I'm starting to feel like I don't actually know how to get myself to stay focused in way that's sustainable and healthy.
I definitely feel like I could be productive right now, but I don't know how to work with my brain instead of simply beating it into submission with negative emotions.
Like, when people suggest using urgency to make tasks more interesting, I'm pretty sure they don't mean creating urgency by telling yourself "if you don't get this done today, you're dumb and a failure" over and over again in your head.
I don't know how to instill a sense of urgency in a way that is believable to my brain. It's not urgent if I need to lie to myself about how urgent it is. It kind of demonstrates the opposite, actually.
Trying to convince myself with logic that a task is important or urgent usually ends up coming down to "do The Thing, because <bad consequence> will happen if you don't", which just activates my anxiety and gradually evolves the task into a claustrophobic threat.
Focusing on a positive reward doesn't help because the reward just turns into the thing that will be taken from me if I fail. Telling myself I'll get a treat becomes "do The Thing or the treat will be taken from you."
So I'm just left with a sort of vague hope/faith that the task will be worth it in the end. Which maybe works on a good day, but not in the depths of depression.
It all comes back to "simply do The Thing" — go into a head-empty zen state and just do the task without consideration of the needs or wants of the self.
That seems an awful lot like dissociation, though.
And there's the very real possibility that all of this rambling is for naught because the thing I'm missing is simply dopamine.
I might just be thinking myself to death trying to solve a problem that's not logical but biochemical. Maybe there's literally nothing I can do when I don't have my meds. Like, I can try to hedge and mitigate the worst of it, but ultimately nothing will improve meaningfully without medication.
I don't know what that scenario would mean for me. The idea of everything in my life being so dependent upon a medication chafes at my need for autonomy. It's just another source of chronic anxiety — a threat
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