Ask HN: How do you guys deal with laziness?

I usually think of myself as a curious, open-minded person. When I think about things they are all sounds interesting to me, especially if they are connected to technology.

Unfortunatelly, the last week shows that I just cannot win with my laziness. I spend all the time lurking on the internet or watching youtube vides. I've tried ti blocked time-wasting pages (like 9gag/reddit/etc.) but it clearly didn't help at all. I have a lot of books and articles to read, topics to explore, projects to finish but every time when I'm trying to dig into it I end up feeling tired and resigned. It really makes me worry about myself, because I'm wasting so much time!

What can I do to improve my attitude toward useful areas of my life and convince myself to stop wasting time?

I don't think you're going to find a helpful answer here because in the end, even asking that question on HN might be a form of procrastination.

What I recommend is thinking hard about yourself: What are your goals? What motivates you? What are you afraid of? What thinks make you enter "the flow" and bring you in the right mood to be productive (e.g. change of scenery)?

Finally, a very personal suggestion which usually receives many downvotes: At least for me, there is a certain kind of movie which really makes me want to get things done. These movies are mostly documentaries and they usually show how other people get things done and actively do stuff. Such movies might include "The Social Network" or "The Brink" (no matter what you think of Steve Bannon - you actually see him being active in the movie).

- No caffeine after 1/2/3PM (even "sleep-friendly" tea throws me off)

- Melatonin / Sleep aids: See if they work for you

- Don't drink before bed (because it means a bathroom break in the middle of the night) [1]

- If you do wake up in the middle of the night, a snack may help. (https://www.sleepfoundation.org/articles/food-and-drink-prom...). Though I don't know, I've tried Chamomile tea and it keeps me up.

- Sleep study. Screen for sleep apnea. You may be able to get a CPAP machine depending on insurance.

- Find a psychiatrist to screen for adult ADD/ADHD.

- Consider a single monitor, ultra wide screen, and tiling/snapping window. Always have your content you need to get done open.

- Take a few days to clean and unclutter stuff. It takes an upfront emotional toll to get rid of stuff (loss aversion), but most stuff you forget. Junk is burdensome on the mind.

- A nice podcast on procrastination: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YWFWsR0iPqI

- Dietary: Any sensitivities? Consider simplifying your diet to be very plain (cut carbs?) and experiment. I do keto. Simple carbs can impact me heavily!

- Bed: Do you have a comfy bed frame? Blankey? Pillow? Latex pillows are nice. I like soft pillows and hard mattresses. Amazon has cheap, high quality bed frames and mattresses-in-a-box, and I'm a big guy. My bed setup is ~$350 all included, with a comfy comfy pillow. Walmart has mattress-in-a-box.

[1] my hypothesis is for certain people, when they wake up at night, go to the bathroom, it's enough excitement to make it hard to go back to bed.

Subsystems to fix: Unclutter physical possessions, Streamline info spaces (computer workflows, email), avoid stimulants in afternoon / evening. Check for sleep apnea and ADD/ADHD.

Willpower is like a muscle. There are 3 types: will (trying to do something, like exercise), won't (avoiding something like 9GAG), and want (being driven by a higher purpose).

Dopamine fuels want. Dopamine makes you do things, no matter how painful. It starts you off with arousal and excitement, and then forces you to finish, using anxiety. But if you don't want anything badly enough, it grasps nearby things - memes, porn, emptying your inbox.

One cure is to spend a little time, maybe 10 minutes a day (or before bed) thinking about what you really want. Keep aligning that. Watch motivational videos. You'll be high on dopamine when you start procrastinating, and if you can master redirecting it towards something you actually want, that makes you very productive.

The other treatment is to bolster up your will/won't power enough to keep you off Reddit and start working. Willpower is like a muscle. Exercise strengthens it. Overtraining kills it. I find what works is tiny reps. Find the smallest thing to train your will and won't power. What worked for me was trying to walk faster and putting cookies on my desk and trying not to eat them. This trains your brain not to give in.

One big, completely unintuitive thing you can do is to not feel bad about yourself. Feeling bad saps your willpower. Which makes you indulge. Which makes you feel worse.

A hack around that is to simply track how many times you've indulged. Just observe. And don't try to reduce it. Forcing yourself to reduce it leads to a willpower trap, where you'll keep failing week by week, try to make up for it, making the gap from reality bigger and making you feel worse. What worked for me is try to maintain the number... it naturally went from 11/week to 2/week to 1 the next week. If you tell yourself you'll watch Reddit 4 hours a day, it starts to feel less appealing.

In the short term, you can also try to hold off on an impulse. We are wired to give in to instant gratification. Give yourself 10 minutes before indulging, and after that 10 minutes do it if you still want to. Even if you fail, it trains up your willpower. This is a big part of how Pomodoro works.

A lot of this is taken from the book Maximum Willpower, by Dr. K. McGonigal. A lot of advice on the Internet and books is incomplete and conflicting, based on anecdotes on what's worked for someone. It's good to reward yourself, but also bad. You can slog through it, but there's a limit and a cost to it. Hacks like dopamine suppression works, but overdo it and you'll lose interest in everything. The book covers most of the scenarios, and generally it's good to look to psychologists on advice on how to hack your brain.