This did not go where I thought it was going, and I'm glad. I enjoyed the read. I'm not versed enough in psychiatry to validate the brain-chemistry stuff but my practical experience lines up.

Reminds me of the trick of telling yourself "let's give this my full attention for just 5 minutes, and if I still don't want to do it we can move on". I pretty much always end up wanting to keep doing that thing.

> "let's give this my full attention for just 5 minutes, and if I still don't want to do it we can move on".

I have to use this trick to help manage my ADHD. Of course, just actually starting for 5 minutes is a challenge in itself but while medicated at least I can. Giving myself a time limit as an easy out works wonders, and after 5 minutes I'm probably going to keep going.

“Action comes before motivation.”

I’ve repeated this to my kids to the point it’s a meme in our house. I find it’s a nice short circuit to “I have no motivation”, b/c “Great, do {thing} and you’ll find the motivation!”

It was such a delight to see someone finally getting the dopaminergic function right and not confusing dopamergic populations activity with perceptions of pleasure, but instead pointing to the modern understandings: they predict future pleasure. Glutamate (in the shell of the nucleus accumbens) is the real "pleasure" chemical (among all it's various other uses).

I've been learning to draw lately and I was having some serious "getting started" issues every time. For me the trick was to not go "I will now practice drawing" but to go "I will now hold a pencil and browse through my old drawings". It ends me up holding a pencil and looking at a blank page.

I know it ends up with me drawing anyways every time and yet lying to myself that I'm not intending to draw works wonders.

That's interesting. I really enjoy playing video games, when I have time. There are games that I objectively find fun, like recently, Clair Obscur Expedition 33. But oftentimes I'd play with my full attention, trying to absorb the beauty of the world and the music, and then I take my phone out during a loading screen and now I'm "second-screening" with my news feed or HN. And I'm still enjoying the game itself, but I feel like I'm robbing myself of the experience because I am not giving it my full attention.

I try not to second-screen when watching movies or TV, and I'm pretty good at it. I know it's a very common thing for people to do these days and it honestly kinda bugs me because at least for me, TV and movies are a shared experience, but video games, at least the ones that I play, are almost always solo experiences.

Anyway, I feel like I just diagnosed myself with ADHD in writing this comment.

This is how I started working out regularly. "I can quit 5 min after warming up".

Five minutes after warming up I've changed, in the gym and a couple of sets in. I quit maybe 1/20 sessions, and it's shrunk more over the years since, but it was an easy way to fool my brain.

I'm guessing this is different because the main threshold is starting to do the thing. Once you've started it's much less mental effort to keep going and just do the full workout.

> Reminds me of the trick of telling yourself "let's give this my full attention for just 5 minutes, and if I still don't want to do it we can move on". I pretty much always end up wanting to keep doing that thing.

Inertia is a good mental model for attention in ADHD. I sometimes tell people that my attention is like a large truck. It can be hard to get it started and up to speed, but once it's up to speed it's hard to stop.

Spending 5 minutes on something is a way of forcing yourself to get started. Once you're up and running it's will be hard to break your attention. For that reason, it's important to choose carefully which things you deliberately spend attention on if you have ADHD.