My bike trip ended up being just three days, as I got bored rather quickly. It turns out that just biking all day was not as mentally stimulating as I had hoped it would be. The bike trip wasn't a complete waste; biking to the ocean has been a life goal of mine, and I finally pulled it off. Also, I got lots and lots of exercise, which helped with my depression. Finally, I slept in a ditch on the side of the road, something I have never done before. I no longer fear being homeless. If you have food in your stomach, a warm coat, a place where you can rest undisturbed, and a deep exhaustion that makes worrying about social conventions impossible, it turns out that the rest of life will take care of itself. Of course, I was biking through a rural area, so that made sleeping undisturbed a lot easier. The other big thing was the ocean. Oceans and libraries always settle the thoughts in my head.

After all that, I went home and got a job. They don't pay me much, but on the plus side expectations and stress are very low.

I went from generally depressed to generally happy all at once, when I got that low stress job I previously mentioned. It turns out that spending several months sending out tons of job applications, getting exactly 0 responses, and then having LOTS of free time to stew in your thoughts is not healthy. In the future, I will treat large blocks of free time as being a potential risk, and make sure to fill them up with productive activities.

I've had "find meaningful tasks to occupy my time" as a life goal since about age 7 or so, though back then I phrased it as "don't be apathetic". Basically, I want to be the sort of person who goes out and does things and has an interesting and meaningful life, but instead I do the easiest, laziest thing instead, which usually means browsing the internet. Up until now, my strategies have included (starting with my first strategy and ending in my last) praying to god to change me, swearing every night that I would totally be a different person, berating myself when I failed, using physical impediments to prevent myself from failing, reading lots of books about reason and psychology and keeping a journal in which I listed things like goals and reasons why goals were not being met, and using mind altering drugs to chemically force the emotions I wanted. All these plans failed, and as you can likely imagine by the time I was willing to use the mind altering chemicals I was pretty desperate and upset.

The thing that all these strategies have in common is that they are attempting to promote the positive emotion. I read some books on meditation, and one concept that stood out to me was this idea that happiness doesn't exist; there is simply the absence of negative emotions. Remove all negative emotions, and you will discover that you are happy. My new strategy is that I am going to practice removing negative emotions. When I detect negative thoughts, I will focus all my attention on the sensations I am experiencing present moment, starving the negative emotions of the brainpower they need. It's like that old question; "Quick, think of anything other than white elephants!". The way to prevent your mind from thinking unwanted thoughts is to focus your mind so intently on another, different thought that there is no space left for the first thought. Poof! White elephant gone.

My new plan for "find meaningful activities to spend my time on" is to meditate until I eliminate the negative emotions that are preventing my from enjoying myself. Once my mind is a place of peace, I will being to naturally enjoy certain activities again, and find them more compelling and interesting then just browsing the internet.

So far this plan seems to be working well, and I have even had some success in starting a meditation habit. I'll report back in a couple months.

...

One last thing; I've often thought that flossing would be a good idea, but was too lazy to bother. Then I learned that the water in my district was not fluoridated, and that mouthwash actually works, so I went and bought some mouthwash. Swishing funny-tasting liquids around my mouth is a lot more fun then dragging a string between my teeth and having it sometimes come back bloody, so I've successfully added "use mouthwash" as a habit. That's neat. And hopefully it'll save on dentist bills. I've had a cavity pretty much every time I visited the dentist for as long as I remember, so if I suddenly stop getting cavities I'll have clear proof that this works.

Reminds me of one of my favorite quotes from the quotes thread.

At home there was a game that all the parents played with their children. It was called, What Did You See? Mara was about Dann’s age when she was first called into her father’s room one evening, where he sat in his big carved and coloured chair. He said to her, ‘And now we are going to play a game. What was the thing you liked best today?’

At first she chattered: ‘I played with my cousin . . . I was out with Shera in the garden . . . I made a stone house.’ And then he had said, ‘Tell me about the house.’ And she said, ‘I made a house of the stones that come from the river bed.’ And he said, ‘Now tell me about the stones.’ And she said, ‘They were mostly smooth stones, but some were sharp and had different shapes.’ ‘Tell me what the stones looked like, what colour they were, what did they feel like.’

And by the time the game ended she knew why some stones were smooth and some sharp and why they were different colours, some cracked, some so small they were almost sand. She knew how rivers rolled stones along and how some of them came from far away. She knew that the river had once been twice as wide as it was now. There seemed no end to what she knew, and yet her father had not told her much, but kept asking questions so she found the answers in herself. Like, ‘Why do you think some stones are smooth and round and some still sharp?’ And she thought and replied, ‘Some have been in the water a long time, rubbing against other stones, and some have only just been broken off bigger stones.’ Every evening, either her father or her mother called her in for What Did You See? She loved it. During the day, playing outside or with her toys, alone or with other children, she found herself thinking, Now notice what you are doing, so you can tell them tonight what you saw.

She had thought that the game did not change; but then one evening she was there when her little brother was first asked, What Did You See? and she knew just how much the game had changed for her. Because now it was not just What Did You See? but: What were you thinking? What made you think that? Are you sure that thought is true?

When she became seven, not long ago, and it was time for school, she was in a room with about twenty children – all from her family or from the Big Family – and the teacher, her mother’s sister, said, ‘And now the game: What Did You See?’

Most of the children had played the game since they were tiny; but some had not, and they were pitied by the ones that had, for they did not notice much and were often silent when the others said, ‘I saw . . .’, whatever it was. Mara was at first upset that this game played with so many at once was simpler, more babyish, than when she was with her parents. It was like going right back to the earliest stages of the game: ‘What did you see?’ ‘I saw a bird.’ ‘What kind of a bird?’ ‘It was black and white and had a yellow beak.’ ‘What shape of beak? Why do you think the beak is shaped like that?’

Then she saw what she was supposed to be understanding: Why did one child see this and the other that? Why did it sometimes need several children to see everything about a stone or a bird or a person?

Doris Lessing, "Mara and Dann"

I haven't read The Four Hour Work Week, but I have read The Motivation Hacker by Nick Winters, and haven't been able to move beyond attempts at success spirals and enforcing work times by disconnecting the internet. Mostly, I think of the most powerful motivators he mentions to require the kind of precommitment that could be quite costly if you fail, and given my financial situation and personal history regarding doing what I plan to do, I would be hard pressed to bet more than $10 that I'll accomplish any given task in a given interval.

Basically, he had some starting capital and a few reliable allies when he set out on his high-productivity mission. I tend to expect that, had I either, I would be accomplishing much more.

The idea, of course, is to make failure so costly that one can't help but succeed. I have a much more pessimistic view on how my brain works. Putting something costly enough to truly hurt up as collateral seems likely to motivate me to want to work, not enough to actually work. (Something similar to this happened in late 2010, and I was even on Focalin at the time, and all it managed to accomplish was making me so miserable that I switched from Focalin to Prozak by the end of the month. It was not as high-stakes as the sorts of things I was imagining trying, but it did manage to ruin something I'd been planning for about a year without accomplishing anything.) I suspect that if I tried Beeminder, I'd lose all the money I've made in the past 1.25 years pretty quickly. (All the money I've made comes down to about $300, minus some software upgrades.)

You're living the dream. That's amazing, and I don't want to do anything to discount that. You've done well in breaking your previous bad habits, and I think you certainly are smart and dedicated pull this off. What are your plans for sleep, weather, thieves, and explaining the job history gap? Improvising is half of what makes runs like that exciting, but it's probably better to have a plan in advance for the more predictable issues. Just because there is a plan doesn't mean you have to stick to it.

Your failure mode sounds a lot like what I just got out of doing, and yours is a more coherent explanation of why I can't do college right now than I've managed to articulate. You go [insert appropriate gender noun]! Your bike ride sounds similar to the fantasy I had about packing up (Well, mosting throwing away) everything I own and driving off to see more exciting places. I'd say the bike is a better idea because it provides a focus for your energy and gas is expensive, but I really do appreciate having a steady place to sleep and guard myself from weather's whims.

I'm currently stuck somewhere between 1 and 2. My job doesn't take much effort on my part, but I've become increasingly aware that it does take a good amount of time out of my day that I could be spending on things I actually want to do.

Getting a job, like hotel night clerk, that doesn't require much effort on my part, so I can explore my interests on the side

If you decide to go this route, I would strongly recommend looking for something where you can multitask exploring your interests with working. As hamnox mentions, a job can eat up a lot of time, even if it doesn't require much effort. Hotel night clerk sounds like a pretty multitaskable job, but be careful about the negative effects of working night shift (my understanding is that you can counteract these by carefully managing how much light you're exposed to during the rest of the day).

Out of curiosity, what other interests do you hope to pursue?

My current life plan, which revolved around graduating college, failed miserably, so I ditched it. I'm going to bike about a 1000 miles, then reassess why what happened happened, and what I'm going to do next.

My current thoughts are as follows; It was a mistake to go to school when I did. I went because I was scared, and didn't really know what to do with my life. I thought college was a good idea because it would buy me time to figure myself out a bit more. Sadly, this only works out if school doesn't make you depressed and apathetic about life. While I'm convinced I picked a good major, possibly even the best one I could have taken, the mistake was thinking that after a lifetime of schooling, my best move was more school. I'm still not sure what I want to do with my life, but I'm no longer concerned about failing. Been there, done that. I wish I could have learned the lesson some faster, cheaper way though.

While in college, I thought I could fix my grades by being more disciplined, by having a schedual, by cutting bad influences out of my life, and by having fun hobbies that engaged and interested me. This didn't work. What happens is I have to do something I dislike, which I do, and ends with me being depressed and apathetic about doing anything other than mindlessly browsing the internet and playing video games. As a result, I don't socialize or do an interesting hobby, and so when I do that difficult, annoying task again, I come away just a little bit more apathetic and depressed. This continues until the apathy builds up enough that instead of doing the unpleasant task, I procrastinate instead. So the task doesn't get done, I'm just as apathetic about life since procrastinating doesn't make me happy, plus I'm not happy with myself as a person. The end result is a slow, downward spiral that ends with me endlessly browsing the internet and not talking to anyone.

I thought I was depressed, and if I could just find the right drug (coffee, mild anti-depressents, modafinil, that sort of thing) I would become motivated to do things I dislike. This also failed. Chemicals may help, but cannot be the main source of happyness/motivation. In retrospect, this seems obvious.

As for the future, the way I see it my options are:

1: Getting a job, like hotel night clerk, that doesn't require much effort on my part, so I can explore my interests on the side without getting stuck in that cycle of depression, lack of motivation, procrastination, and frustration with myself. This is the most likely outcome.

2: Be paid to do what other people want me to do, and hope I learn/am able to enjoy the work. This was my original life plan. I am currently avoiding this route, at least in the short term.

3: Create my own job by doing fulfilling work and finding people willing to pay for it. This remains a distant dream. That said, I am now much more willing to make the sort of sacrifices required for this to happen.

4: Go back to college. NO. But maybe in 5 years.

My goal for this bike ride is to do what I should have done before going to college; be totally free and financially independent. Carry everything I want and need in my life on my bike. Want to spend a day biking from nowhere to nowhere? Go for it. Want to spend the day in the library? Sure. Sleep anywhere? Of course; cars and houses are for chumps caught in the rat race. No deadlines (at least till the money runs low), no expectations, no goals other than the arbitrary one of reaching a certain physical location on my bike at some date in the distant future.

I should also make some friends, as my standard reaction to stress is to isolate myself. This is often a bad idea.

I'll re-evaluate all this 1000 miles or so from now.

For as long as I can remember, I have suffered from a lack of motivation. Trying to understand and fix this aspect of myself has been my project for the past several years. The following are my attempts to find a source of motivation.

Fear: Doesn't work. At first, the fear of getting a C in a class was enough to get me to study. Then it was the fear of failing the class. Then it was the fear of failing out of college entirely, which nearly happened. I gave up on this strategy two years ago.

Creating an environment that encourages productivity: I am severely lacking in whatever personality aspect allows other people to do things they dislike, with the result that instead of doing the thing I disliked, I'd browse the internet. I tried to treat this by blocking the internet, leaving the laptop at home, and things of that sort, but all these strategies backfired, as I just found other ways to waste my time. Like staring out the window and daydreaming. Other strategies, like time and task management programs, I just ignored. That's not to say that creating a positive environment is useless; It does work to some extent. Just not well enough. I moved on to the next strategy one year ago.

Behavior modification: It was around this time that I joined less wrong and read a great many books on how the mind works. One comment about a person on this website using nicotine gum to reinforce positive habits caught my eye, and I have since done a great deal with nootropics and the like since then. Also started meditation, and journaling, in an attempt to understand myself better. This strategy has been the most successful by far. By this point I had built up some very strong negative associations with school, and would characterize myself as depressed. Journaling helped me to see these issues, and meditation and careful use of mood altering substances allowed me to dispel these issues. A reductionist model of my moods ("My current stress is just a symptom of a lack of GABA"), a strong understanding of how habits and mood work, in addition to mediation has allowed me to halt negatively reinforcing emotions by "seeing-through" them.

So this is my current situation. While I've gotten rid of my bad habits and thoughts, I have yet to replace them with good ones. I spend less time on the internet, and the time I do waste isn't quite as wasted as it used to be, but I'm not reading the books I want to read. I'm not writing the code for the game I want to write. I'm not writing the fantasy story I want to write. And most importantly, I'm not studying enough for the classes I need to study for.

With this in mind, my current strategy is two-fold.

First, treat myself as being mildly depressed due to being unable to find enjoyment in activities that I ought to enjoy. This is a change from my previous view, which is that nothing is wrong with things like being unable to enjoy doing well at school, and that enjoying this sort of success is simply not in my nature. I've ordered St. John's Wort, a mild anti-depressant, which I will be taking soon. I am not expecting much out of this experiment, but it only cost me $8 and a bit of time spent reading about depression, so I think it's worth a shot.

Second, to continue working on using behavior modification type stuff. Record whenever I meet a goal, and why ("It seems the internet and video games suck my will to study, while fascinating books, less wrong and writing restore it.") Continue writing in my journal, encouraging myself to build discipline and good habits, not being upset when I fail and rewarding myself when I succeed. Sharing my progress in the rationality journal. Telling myself I will not give up. That sort of thing.

Done it twice so far, using this as a guide. Fell asleep both times. That said, it was a positive experience, and I plan to make it a habit. Really helped be more aware of how easily distracted I am, and how often my minds runs in tracks, thinking the same thoughts again and again.