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Recently, I had a strange reaction to Sensodyne Whitening and Gum Sensitivity toothpaste. As luck would have it, I happen to fall into the subset of the population that lose much of their ability to taste certain flavors after using the toothpaste for a couple of days.
I happened to catch on pretty quickly and ended up switching toothpastes within the week, but it still resulted in about two weeks where I could not taste salt, and could hardly taste anything sour, sweet, or whatever makes buffalo sauce taste like buffalo sauce. It felt like I was coating my mouth with flavorless lard, in case anyone was curious.
What I found most fascinating about this experience came after my tongue recovered. Despite only having lacked those tastes for about two weeks, my perception of them became a lot stronger -- apple juice, which I previously would not have called sour, suddenly seemed to have a bit of a twang to it (which is to say nothing for how sweet it was). The taste of salt, surprisingly, did not become overwhelming without amounts that I'd regularly consider to be a lot.
I suppose that this shouldn't be particularly surprising -- this happens with vision. For example, staring at the color yellow, and then looking at a black background will show you a stygian blue, which is impossible to perceive normally. Still, I find this interaction fascinating, and have to wonder what might happen if I were to blind myself for a couple of days, or deprive myself of sound or smell. I must also note that it's incredibly disappointing that I will likely never taste apple juice in that way again, it was probably one of the best drinks I've ever had.
1I must also note that it's incredibly disappointing that I will likely never taste apple juice in that way again, it was probably one of the best drinks I've ever had.
You could repeat the taste suppression/recovery process if you wanted.
I may, at some point, and for other reasons. Lets say, if I were to start drinking some rather foul-tasting protein or something -- it would be nice to potentially taste less of that. But, in general, deliberately and severely impairing my ability to taste the things I like for about two weeks, only to be able to taste in that way for a meal or two post-recovery is probably not the sort of tradeoff that I'd find myself making regularly.
Something that I struggle badly with is valuing (and meaningfully using) small chunks of free time. I feel that I am more inclined to waste a forty-five minute block of free time between classes than I am to waste, say, the entire end of a day.
What I feel is that I cannot meaningfully engage with an activity if I suspect that I might be forced to stop before I'd like to, and I'm not sure that that is an entirely incorrect intuition. After all, there is certainly a loss incurred by context-switching, and perhaps leaving business unfinished in one task while being whisked away to another will make my performance on that other task worse. Anecdotally, I recently started programming for personal projects again, and on the occasions where I decided to start programming even an hour before class, I wouldn't really be able to put my work down -- I'd instead continue to program through my lectures. So, perhaps this intuition is actually my System 2 trying to save me from hurting myself academically?
So, maybe the moral I need to take from this is that I should both be less averse to starting things during small windows of time, and that I should find a way to make myself more inclined to actually put a task down (maybe by making it easier to resume?)
I'd be delighted to hear from anyone who has or had a similar problem, and how they went about solving it.
I see this problem quite often in communities for people with ADHD. People describe being unable to relax or start any task if they have any plans later, seemingly going into a sort of "waiting mode" until that event happens. This may be a common problem which is simply stronger in people with ADHD, I'm not sure.
If you Google "ADHD Waiting mode", you should be able to find posts on this. I don't know how many of these are scientific or otherwise high-quality, and how many of them are unhealthy self-victimzation and other such things. I'm not judging, as I'm diagnosed with ADHD and a few other things myself, I just don't recommend identifying as ones medical diagnoses nor considering them as inherently impossible to overcome.
Ah. I had no idea that this was symptomatic of ADHD. I happen to have an appointment with a psychiatrist coming up for reasons unrelated, so I suppose it might be worth bringing up. Thank you for the insight, and sorry the post was so trite.
No problem! Little note though, your psychiatrist might doubt you if it seems like you're trying to self-diagnose because of something you read online. It may be better not to name it directly unless they bring it up first
At job, what works for me is making notes. For each task, I start a new page in a note-making software, and put there everything related to the task: link to the Jira ticket, short description, people to contact about analysis and testing, links to relevant resources, etc. Sometimes I also write an outline like "first I will do this, then this". Then I start working on the task, adding more information as it emerges: things that people told me, things I found in the source code, links to the commits and pull requests I made, etc.
The reason is that interruptions are frequent (both planned and unplanned) and seems like I can't do much about it, but the thing I can do is make it easier to recover after the interruption. This way I can make a use of a short block of time, by reading about the planned next step in my notes, doing it, and adding a note about the result.
Unfortunately, the same strategy does not work for me in my private life. I am not sure why, but I have a few suspicions. In private life I have to play both the role of the manager (decide what to do) and the individual contributor (actually do it); my current version of the system works okay for the latter but not for the former. The difficult part is to make myself continue working on the interrupted project, when there are so many alternatives.
Without interruptions, this is automatic. It is difficult for me to start working on something, but once I do, I can easily get obsessed, and could continue working on the same thing for days. That is how I accomplished some things when I was single and childless; I knew that the right time for projects was weekends, especially the ones that had a holiday on Friday or Monday. I could work on something for 4 days in a row, only taking breaks for food and sleep. But now that I have kids, I simply don't get that amount of uninterrupted time, ever.
Interruptions at work are not just difficult for me, but also very unpleasant. It feels like getting hurt in some mental way; having my autonomy violated. Forcing myself to start doing something when I am not in the mood, it hurts. Finally getting in the mood as I am doing it, and then being forced to stop, it hurts again. To have an interruption looming ahead of me means to expect to get hurt soon... that is, if I actually start working on the project. The unpleasant feelings accumulate and result in aversion against the task they are associated with. The more I get interrupted trying on work on a certain task, the more I hate the task. At work, I usually don't have a choice, and I have to finish the task anyway. In private, this makes me abandon projects, or procrastinate on them a lot.
Not all interruptions have the same effect. Taking a break to eat, sleep, exercise, or take a walk is okay. Those are simple activities, so I can continue thinking about the project in the background. The bad kind of interruption is when I need to think hard about something different, when I need to solve a different problem.
You offer a really interesting point. I don't think I feel as sharply bad about having to context switch as you do, but it very well could be that I still register a similar bad feeling, and simply react to it by doing nothing as opposed to being productive and then having to go through a context switch.
I hadn't really thought about it as a response to stimulus like that, but I guess that's because I have a more subtly bad feeling when switching contexts, so there wasn't as obvious of a thing to associate my behavior with.
Last night, I had a dream that scared me awake. I suspect that this was some sort of response to a low heart rate, because when I woke, I noticed that my lips were rather cold, and my heart was now beating rather quickly. I've often heard of dreams of falling being a way for the mind to correct for this kind of danger, but I've failed to find any evidence for that with some quick searches.
If true, though. this would be interesting because it would suggest that some part of my brain has a model of "things I put myself through that I would fear enough to cause an elevated heartrate." I typically consider things like that to be exclusively (stimulus -> response) events in the brain, so some part of me that could work backwards from a visceral response without my conscious faculties would change that perception considerably.
Granted, I can't say for sure that anything like what I describe happened here, because I don't actually know that my heartrate was low to begin with, and I think an experiment designed to show that (low heartrate -> scary dream to elevate heartrate) in some or most cases is probably beyond my means.
That said, if anyone has a recommendation for a device to track sleep, and more specifically heartrate during sleep, please let me know. It could be worth keeping a journal to see (anecdotally) the relation between the two things.
When I skipped my medication whose abstinence symptom is strong anxiety, my brain always generated a nightmare to go along with the anxiety, working backwards in the same way.
Edit: Oh, never mind, that's not what you mean.