(Part 3) Best products from r/DecidingToBeBetter

Ok /u/ACfireandiceDC, here goes:

I was diagnosed ADD a few years back after I read an account of someone describing their ADD symptoms on a Humans of New York post, of all things.

I read their life story and thought, shit, this sounds awfully relateable.

As soon as I was diagnosed, it became obvious I'd suffered since I was a child, and in-fact my Dad had, too - ADD is often genetic.

In being diagnosed, I was able to start better understanding why I acted in certain ways, and therefore able to start deploying strategies to navigate the challenges I faced.

This included starting on medication, initially Ritalin, but at this stage, I take Dextroamphetamine as I find it's much kinder to me later in the day during the 'crash' associated with amphetamine stimulant meds (note: the effects are entirely personal and vary greatly from person to person).

With hindsight, it's now obvious to me that ADD, and many other similar 'labels' are a general attempt to describe a group of symptoms that can range wildly from diagnosee to diagnosee - what I'm trying to say is that similar to Autism, I believe ADD and other similar disorders are sub-sets of a spectrum.

In my case, and by that I mean my individual 'genetic' traits which are associated with ADD, I suffer from the following things:

• Performance anxiety/perfectionism
  
• Extreme procrastination
  
• Difficulty focusing
  
• Problems with timings and organisation
  
  There are probably a few more I could squeeze in, but for the most part that's my slice of cake.
  
  Now, at this stage of the game, a few years into the diagnosis, I've spent much time and effort reading books, studies, anecdotes and so forth which have lead me to some interesting conclusions (that I have no doubt will continue to evolve):
  
  Overall, I think most of my symptoms are a manifestation of a type of anxiety, not dissimilar to what I imagine you experience with OCD.
  
  As a designer, if I can't get something 100% spot on within my own idea of 'perfect', I'll quickly end up grinding to a halt and giving up.
  
  Likewise, if I mess up a deadline early on, I'll lose all ability to continue, instead, becoming stuck in a bottomless pit of self-loathing and procrastination.
  
  My point is, I can trace most of my symptoms back to this type of 'anxiety'.
  
  I think, in many ways, this stems back to a conflict between my self-image and the reality of productivity requiring the suspension of 'perfection' in order to get things done.
  
  What I mean is: in my head, I want everything I do to be perfect because my ego constantly tells itself that it's special and unlike everyone else - when I look around, I see everyone elses work that seems mediocore and average, and I 'know' that I am capable of so much better, but then when I am working on something, as soon as I faulter and begin to struggle to get it 'just right', I am no longer capable of working and the procastination sets in - perhaps just a sub-conscious defense mechanism against the realisation that I, too, am mortal, and not as 'perfect' as my ego so desperately needs me to be - a form of cognitive disonance.
  
  As a side note, I've often wondered if this insecurity stemmed from my parents, or perhaps from bullying during my formative years - a question I fully intend on getting to the bottom of as soon as I can afford to see a professional.
  
  With this realisation under my belt, I've slowly but surely been able to make great strides in the last few months towards something that finally seems like an effective counter-attack.
  
  When starting a big project, I let myself spend hours, if not days, engrossing myself in the details and getting comfortable with the task set out before me. I find this helps silence many of the 'voices' (metaphorical) before they have a chance to bring me down and derail the train.
  
  The aim is to understand what I need to do, how I'm going to do it, and importantly, that I can do it, alongside a light but constant reminder that I need to focus on finishing something over lower quality rather than giving up on something nearer to perfection (in my industry, a common phrase is 'Just Fucking Ship It' (ship = launch) and 'Shipped is better than perfect').
  
  Alongside the effective medication, frequent cardio, no longer drinking alcohol, a good nights sleep, meditation and a quiet, healthy work environment, I'm starting to see real change.
  
  I'm no-where near the 'utopia' of productivity I have in my mind, and honestly, I likely never will be - that's okay.
  
  But as someone who has spent literally years hating myself for not being able to command myself into action, the slightest signs of a 'pulse' are incredibly exciting.
  
  It's taken a lot of effort and time to get here, but I firmly believe that if I can, anyone can.
  
  If you have any further questions or think I might be able to share some other useful information, please feel free to message me or simply reply here (this applies to OP and anyone else who might stumble across this reply, at any point in the future).
  
  As much as I hope you find this reply useful in some way on its own, I also want to leave you with some actionable steps:
  
  If you haven't already, take a look at the GTD 'Getting Things Done' methodology. Regardless of whether you implement it or not, learning the 'science' behind it will help you on your journey.
  
  Here's a good place to start: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kOSFxKaqOm4
  
  Then here: https://blog.zenkit.com/a-beginners-guide-to-getting-things-done-3cc1a5123b98
  
  Some brilliant books I'd suggest are as follows - I'm not great at reading a book the whole way through these days, so I find Audiobooks to be a God-send (mainly Audible):
  
  Mindset by Carol Dweck
  
  https://www.amazon.com/Mindset-Psychology-Carol-S-Dweck/dp/0345472322
  
  Switch: How to Change Things When Change Is Hard by Chip & Dan Heath
  
  https://www.amazon.com/Switch-Change-Things-When-Hard/dp/0385528752
  
  Ego is the Enemy by Ryan Holiday
  
  https://www.amazon.com/Ego-Enemy-Ryan-Holiday/dp/1591847818
  
  Principles: Life and Work
  
  https://www.amazon.com/Principles-Life-Work-Ray-Dalio/dp/1501124021

You're welcome! I got hyperfocused on fixing my ADHD once and learned some good tricks, haha. Here are some good books to look into as well:

First: "Attitude is Everything" by Jeff Keller. Very short book. It explains how your attitude basically controls how you feel about everything in your life. This relates to learning because you can choose how you feel about learning. Especially when armed with methods for studying & remember stuff, you can start each study session excited & confident instead of feeling repressed by having to actually do the work of learning instead of the idea of how exciting learning something would be:

https://www.amazon.com/Attitude-Everything-Change-Your-Life/dp/0979041031/

Second: "Unleash the Warrior Within" by Richard Mack Machowicz. As mentioned, one of the core takeaways I got was that you have to learn how to setup targets for yourself and then knock them down. A simple but kind of mind-blowing concept because you grow up getting work handed to you, and having to break things like studying down into chunks, put them on a schedule, etc., isn't really ever a skill we're taught. And that applies to studying for school, painting your house, following a workout program, etc. Setup targets, knock them down. Great concept:

https://www.amazon.com/Unleash-Warrior-Within-Discipline-Confidence/dp/0738215686

Third: "The Talent Code" by Daniel Coyle. The basic idea that talent is somewhat overrated & consistent work is really what makes people successful. There are plenty of smart kids out there who never end up applying themselves in college, for example, and end up being under-achievers. Second concept, slow failure - learning & mastering individual concepts, slowly, and learning not just how to get good at it but how to fail at it is important (the part about the Link Trainer is great). Third concept, myelin being an actual thing in your body that represents the work you put in to build "talent" or skill through repetition. Excellent book:

https://www.amazon.com/Talent-Code-Greatness-Born-Grown-ebook/dp/B0026OR1UK

Fourth: "Getting Things Done" by David Allen (aka "GTD"). The basic concept is to capture 100% of your commitments (both to others & to yourself) in a system off your mind (notepad, smartphone, whatever), and then process them by asking what's the outcome desired & what's the very next physical action, and then grouping them by context so you always know what to do next when you're actively working on things. If you want a bulletproof system for never letting things slide or dropping the ball on anything ever again, this is it. It's a somewhat difficult system to learn because it is very comprehensive, but it's also very much worth it:

https://www.amazon.com/Getting-Things-Done-Stress-Free-Productivity-ebook/dp/B00KWG9M2E

Fifth: "Grit" by Angela Duckworth. First, watch her TED Talk:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=H14bBuluwB8

The basic idea is that people who have "grit" are the ones who are the most likely to succeed, with grit being defined as basically picking a goal & sticking with it. This goes back to what I was talking about with having to be overly-organized when it comes to managing my ADHD...I have to not only pick something, but also break it down & make sure I work on it every day, because as you'll learn in GTD, you can't really "do" a project, you can only do actions related to the project, and when enough actions are completed, then the project is considered "done". So it's not about being superman and reading a book overnight or rushing through stuff, it's more, as the author puts it, like running a marathon & keeping a steady pace, which is really really really hard to do & counter-intuitive, because no one likes feeling stuck to a schedule. But by breaking stuff down like that...whether it's weightlifting or studying math or whatever...you will grow & learn over time.

https://www.amazon.com/Grit-Passion-Perseverance-Angela-Duckworth-ebook/dp/B010MH9V3W/

Sixth: "The Seven Hidden Secrets of Motivation" by Todd Beeler. You have to take this one with a grain of salt, but the concepts are good. These are basically good tricks for "motivation in the moment", i.e. how can you trick yourself into getting started on things? One trick is perspective. To cite a (hardcore) example he uses: "FloorboardQ, how does your difficulty with the process of learning compare to a blind child dying of terminal cancer?" Well suddenly it's not such a big problem, right? Similar to the "Attitude is Everything" book, we can shift our perspectives & our attitudes and change our moods & how we approach things so that we can kind of shrink the problem down to make it feel more manageable.

https://www.amazon.com/Seven-Hidden-Secrets-Motivation-Unlocking/dp/B000F0UUDM

Just be careful, it's easy to fall down the rabbit hole of 'thinking you're being productive' but working ON things instead of "In" things. (Meta-procrastination is reading a book about getting organized instead of getting organized.) You should strive to have the simplest, most boring system that actually works for you. It's very easy to get caught up in the trap of researching the latest and greatest fad rather than actually doing the hard tasks that need to be done.

The 'classic' is "How to take control of your time and your life" by Lakein. This is the most generic, 1970s version of time management possible, but is helpful to understand as it is kind of 'responded to' by multiple other authors, even if they don't call him out by name.

Another frequently referenced work is "7 Habits of Highly Effective People" by Covey. This gets mentioned in a lot of places. It is a 'top down' style.

For a completely different perspective, try "Getting Things Done" by Allen. This will lead you to realize how many commitments that you have made. It is more 'bottom up'.

Finally, some of the most interesting stuff in this space that I have read is by Mark Forster. His latest book is here. And his blog is here.

At a high level, it is always useful to think about the utility of what you are doing - that is, making sure you are doing the right things, even if you are doing them slowly (working on your most important tasks), rather than doing low value tasks efficiently (man, I can read email quickly). Peter Drucker, Tim Ferriss (Four Hour Workweek), etc.

Other ideas/Books to research: JIT/Kanban, 80/20 'rule', "Eat that frog" by Brian Tracy. Smarter Faster Better by Duhigg, The Power of Habit also by Duhigg I also very much enjoyed. The Magic of Tidying up by Kondo might also give you some insight into cleaning out your commitments.

Hope this helps. I have read all of these so let me know if you have questions I guess...

Check out The Easy Way to Stop Drinking by Allen Carr: https://www.amazon.com/gp/aw/d/1402736479 I read it because I was only curious about his methods (his smoking book is famous for being good at helping people stop smoking), but after reading it I stopped drinking. The gist of it is that there is actually no good reason to drink and once you debunk all of the myths and cultural conditioning about it, you just stop without requiring willpower. I linked to the out of print (available from 3rd party sellers) version that I had read. I'm not sure if other versions of the material would be as good or not.

With that out of the way, next I'd recommend the books of Cal Newport. He's a really smart guy:

Deep Work is about setting up time to work on the things that really take advantage of your abilities -- to focus on something for a good block of time without distractions to produce your best work.

So Good They Can't Ignore You is one I'm in the middle of now. It talks about career advice. He advocates that you should get really good at valuable skills, and that "follow you passion" is actually terrible advice. Some of the things you mentioned is what made me think of this. In fact the title is a quote from Steve Martin.

Finally he has several books specifically targetted as students. I haven't read them but if I were a student (like you are) I would definitely check them out. I did really good in the classes for my major but the rest were not so good. The descriptions are really intriguing so I might just read them anyway.

Ah, something I'm unfortunately an expert at! Skip to point 3 if you just want to read about the light, I'm pasting in something I wrote on a different thread. I have suffered from really dramatic SAD for years (Minnesota) and have finally got a handle on it.

For me, it revolves around 3 categories: Exercise, Vitamin D, and Light. Especially blue light. Also, I didn't realize until I started really digging into it how poorly researched SAD is. . .

1. Exercise: The "easiest" one. Getting your heart rate up once a day appears to be very effective in combating depression generally, and seasonal depression specifically. Being a ginormous nerd, I bought a smart trainer to strap my bike into, and cycle fast for 30 minutes every morning through virtual lava fields in Zwift. https://zwift.com/ It definitely seems to help, and I'm no longer 'foggy' in the morning, but I'm still having issues fitting it into my schedule. . . it probably takes 45 minutes more in the morning, total, to fit this in. . .
   
   
   
   
2. Vitamin D: My entire family is known to be chronically deficient in Vitamin D, so I supplemented with the suggested dose of 2,000 IU a day for the last year. While getting a blood-test for an unrelated reason, I asked if the doctor could also check my Vitamin D levels, and they were hysterically low, ~14 nmol/L. Normal levels are around 85, and anything below 30 is deficient. With this new knowledge I started dosing with 25,000 iu a day, and noticed an immediate improvement in my mood. I've considered really cranking this up as there seems to be no documented negatives from too much vitamin D (if you drink adequate water, at least) but 25K seems to be working for me.
   
   
   
3. Light: The tricky one. . .
   

• I had a standard "10,000 Lux!" light box that was a hand-me-down from someone who hadn't found it effective. . . I didn't find it effective either. Some research showed that these were only rated at 10,000 lux when you were 8 inches from the light and looking at it. That's not going to happen. This model made no difference at all.
  
  
• Looking around for a DIY solution with many more lumens, I ran across this blog: https://meaningness.com/metablog/sad-light-lumens and https://meaningness.com/metablog/sad-light-led-lux This seemed like a good way to go: find the maximum lumens per dollar possible and spend what I could justify. Out came the spreadsheet, and at 183 lumens per dollar, this LED floodlight won the prize: https://www.amazon.com/gp/product/B01KFVFQFW. I was thinking of getting 2 or 3, but I've only gotten one so far as a trial. It is SO BRIGHT. I'm intending to mount this over my bike trainer to get a blast of light while exercising. . .
  
  
• Blue light is king, apparently. . . a fairly narrow band of blue (Lower than 540nm) controls the circadian rhythm. In an effort to get enough of the blue wavelength, I tried having a very bright white light at my desk at work. This was ridiculously over-bright, led to a lot of eye-strain, and seemed to have only nominal effectiveness. To try to deal with the 'blue issue' I was going to do two things:
  Wear blue-blocking glasses every night starting 90 minutes before bed. Richard actually got me turned on to these, and they seem to work really well: https://www.amazon.com/Uvex-Blocking-Computer-SCT-Orange-S1933X/dp/B000USRG90
  Wire up some LED's in the specific blue wavelength to use at my desk at work. However, I happened to find an (overly expensive) ready to go solution to this from Phillips: https://www.amazon.com/gp/product/B00M3SGCUE This sits on my desk just below my monitor and beams JUST blue light into my face, within my field of vision. I can comfortably have this on for several hours in the morning, and it seems to make a huge difference. I think.
  The light and the glasses seem to agree, as wearing the glasses makes the light very nearly disappear. . .
  
  TL;DR: Use a LOT of blue light in the morning, block blue light late at night.

Can I give you a little perspective from someone that has been down a similar road.

Unless you make peace with the worst parts of yourself and just accept that they exist, you are going to have a very hard time making positive progress.

All the things that you categorize as awful: "selfishness, greed, egotism, laziness, compulsive behavior, lying, cheating, manipulating " are things that actually serve an survival and evolutionary purpose.

Many of these things, for example, are rooted in trying to take care of yourself first and foremost and ensure that you come out on top. You mention being scared and a direct reaction to being scared is self-preservation.

If you are scared that people will not love you if they knew the "real" you, then you might lie and manipulate to make yourself look better than you feel on the inside. If you are scared of failure it might manifest itself as laziness because if you don't do anything, then you can't fail.

That shadow-self is part of you and without it, you will not be whole. You open with a bible verse and I don't know if you come from that world but one hard part of coming from Christian theology is the concept of the sinful nature and the war with it. It can promote a very dualistic mindset. The good you and the bad you and they are at odd with each other.

Let's go really base with it. If you are a straight male and you see a beautiful woman, your first impulse might be something lustful. Then "good you" chastises yourself and your depravity... but that impulse still continues.

The problem is everything in your being is wired to want to sleep with the hot woman you just saw. You aren't fighting against a sinful evil version of yourself, you are trying to deny things that are built into the most primitive parts of yourself!

The balanced version would be seeing the beautiful woman, recognizing that yes, you would love to sleep with her and then deciding what to do with that impulse. If your faith or beliefs or life situation do not allow it, then you make a choice to live according to those beliefs.

What you have now done is recognize the impulse, accepted it, you did not moralize it in either direction, and you made a choice of what to do with that impulse based on your values and choices for your life. You walk away just a normal person, feeling normal things, and making the decisions you want in life.

This is the healthy way to improve.

I am sure you can see how this applies in other situations as well!

All the things that are a part of you, the things you see as negative, depression, instability, are all things you can learn to accept and life with. I know this because I have lived this.

I spent a lot of time wishing I was just magically different. Guess what changed? Nothing. But while I wish I were wired differently and that, at my core, I didn't have such a capacity for being awful, I've made peace that those are the cards I was dealt and I can take control of my life from my impulses. I can make the right choices because I have already accepted the desire to make the wrong ones. I don't have to "react" when I've already thought it through.

Look into the concepts of Stoicism and you will find that there is a "negative" path to contentment in life and it comes from accepting things as they are instead of wasting the energy wishing it were different. A good starting point would be "The Antidote: Happiness for People Who Can't Stand Positive Thinking." This book serves as a good primer for some of the bigger concepts. I personally really enjoyed the audiobook if you are a listener and not a reader.

This isn't to say that you can't take Stoicism way too far and rob life of joy and happiness, but it is a good mental exercise in framing what is happening in your life as just being how it is. To tear away all things we build up to make things look better than they are so we don't have to face that reality.

But first and foremost, you, exactly as you are, do deserve love and acceptance from yourself and others. There are always ways to improve but you are not a broken thing. Give these two talks a listen by Brene Brown (The Power of Vulnerability and Listening to Shame) to get some perspective.

The worst parts of yourself, as you see it, are just things that exist in most of us that you only need a little practice in redirecting. Think of a child.. they are selfish, little assholes whose world revolves around themselves... yet no one faults them because they have learned to exist beyond that mindset. Some of us take a little longer to get there but we all can. Accept your where you are, and start your journey.