Other options:
- Writing a to-do list. If the tasks on the list are too daunting, break them apart into smaller tasks.
- Changing location to an unfamiliar place. The less familiar the better. The changed context often makes motivation easier (not sure whether this helps other people).
W.r.t. maintaining a to-do list, I've noticed that, for me, at this time in my life (the last year or so), seldomly referencing a to-do has aided me in more quickly getting my work finished (both at my job and with my projects). As a result of seldomly referencing (looking at / thinking about) the to-do list, my behavior surrounding task completion has changed: I now pause, think of a task, and then decide to do the task, knowing that while I am doing this task I am getting closer to my end, whereas previously I could not be doing any task with often thinking about the other tasks remaining on the to-do list. Of late, there is just me and the task at hand, with very rare planning sessions, usually on the order of every 2-4 weeks where I reference a to-do list.
Historically, I've maintained long to-do lists, sorted by urgency and importance. Oftentimes I would go back and forth between tasks, i.e. task-switching, within the same day. To counter this, I would maintain another to-do list (keeping the longer one away), where this one I'd keep before me during my tasks, with a single written task, which I would cross out once completed. Despite these methods (the "backlog" and the one-task-at-a-time list), I found that, at times, the existence of these to-do lists resulted in my mind frequently reciting their items, and this recitation was enough to pull me away from the task at hand.
I've not attempted to quantitatively measure my productivity, so I do not have metrics to coincide with the aforementioned change in productivity.
This method is interesting to me and I'd like to get into it someday. Personally I keep finding that whenever I decline to write something down, that one thing will come back to bite me a few days later (because I'd forgotten it). Do you find that you're able to mentally keep track of things better than before, even if they're just vaguely in the back of your mind?
So far I've not had this issue (i.e, ...that one thing will come back to bite me a few days later...) with my obligations but have had it with some private projects. Infrequently referencing my obligations in to-do list format allows them to stress me adequately, as they occur first on my mind and aren't detracted from by the gravity of the other tasks I have, which would be easily visible and "present" if on a nearby to-do list.
Having a complex task system containing both job-related obligations and private work tasks somewhat deprioritizes the job-related obligations for me [1], relative to how I believe most people might prioritize their job-related obligations, and the near absence of my multiple to-do lists has allowed me, of late, to "calibrate my stress" (the levels of stress I mention here are not severe).
Do you find that you're able to mentally keep track of things better than before...
I am better mentally able to keep track of job-related obligations (which, for the time being and as far as I've surmised, are more important than my private projects / tasks) but less able to remember private project tasks. The magnitude of a task that comes to mind naturally is felt more strongly than if I had proceeded through the same task from a list. I've been tackling tasks that cause me higher levels of stress sooner.
Why? I expect that I have more trouble than is average separating "job" versus "non-job" work, meaning that how much I value one over the other oscillates. ↩︎
Writing a to-do list.
Step zero: Prepare a pen and pencil, so that you can put things on your to-do list when you remember them.
I previously think I overvalued the model in which laziness/motivation/mood are primarily internal states that required internal solutions. For me, this model also generated a lot of guilt because failing to be productive was a personal failure.
But is the problem a lack of "willpower" or is your brain just operating sub-optimally because you're making a series of easily fixable health blunders?
Are you eating healthy?
Are you consuming large quantities of sugar?
Are you sleeping with your phone on your bedside table?
Are you deficient in any vitamins?
Is you sleep trash because you have been consuming alcohol?
Are you waking up at a consistent time?
Are you doing at least some exercise?
I find time spent addressing this and other similar deficits is usually more productive than trying to think your way out of a laziness spiral.
None of this is medical advice. My experience may not be applicable to you. Do your own research. I ate half a tub of ice cream 30 minutes ago.
2I agree, but I'd lump all of that into "Analyze the circumstances that caused it". Maybe I should've included more external examples like these
“My experience may not be applicable to you.”
Thanks for the note - my experience has been exactly the opposite. A classic case of the law of equal and opposite advice :)
Another option after acknowledging the spiral is giving yourself 30 minutes to do nothing, and doing a Gendlin’s Focusing / IFS parts work with your emotional fatigue during that time. Perhaps laziness is guilt from not doing things in the last day or two. Perhaps it’s a symptom of long-term mental exhaustion. Either way, if you manage to find the time and are skilled enough in it, that’s one of the best ways to at the very least better understand what’s happening. In some cases, if it’s a very recent emotion, you can even become motivated and productive again in half an hour.
Sleep is a banger reset point for me and therefore doing a nap/yoga nidra and then picking up the day from there if I notice myself avoiding things has been really helpful for me.
Thanks for the post, it was good.
1
Much of this seems quite plausible and matches my experience, but it seems worded slightly overconfidently. Like, maybe 5 to 10% at most. Lots of points where I went, "well, in your experience, you mean. And also, like, in mine. But I don't think either of us know enough to assert this is always how it goes." I've had issues in the past from taking posts like this a bit too seriously when someone sounded highly confident, so I'm just flagging - this seems like a good insight but I'd guess the model as described is less general than it sounds, and I couldn't tell you exactly how much less general off the top of my head.
But also, it's a pattern I've noticed as well, and have found to be incredibly useful to be aware of. So, weak upvoted.
My yakshaving essay seems relevant here. Especially relevant is the vicious cycle of overload/working-hard/not-yakshaving:
Wait for a reset point
Actually, something I do is run toward the next reset point. I know that if I wake up on-time tomorrow having showered and tidied my room, then I'll start the next day well. So I will write off the evening and just give up on my goals today and take melatonin early and make my only goal to start the next day well.
I think I've probably spent the majority of my 42 years of life in a laziness death spiral. ☹️
In other words, aggressively run away from your goals, and reflect on how miserable it is to live that way. The reflection is crucial: if you’re self-forgetful / not mindful about it, you’ll risk staying in that state. Do it for a week or two, reflect on how much it sucks, and in doing so you’ll condition your mind to view the goal as a valuable opportunity to escape that misery (which it is).
When I do this kind of thing, it tends to be called "depressive rumination". Rather than decide "not doing the thing sucks, therefore I should go do the thing", some part of me assumes that "doing the thing" isn't actually an option (because otherwise I would have done it already) and I just stay miserable. On a more general note, I also somehow managed to live for 42 years without gaining the capacity to do something at a time I don't "feel like" doing it, even though a lot of other people tried very hard to instill that capacity in me through force and threats.
In a different context, I once gave a deliberately exaggerated example of one way my motivational system actually works in practice:
Guy with a gun: I'm going to shoot you if you haven't changed the sheets on your bed by tomorrow.
Me: AAH I'M GOING TO DIE IT'S NO GOOD I MIGHT AS WELL SPEND THE DAY LYING IN BED PLAYING VIDEO GAMES BECAUSE I'M GOING TO GET SHOT TOMORROW SOMEONE CALL THE FUNERAL HOME AND MAKE PLANS TELL MY FAMILY I LOVE THEM
Guy with a gun: You know, you could always just... change the sheets?
ME: THE THOUGHT HAS OCCURRED TO ME BUT I'M TOO UPSET RIGHT NOW ABOUT THE FACT THAT I'M GOING TO DIE TOMORROW BECAUSE THE SHEETS WEREN'T CHANGED TO ACTUALLY GO AND CHANGE THEM
The other problem I have is the same one I've had for much of my adult life - I don't know what to do wity my life other than live in a laziness death spiral, because a lot of the common alternatives also seem terrible and I do not know what I want.
You see, 10-year-old me was a hedonist, and probably had a relatively sophisticated philosophy of hedonism for a 10-year-old. He divided the world into "fun", defined as "pleasurable things I do because I choose to, such as play video games", and "work", defined as "anything I'm being forced to do, such as schoolwork or laundry," and his goal in life was to maximize "fun" and minimize "work". He resented school for keeping him away from his video games and thought that having a 40-hour a week job, the way most adults did, must be an even worse fate than being a child in school, because you were still doing "work" on behalf of other people instead of doing the thing that's the most pleasurable, and it takes up even more of your time than school does.
I still have a view of paid employment that equates it with misery and coercion. I don't know how much I can blame my father in particular for this, and I also tried my hardest to avoid internalizing a value system that said that someone who was capable of working for money but preferred not to was a worthless person, but I also spent a long time living under clouds of sentiments like "your parents aren't going to be around to support you forever" and "people who don't work end up homeless and starving" and "people won't respect you for being good at things that don't make money." Instead of working, I spent most of the past 20-ish years as an unpaid family caregiver for sick relatives. I didn't have any close friends I saw in person on a regular basis, and I didn't think Hello, my name is ----, I'm unemployed and live with my parents would actually work on a dating site profile, so I spent a lot of time lonely and feeling bad about myself.
Perhaps ironically, the thing that actually did help me - besides the antidepressant medication I've been on since high school - was when a woman reached out to me online after a brief encounter and ended up becoming my first girlfriend ever and, later, my wife. That was about ten years ago. I couldn't motivate myself on my own behalf, but I could do it for her, and that was enough. Was, because she died last March and I once again am left drifting without a purpose in life. Sigh...
1Personally I don't call this 'laziness' but something more like 'losing agency' or 'losing consciousness' or 'being overhwhelmed'.
I very much appreciate this post, because it strongly resonates with my own experience of laziness and willpower. Reading this post feels less like learning something new and more like an important reminder.
small wins in the present make it easier to get bigger wins in the future.
Mildly interesting: In his biography of Deng Xiaoping, Vogel implies he believed the same:
For his civilian breakthrough in consolidation, Deng chose to focus on a project that would quickly both increase production and inspire others. Ever since his guerrilla days, he had believed in fighting small battles that he was sure to win, as a way of encouraging his troops as they prepared for larger battles. In 1975, many of the factories criticized for failing to meet production targets complained that they lacked adequate supplies. Transportation was an obvious bottleneck. Could a success in transportation provide an early victory that would both increase production and demonstrate possibilities for success in other areas?
What are your natural reset points?
I have a Type A personality and feel that I need to be doing something productive at all times. But this behavior can lead to excessive mental fatigue. To combat my cumulative fatigue, I wrote for myself a list of "Coping mechanisms for stress and ways to recover energy" and posted it in my apartment.
The list:
- Walk or lay down to process my thoughts
- Journal
- Yoga or meditate
- Sunbathe
- Call a friend
- Play piano or guitar
Curated. I think this is a good pair with "Struggling like a Shadowmoth", which motivates me to maintain a locus of control and agency over the world. This post is then like "here's a bunch of tips to get that back when you lose it!". I think some of the advice here is good, and also it would be helpful to me (and so probably others) to think for ourselves what works for us here.
Building on the step of analyzing the circumstances, I find it very helpful to ask the zookeeper question:
If someone was keeping an animal as I am keeping myself, what would I think of them?
"Don't treat people worse than we treat critters" seems like it should be a low bar, but very often failing the zookeeper test goes hand in hand with failing other tests presented to me by the circumstances. But the zookeeper test has concrete answers for how to resume passing it, which are often more actionable than other tasks.
I like having a list of small, useful things to do that tend to pay off in the long run, like:
- go to the grocery store to make sure you have fresh fruits and vegetables
- mediate for 10 minutes
- do pushups and sit ups
- journal for 10 minutes
When my brain feels cluttered, it is nice to have a list of time-boxed simple tasks that don’t require planning or assessment.
Even as I’m caught up in lazy activity, I’m making specific plans to be productive tomorrow.
How? I personally can't really make detailed or good plans during lazy mode
Got a project you’ve been excited about but afraid to start? Don’t even think about it—don’t enjoy the fantasy of it; stop telling your friends about it; pretend you never had that intention in the first place.
In other words, aggressively run away from your goals, and reflect on how miserable it is to live that way. The reflection is crucial: if you’re self-forgetful / not mindful about it, you’ll risk staying in that state. Do it for a week or two, reflect on how much it sucks, and in doing so you’ll condition your mind to view the goal as a valuable opportunity to escape that misery (which it is).
As someone who was diagnosed with adult ADD at age 43 in 2019, I thought I knew how my scumbag brain worked. I have daily conversations with similar minded colleagues at work (we call these our informal therapy sessions), however, what my stimulant medication and these therapy sessions fail to address is motivation! I've read countless text and spoken to many people about ADHD and the fact that medication may help you to focus on a task once you start it - but it's curing the "getting started" part that is extremely individualistic. Many people will give tips on how to solve this problem, but until now, none of them have ever come close to addressing my own internal demons.
What I read on this page today was the magical silver bullet for me. The longer I read, the more tick boxes I checked for my individual circumstances. Better still, having read the solutions provided, I found myself nodding instead of poo pooing them, testing them against my internal monologue of "nah, that won't work for me", and finding that almost ALL of them have come back with positive reactions. This is a first!
In short, I am incredibly happy that I stumbled upon your website today. At age 48, the huge "project" that I have been excitedly telling everyone about is for me to gain a professional certification which is incredibly difficult (and expensive) to obtain. Work have paid the full cost of this venture for me, and I have told everyone that'll listen about how I intend to pass the exam - and that is the fantasy of it. I've spent the past 45 days procrastinating instead of knuckling down with the study review. Nothing has worked...but I can already feel that some of your solutions will be successful, namely the piece "aggressively run away from your goals, and reflect on how miserable it is to live that way". I can actually feel that this reflection technique, combined with some of the Natural recovery methods, will drag me out of this rut! ❤
I enjoyed this article and the linked piece on willpower accumulating. I have for a long time felt intuitively that willpower is not a finite resource per se, and that the more I exercised it the more I had of it. Your way of expressing it as "everytime your willpower wins out, it has a greater chance to win out in the future" has been my experience.
Certainly there is also a sense in which limiting the amount of "mega tasty" things you have to decline on a daily basis is a good idea, because I do think if you constantly put yourself in a position to have to say to no to things that are very enticing, eventually you will fail.
Perhaps the most salient part of both this and the willpower article is the self-reflection part, which I think is actually at the root of the whole thing. For me, there is a distinct avoidance of any mindfulness of what is happening to me during these spirals. And for many, spirals are a repeating cycle that is connected to a longer term issue.
It's difficult to talk about this stuff, because as you mention it is so subjective that your formulation of it may not resonate with most other people's. I've often wondered to what extent these kinds of processes share key characteristics across populations and individuals, and reading your article I can at least say that my process mirrors yours in all of the important ways.
In terms of practicality, I have found the most important 'mundane' things that can help treat/prevent. death spirals (and foster willpower expression) are:
- Sleep (non-negotiable, unless you have a baby)
- Diet (specifically a strong avoidance of simple sugars, and regulation of meal times)
- Exercise (that includes 3 hours weekly of zone 2 cardio, and some strength training in whatever format)
After that, it comes down to more complex things, like managing your phone use and protecting your mornings/start of day. Obviously a lot has and could be said about these things. But I appreciate the commentary nonetheless, as I think it's important to describe even subjective processes.
Patrick, I find that fasting is a great way to prevent oneself from falling into this spiral. Being in a fasted state helps promote mental focus and, ironically, more physical energy.
Granted, this is more about preventing oneself from falling into the spiral than getting out of it. If you fast daily on a 20:4 regimen, you will spend most of the day in a productive state.
The idea of inertia is excellent, extending the idea of momentum far further (and naturally inspiring thoughts on mass, velocity, etc)
Unlike with obvious epistemic predicates over some generality [ eg "Does it snow at 40 degrees N?", "Can birds heavier than 44lb fly?" - or even more generally the skills of predicting the weather and building flying machines ], to which [parts of] the answers can be usefully remembered as monolithic invariants, obvious deontic predicates over generalities [ eg "Should I keep trying when I am exhausted?", "Will it pay to fold under pressure?" - and the surrounding general skills ] don't have generalizable answers that are independent of one's acute strategic situation. I am not against trying to formulate invariant answers to these questions by spelling out every contingency; I am unsure whether LessWrong is the place, except when there's some motivating or illustrative question of fact that makes your advice falsifiable [ I think Eliezer's recent The Sun is big, but superintelligences will not spare Earth a little sunlight is a good example of this ].
I find that these situations, doing anything agentic at all can break you out of the spiral. Sports is a good example: you can just do 5 pushups and tell yourself "That's enough for today, tomorrow I'll get back to my full routine".
I'd be interested in reading much more about this. Energy and akrasia as it's popularly called here continue to be my biggest life challenges. High fiber diet seems to help, and high novelty seems to help.
This was an interesting read and points to a simple truth that I think is often forgotten: Newton's first law applies to basically everything in life, not just physical systems. The "resets" you describe are definitely valid but by no means a comprehensive list of "opposing" forces that can help drive you in the other direction to reverse your momentum (in a positive way). The two other main ones that I believe are missing, yet fundamental are:
- Diet: the food we eat affects our mental/emotional tendencies to procrastinate vs get things done through pretty intricate biological + neuroscientific mechanisms
- Exercise: similar to diet, but perhaps harder to get started
All these can be thought of as different "forces" that can influence our momentum in one way or the other. Side note: it would be interesting to develop some sort of grounded pyschological theory on how different external stimuli affect our mindspace. Some of it is covered in the Vedas (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gu%E1%B9%87a).
The LessWrong Review runs every year to select the posts that have most stood the test of time. This post is not yet eligible for review, but will be at the end of 2025. The top fifty or so posts are featured prominently on the site throughout the year.
Hopefully, the review is better than karma at judging enduring value. If we have accurate prediction markets on the review results, maybe we can have better incentives on LessWrong today. Will this post make the top fifty?
I’ve claimed that Willpower compounds and that small wins in the present make it easier to get bigger wins in the future. Unfortunately, procrastination and laziness compound, too.
You’re stressed out for some reason, so you take the evening off for a YouTube binge. You end up staying awake a little later than usual and sleeping poorly. So the next morning you feel especially tired; you snooze a few extra times. In your rushed morning routine you don’t have time to prepare for the work meeting as much as you’d planned to. So you have little to contribute during the meeting. You feel bad about your performance. You escape from the bad feelings with a Twitter break. But Twitter is freaking out. Elon Musk said what? Everyone is weighing in. This is going to occupy you intermittently for the rest of the day. And so on.
Laziness has a kind of independent momentum to it. When you’re having a day like the above, even if you consciously commit to getting back on track, the rut tends to find its way back to you within a couple of hours. Keep this up for a few days and your sleep is utterly messed up, and you walk around in a fog. Keep it up for a week or two and you’re fully off your workout routine. In a month or two, you might have noticeably fallen behind on work; you might be absent from your social life; you might’ve visibly gained fat or lost muscle; you can no longer feel excited about your personal goals because they’re behind a pile of mundane tasks you need to catch up on first. And so on.
How do we stop the vicious circle?
I’m spiraling! I’m spiraling!
When you’re in a laziness death spiral, it’s hard to do anything deliberate. The first and most important step, which does take some willpower but not a lot, is to acknowledge, “I’m in a laziness death spiral today.”
If you don’t acknowledge it, here’s what happens: You vaguely notice you you’ve been wasting time today; you feel a twinge of guilt, so you quickly decide, “I’m going to turn the rest of the day around, starting right now.” And does that work?
Often it doesn’t! Sure, after a small lapse you can just get back on track, but if enough laziness momentum has built up, a momentary reaction doesn’t cut it. Deciding things quickly, in response to negative emotions, is exactly how you got into this situation! You’re going to turn it around on a whim? You’ll have a different whim in the next hour; what then? You need to take a step back and get your mind outside of the problem.
Do what you can
The next three sections are three different courses of action you can take to get out of a laziness death spiral. One of them is clearly preferable, but I’m writing the alternatives, too. When you’re in a low-willpower state, it’s often bad to attempt the very best solution—the farther you reach, the harder you can fall. Building a base of “small wins” is the reliable way to repair your willpower. If you start something lofty and then bail on it, you’re doing real damage: logging another willpower failure and associating that “very best solution” with failure.
Here are the moves:
A) Emergency recovery
If you’re in a laziness spiral and you need to get out of it right now, there are some measures you can take that, while effective, are not ideal. They are unsustainable, promote bad habits, or are just generally unhealthy. But sometimes the need is there: maybe you have a deadline fast approaching (and the deadline itself isn’t enough to snap you into action); maybe your friends or family need you to take care of something today; maybe you were in the middle of an awfully lazy day and a once-in-a-lifetime opportunity came up, and you just can’t focus enough to act on it.
Disclaimer: I believe that in a well planned life, none of these should ever be necessary. I’m only writing them because we are not perfect.
B) Natural recovery
What’s the easiest way to get out of a spiral, without doing anything drastic or unusual? I find there are times when it’s naturally easier to change course. And if you wait for them to come, you can pull yourself out of a spiral without a herculean effort of willpower. Then you can analyze what went wrong and avoid those circumstances in the future.
Wait for a reset point
For me, waking up in the morning is a mental reset; nothing from my headspace the night before really makes it to the morning. Now, bad habits from the night before might’ve given me less sleep, or poor sleep, but I find that my willpower is usually fresh. So when I’m having an off day, and I notice, I might just call the rest of the day a wash and start planning what I’m going to do tomorrow. Even as I’m caught up in lazy activity, I’m making specific plans to be productive tomorrow. The fact that it’s at a later point in time means I’m thinking about it for a while, putting more mental energy into the plan. That’s the opposite of “deciding on a whim.”
It also gives me time to realize, wow, I really don’t enjoy being lazy. In my New-Year’s resolution rant I talked about this effect. For those who continually fail their New Year’s resolutions:
Sometimes you cognitively “want” something, but there’s just no mental energy behind that want. You know some goal or idea is good for you, but you don’t feel, subconsciously and emotionally, that it’s good for you. Sometimes you need to feel it. So, you should go completely without the thing for a while, and allow yourself to feel irritated by that condition.
This is actually a sneaky form of self-control. When you notice you’ve been lazy, your next impulse is to dash into some “productive” task to start “making up for” the lost time. But this reinforces a habit of acting on impulses. In a way, it’s more difficult to remain in the state you’re in and accept the loss. A person who can do that can also wake up the next day and be extremely productive.
What are your natural reset points? Maybe it’s the morning. Maybe it’s when you go to a specific location. Maybe it’s a specific day of the week. Identify your next reset point, and then wait patiently for it to come.
Analyze the circumstances that caused it
The other part of the natural recovery is to notice what started your spiral, so you can avoid it in the future. You do this analysis as soon as you’re at a reset point. Look at your recent activity and ask, “Where did I go off the rails earlier?”
In doing that review, you’ll discover how far back the laziness death spiral goes. “Well it’s cause I got up late today. Why was I on my phone so late last night? Oh yeah, that other thing…”
For me, when I get down to the real original cause, it’s often something very mundane that just happened to occur at the perfect moment to throw me off. A few examples:
So, that’s the natural recovery. It works pretty well, but the downside is that you can get knocked off again. You might know the exact circumstantial triggers that caused a spiral last time, but different ones will come up next time. Some you can mitigate, but some will keep coming at you because, as I said, they’re mundane. And that makes me again wonder how something as ordinary as a big meal had such a great effect on my day—perhaps something else is going on.
C) Heroic recovery
The heroic recovery from a laziness spiral is harder and takes longer to work, but it solves the problem in a more complete way. I have enough familiarity with this to see how it works, but not a ton of familiarity. I learn from people more mature than me; every day is a journey.
In short, the heroic recovery means deeply analyzing yourself to understand the root cause of your escapes to lazy pastimes—your decisions to dissociate from what’s going on immediately in front of you.
Deep psych work
Think about the circumstances behind your lapse, like you did in the last section. Then go deeper and analyze exactly why you responded the way you did. Typically, you experienced some minor discomfort, and you escaped from that discomfort by hijacking your attention with a quick-reward activity. What was the minor discomfort? I don’t mean the trigger in physical reality; I mean what was the negative feeling that you cut short? And why?
Does the feeling go against your self-image in some way?
What kind of self-image adjustment would it take to be able to accept that feeling? Who would you be, if you were unconflicted about what you felt in any given circumstance?
This kind of work is best done on a good day when you’re already doing the things you want to do. It’s too important to do on a laziness death spiral day, and it can easily become another part of the spiral: If you’re busy analyzing your reaction to some feeling, you’re not feeling it. You’re still avoiding it.
But, if you do enough digging up and sorting things out, you start to re-frame these dissociation triggers, so that even the ones that are out of your control don’t affect you the way they used to.
Conclusion
This has been a very heady post. I notice I’m writing very heavily from personal experience here—more than usual—because the dynamics of willpower and laziness and dissociation are very subjective. If it doesn’t seem to match your experience, then disregard it. But if there’s anyone who experiences laziness the same way I do, I might have saved them a lot of trouble.
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