Similar activation threshold issues to mine, but I’m freshly diagnosed with inattentive type ADHD. You should probably avoid Prozac; I was put on that before diagnosis and it eroded the ability of deadlines to motivate me. Bad sleep + Prozac’s deadening effect on deadlines = losing one of your main control pillars. My rational mind recognizing that I should be more anxious about the consequences of not meeting the deadline and that normally it would have pushed me into actually starting it was quite the experience.
Your sleep pattern is also familiar: that’s deadline driven scheduling operating at daily cadence. The meeting is a deadline, so you planned being awake for the deadline. Worse, you may also have a failure mode where you sometimes work your way backward from the deadline to decide _when _ to sleep. You keep doing what you were doing before bed (especially if you if you enjoyed it after beginning it) until the deadline of needing to be awake looms. Overshoot that significantly? May as well skip sleep!
Since you are anchored by deadlines, have completion focus, and have difficulty maintaining an activity unless it is an established routine (until you fall off), try this:
Split up the mental cost of planning and execution into two separate activities.
Current-you plans for future-you, and executes what past-you assigned to it.
The mode to explicitly avoid is relying on motivation in the moment to choose what to do. That’s when your compromised effort/benefit evaluation runs, which takes significant mental energy and collapses into doing something else / nothing.
Breaking up the activity into two steps reduces the cognitive cost of both. Current-you just pathologically executes what past-you planned and put on the schedule. Don’t think, do.
The things that you are able to do reliably on a schedule are already “established habits”. These are practically free for the brain: repeated on a cadence, no in the moment assessment of energy or worth, you just do it. That’s all fine and good until something pulls you out of the habit; the longer before you get back into the habit, the more expensive restarting it becomes. Falling out of a walking routine is a common case, but I’ve even fallen out of brushing my teeth. In these scenarios I tend to obsess over damage already done and use that anchoring to not resume the activity. It effectively becomes a self-fulfilling prophecy, purely in the basis of taking no action until the prophecy is fulfilled.
Anyway, enjoy your wall of text. It assumes a lot so I’ll hold off on dumping even more until you confirm whether this stuff is familiar to you at all.
Similar activation threshold issues to mine, but I’m freshly diagnosed with inattentive type ADHD. You should probably avoid Prozac; I was put on that before diagnosis and it eroded the ability of deadlines to motivate me. Bad sleep + Prozac’s deadening effect on deadlines = losing one of your main control pillars. My rational mind recognizing that I should be more anxious about the consequences of not meeting the deadline and that normally it would have pushed me into actually starting it was quite the experience.
Your sleep pattern is also familiar: that’s deadline driven scheduling operating at daily cadence. The meeting is a deadline, so you planned being awake for the deadline. Worse, you may also have a failure mode where you sometimes work your way backward from the deadline to decide _when _ to sleep. You keep doing what you were doing before bed (especially if you if you enjoyed it after beginning it) until the deadline of needing to be awake looms. Overshoot that significantly? May as well skip sleep!
Since you are anchored by deadlines, have completion focus, and have difficulty maintaining an activity unless it is an established routine (until you fall off), try this:
The things that you are able to do reliably on a schedule are already “established habits”. These are practically free for the brain: repeated on a cadence, no in the moment assessment of energy or worth, you just do it. That’s all fine and good until something pulls you out of the habit; the longer before you get back into the habit, the more expensive restarting it becomes. Falling out of a walking routine is a common case, but I’ve even fallen out of brushing my teeth. In these scenarios I tend to obsess over damage already done and use that anchoring to not resume the activity. It effectively becomes a self-fulfilling prophecy, purely in the basis of taking no action until the prophecy is fulfilled.
Anyway, enjoy your wall of text. It assumes a lot so I’ll hold off on dumping even more until you confirm whether this stuff is familiar to you at all.