Therapy is very expensive (many insurance companies only cover a minuscule amount of visits per time period), hard to access, has few options (for many people), and is exactly the type of thing you need to shop around in (like you need a therapist that is not only decent, but also cares about you (in a patient doctor sense) and communicates with you well).
More than that, even when that lines up, its nowhere near the nearly instant/fast or surefire process so many people imply it is online.
More than all of that, the idea that you need to go to therapy to learn something indicates that its not really actionable advice.
It’s abit like how saying the solution to having good politicians is to take the money out of politics.
We all know that, but the path to achieving it is clearly where the real difficulty is, and so the initial statement ends up not actually being useful to anyone, as it isnt what the actual goal is, and in this case, a psychologist might just have a different plan/words they use as the goal for you based on how they do things.
Every piece of advice for dealing with procrastination will lead to “just doing it.” This is because “doing it” is the end goal when not “doing it” is the problem. If their advice was to “just feel/do better,” then you may have a point, but they didn’t. It wasn’t fleshed out, but they said to learn emotional regulation to better enable the ability to “just do it.”
I can’t say that this advice is relevant for those with ADHD, but the fact that your first response wasn’t to investigate whether their advice was useful, but rather to try to downplay it as not advice at all strikes me as insulting to those who have used the times that they can be productive to work on themself and their emotions, and displays a desire to have problems to fix rather than a desire to fix them.
I can’t say that this advice is relevant for those with ADHD, but the fact that your first response wasn’t to investigate whether their advice was useful
One-sentence prescriptions for a complex problem are rarely actionable. “see a professional” is at least concrete but obviously still has problems as described. “just start” or “regulate emotions” both lack actionability and detail. They both name outcomes while offering no practical advice to reach said outcomes. More than that, they downplay and minimize how hard this actually is. It’s belittling to people who are struggling, and I responded in a polite manner to what, to be honest, was very frustrating to read.
Your follow-up comes off as scolding rather than engaging in good faith. The fact I expanded in a later comment which was ignored in favour of chastising me for not praising the near-truism is more frustrating still.
I wouldn’t praise you for praising it, I probably would have said nothing and moved on because neither comment would be very good/productive. I also would have said nothing if you had said nothing. But in my time on the internet I have seen protests against “just do it arguments” many times, often with good reason but also at times as a defeatist reason to not try. Without knowing you personally your original comment looks like the latter, and I do have a problem with comments that propagate negative thinking like that.
I will admit that I was semi-purposefully scolding at the end of my comment. One part out of my own frustration with that defeatist mindset beyond your personal comment, but also because because if you or someone reading was in that dark place reading something accusatory and a little inflammatory may incite emotions of anger or frustration, which are emotions that tend to lead to more action than emotions of self-pity.
I read enough of your later comment to determine it was about therapy specifically, which I agree with you on for all the reasons you stated. But I wasn’t discussing therapy, I was discussing emotional regulation, and I think there are enough resources online discussing the self-reflective tools for developing that that therapy is not necessary. I could have said more to that effect in my first response.
My point here is that, while yes it was not very informative or directly actionable, if someone read the comment you originally responded to having never considered how emotions could play into procrastination, it could have prompted research into what that means or looks like. If they read your comment they may have instead dismissed that entire line of thinking, and that would be a shame. So in my mind their comment was at worst not negative, while yours was at best not positive.
I find your idea that a comment ought be positive rather displeasing. I think its a bit of toxic positivity whereby useful criticism is muted for no good reason other than vibes.
The big point though, is that you simplifying my comment down to positive or negative, going so far as to imply that my comments said anything like “give up” is completely out of order.
Someone in a dark place does not want to be belittled by advice that minimizes the actual difficulty of the situation they’re in and the hard work and process they’ll need to go through to get out of it.
This idea that people magically are just happier with light, trite advice is inane to me.
It also seems utterly empathy lacking to dump on self-pity like people aren’t allowed to be sad, like thats a failure of the person.
Quite frankly you come across as someone who pretends to care so they can beat down others with their opinions and feel smarter/better by using weaponized civility. Its all frustrating and it feels like you have tried your best to egg on confrontation here with how wildly you misrepresented what I’ve said.
I can attest that this is true, at least for myself. Used to have massive procrastination issues. Spent days playing video games I didn’t even really like anymore. Tried out all the standard advice for time management, but it didn’t do much. Mostly just increased the pressure when the results were lacking.
But through therapy (and also uniroinically mindfulness Mindfulness-Based Stress Reduction), I’ve gotten to a point that I find tremendously satisfying. I can actually do the things I always wanted to do. And though some procrastination still persists (frankly I doubt it’s possible to never ever procrastinate even just a little bit), it is now on a much, much more manageable and tolerable level.
And yeah, first feeling and regulating emotions was absolutely key in all of that.
If you’ve got the 'tism though, things just don’t tend to work how they should, and there’s probably not much to be done about that.
Saying this from a perspective of someone with autism diagnosis and having done therapy and all that. I have problems with feeling and recognizing emotions (especially my own), and problems with self-regulation, so this cycle of not starting is very real. The advice I’ve gotten from professionals basically boils down to “try to stop demanding things from yourself that you can’t do even if someone else can do it, because it is harming your mental health”. I lack something in the emotional department and you can’t really work on emotions if you can’t properly feel and process them in the first place…
Any diagnosis shouldn’t be an excuse for not trying and things can work very differently to different people, buuuut. Just saying that if you keep banging your head against the wall with this stuff and getting nowhere, there might be some other underlying reasons why things are difficult
You don’t need to get started, you need to feel your emotions and do something to regulate them. Then you can get started.
Nice idea, in theory, just like many other mental quick tips that also equate to “just do it”
It’s an incredible amount of work to learn, but starting with therapy can be a good start.
Therapy is very expensive (many insurance companies only cover a minuscule amount of visits per time period), hard to access, has few options (for many people), and is exactly the type of thing you need to shop around in (like you need a therapist that is not only decent, but also cares about you (in a patient doctor sense) and communicates with you well).
More than that, even when that lines up, its nowhere near the nearly instant/fast or surefire process so many people imply it is online.
More than all of that, the idea that you need to go to therapy to learn something indicates that its not really actionable advice.
It’s abit like how saying the solution to having good politicians is to take the money out of politics.
We all know that, but the path to achieving it is clearly where the real difficulty is, and so the initial statement ends up not actually being useful to anyone, as it isnt what the actual goal is, and in this case, a psychologist might just have a different plan/words they use as the goal for you based on how they do things.
I do empathize, it’s certainly a position of privilege to have the time and resources available.
Not to mention trying to find time during their office hours where you can get out of work for an hour every week.
Learning to feel, process, and regulate your emotions is not easy. It will take time and you will have to try multiple techniques.
Every piece of advice for dealing with procrastination will lead to “just doing it.” This is because “doing it” is the end goal when not “doing it” is the problem. If their advice was to “just feel/do better,” then you may have a point, but they didn’t. It wasn’t fleshed out, but they said to learn emotional regulation to better enable the ability to “just do it.”
That is genuine advice, as a growing amount of research is finding that procrastination is tied to a failure in emotional regulation: https://www.bbc.com/worklife/article/20200121-why-procrastination-is-about-managing-emotions-not-time
I can’t say that this advice is relevant for those with ADHD, but the fact that your first response wasn’t to investigate whether their advice was useful, but rather to try to downplay it as not advice at all strikes me as insulting to those who have used the times that they can be productive to work on themself and their emotions, and displays a desire to have problems to fix rather than a desire to fix them.
One-sentence prescriptions for a complex problem are rarely actionable. “see a professional” is at least concrete but obviously still has problems as described. “just start” or “regulate emotions” both lack actionability and detail. They both name outcomes while offering no practical advice to reach said outcomes. More than that, they downplay and minimize how hard this actually is. It’s belittling to people who are struggling, and I responded in a polite manner to what, to be honest, was very frustrating to read.
Your follow-up comes off as scolding rather than engaging in good faith. The fact I expanded in a later comment which was ignored in favour of chastising me for not praising the near-truism is more frustrating still.
I wouldn’t praise you for praising it, I probably would have said nothing and moved on because neither comment would be very good/productive. I also would have said nothing if you had said nothing. But in my time on the internet I have seen protests against “just do it arguments” many times, often with good reason but also at times as a defeatist reason to not try. Without knowing you personally your original comment looks like the latter, and I do have a problem with comments that propagate negative thinking like that.
I will admit that I was semi-purposefully scolding at the end of my comment. One part out of my own frustration with that defeatist mindset beyond your personal comment, but also because because if you or someone reading was in that dark place reading something accusatory and a little inflammatory may incite emotions of anger or frustration, which are emotions that tend to lead to more action than emotions of self-pity.
I read enough of your later comment to determine it was about therapy specifically, which I agree with you on for all the reasons you stated. But I wasn’t discussing therapy, I was discussing emotional regulation, and I think there are enough resources online discussing the self-reflective tools for developing that that therapy is not necessary. I could have said more to that effect in my first response.
My point here is that, while yes it was not very informative or directly actionable, if someone read the comment you originally responded to having never considered how emotions could play into procrastination, it could have prompted research into what that means or looks like. If they read your comment they may have instead dismissed that entire line of thinking, and that would be a shame. So in my mind their comment was at worst not negative, while yours was at best not positive.
I find your idea that a comment ought be positive rather displeasing. I think its a bit of toxic positivity whereby useful criticism is muted for no good reason other than vibes.
The big point though, is that you simplifying my comment down to positive or negative, going so far as to imply that my comments said anything like “give up” is completely out of order.
Someone in a dark place does not want to be belittled by advice that minimizes the actual difficulty of the situation they’re in and the hard work and process they’ll need to go through to get out of it.
This idea that people magically are just happier with light, trite advice is inane to me.
It also seems utterly empathy lacking to dump on self-pity like people aren’t allowed to be sad, like thats a failure of the person.
Quite frankly you come across as someone who pretends to care so they can beat down others with their opinions and feel smarter/better by using weaponized civility. Its all frustrating and it feels like you have tried your best to egg on confrontation here with how wildly you misrepresented what I’ve said.
I can attest that this is true, at least for myself. Used to have massive procrastination issues. Spent days playing video games I didn’t even really like anymore. Tried out all the standard advice for time management, but it didn’t do much. Mostly just increased the pressure when the results were lacking.
But through therapy (and also uniroinically mindfulness Mindfulness-Based Stress Reduction), I’ve gotten to a point that I find tremendously satisfying. I can actually do the things I always wanted to do. And though some procrastination still persists (frankly I doubt it’s possible to never ever procrastinate even just a little bit), it is now on a much, much more manageable and tolerable level.
And yeah, first feeling and regulating emotions was absolutely key in all of that.
If you’ve got the 'tism though, things just don’t tend to work how they should, and there’s probably not much to be done about that.
Saying this from a perspective of someone with autism diagnosis and having done therapy and all that. I have problems with feeling and recognizing emotions (especially my own), and problems with self-regulation, so this cycle of not starting is very real. The advice I’ve gotten from professionals basically boils down to “try to stop demanding things from yourself that you can’t do even if someone else can do it, because it is harming your mental health”. I lack something in the emotional department and you can’t really work on emotions if you can’t properly feel and process them in the first place…
Any diagnosis shouldn’t be an excuse for not trying and things can work very differently to different people, buuuut. Just saying that if you keep banging your head against the wall with this stuff and getting nowhere, there might be some other underlying reasons why things are difficult
Well said.
Ngl I had perfect emotional regulation when depersonalized (was aware of but not influenced by my emotions) and I still only got started when stressed
Now that I actually feel my emotions, it’s tougher to get started.
This doesn’t really hold up ime
Processing and regulating emotions is the key.