LW - Laziness death spirals by PatrickDFarley

The Nonlinear Library: LessWrong

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Welcome to The Nonlinear Library, where we use Text-to-Speech software to convert the best writing from the Rationalist and EA communities into audio. This is: Laziness death spirals, published by PatrickDFarley on September 19, 2024 on LessWrong.
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 sho...