All right, Jesse, what do we got next? All right, next question is from M. "What advice would you give somebody who is currently in a role that meets every job satisfaction criteria but is struggling with motivation? I consistently lack motivation to do deep work and have to force myself to focus.

This at times feels almost physically impossible, especially when working from home and leads me to cycling between burnout, stress, boredom, and guilt." Well, M, this is common, especially right now, especially post-pandemic. There's two potential forces that might be at play here that is causing this amotivation issue. I don't know which of these at play.

It's likely that both are maybe at play and they're mixed together, but let's talk about both separately. The first is what I call deep procrastination, which is an issue I wrote about originally back when I focused my blog just on students because it was in the student population that I first observed this issue.

Deep procrastination is where you find yourself unable to work up the motivation to do work that needs to be done. And for students, it'll be a paper that has to be submitted or a take-home exam that has to go back, and they just can't do it. They cannot muster the internal motivation to even get started.

Deadlines will be passed. Professors will give them extensions. Oftentimes they maybe end up even having to withdraw from that semester. They just can't push themselves to work. So I observed this when I was, especially at MIT where I was at the time among high achieving students, it was different than depression because in other aspects of their life they were not a hedonic.

So it wasn't an overall flattening of their ability to have sort of excitement or hope or positive feelings. There's other things are still very exciting to them, but they couldn't do schoolwork. So deep procrastination could be at play here. I'll talk in a second about how to service that, but let me mention the other possible force at play here, which would be the idea that your mind might be dopamine sick.

So dopamine sick is where you have so frazzled your brain with constant targeted distraction at the slightest hint of boredom delivered through your phone, delivered through your computer screen that is now unable to work up the proper motivation to do something that's longer form, deeper and more complicated. That is so frazzled from just being stimuli bombarded with all of these algorithmically expertly aimed sources of stimuli, these digital darts right to the base of your brainstem that give you that metaphorical electrical charge that when it comes time to do something that is comparably more stayed, that's comparably more boring, like let's start gathering sources and writing this memo, your brain just can't do it.

And there's been an uptick anecdotally, an uptick in dopamine sickness, especially post pandemic because of how much and how many people fell into a pattern of much more hyperactive exposure to distraction that they would have before. Because maybe they're now at home and they're working remotely so they can have the phone out and things feel more haphazard.

Maybe also there is an escape what's happening. You're anxious about things that are happening in the world and you can't confront them. And so let me just look at the phone, let me just look at these distractions and get that numbing in the moment. So I think we have a lot more dopamine sickness than we had before.

Students are getting this very strongly because they got so embedded with their devices that now their brains are struggling. You say, here's a senior thesis you have to write as a high school student and their brain is tick tock, tick tock, tick tock. How can I go from seven seconds before I swipe to spending hours trying to research Charles DeGrete or something like this?

So both of these things might be a play. Deep procrastination, dopamine sickness. Let's talk about solutions to both and you can mix and match these solutions as they seem to fit. So what I learned about deep procrastination is that its source tends to be a combination of the locus of control and motivation being away from the internal and more towards the external.

So extrinsic motivation, you're like, I don't really, this feels arbitrary to me or it's not something I really want to do. But it's being for a student, it might be, I don't know, my parents wanted me to be a pre-med major and this chemistry class is really hard. I never even wanted to be a doctor and this class is not something I went after because I was excited about it.

And in work it could be, I don't even understand why I'm writing this self-assessment report. So I just put it on my plate. No one's even going to read this thing. So you have this lack of intrinsic motivation for the work coupled with the work being hard. So the chem class is really hard and I never wanted to be a doctor in the first place.

This report is going to be a real pain. I don't even really know. There's a lot of ambiguities around how do I even do this? And it wasn't my idea to do this in the first place. No one's really going to read it. That combination can trigger deep procrastination.

So a couple of things you can do here. One you have to reduce the hardness. That does help. Lock it in your organizational system. Here is how I keep track of what's on my plate. Here's how I plan my time during the day. Maybe I'm doing capture, configure, control style system of professional workplace management.

I have processes in place for common collaborations. There's a sense your brain gets of I am in control of how I approach my work that gives it more confidence and reduces the sense of this is some ambiguous, hard, impossible task. So when the hard thing gets reduced to time blocks that show up in time block plans for the days and you sort of execute your time blocks for the days, it's not as hard to execute.

So that can help. Simplifying obligations also helps. So there's a sense of hardness that sometimes come here from just you're overwhelmed, you're overloaded, and your brain says this is enough. Like, I don't even know what all this stuff is. This is impossible. Uncle, I'm going to do deep procrastination.

So it's a good time because it's a serious problem. You're not able to just get normal work done. It's causing you real subjective distress. You have to be ready to make some actual big changes here and a real simplification on what's on your plate, even if it ruffles some feathers, may be what you need here.

Makes your workload seem manageable or possible to your mind. And then finally, I think you need some sort of target that your professional life is serving. This goes back to something like lifestyle centric career planning, right? So here's the chain of influence I want here. I want you to have this vision you're excited about for your life that you're not there yet, but a lifestyle that's different, that resonates.

Okay, there's some things I need to change. You need to figure out how your work fits into there. This may require some changes. I need to shift over from this work to that work or change my focus within the organization because that's going to open up these options, which lets me get closer to my lifestyle.

But what you're trying to get here is a chain of influence from a motivating image of a desired lifestyle and have that chain of influence come all the way back to the work you're doing right now. And it seems like that's arbitrary, but for the motivational sensors in our brain, that makes a big difference.

Now you get intrinsic motivation. This self-assessment report is going to be a pain to write, but it's part of my plan to get this next promotion, which I'll then negotiate the shift over to this type of work, which I'll negotiate to do remotely. And then I'm going to move to the upper peninsula of Michigan as my plan all specifies I should do.

Now the hard, hard effort deployed towards a goal you believe in is not, not hard. It's not going to cause deep procrastination. We appreciate hard things if we know why we're doing them. You have to, you have to fit a why in there. If you're just going through your job, this should be a good job.

I'm paid well, it's satisfying. I like the people, but it's just a job. Then doing the effort could fall into this deep procrastination trap. So you have to connect it to a bigger positive vision. All right. So what about dopamine sickness? If that is the issue here? Well, you need boredom therapy.

I talk about this in my book, Deep Work. This means a regular periods throughout your day where your mind craves distractions and you do not give those distractions to your mind. This includes, for example, going on at least one walk or errand a day without your phone. So you have no option of looking at your phone or listening to something.

I would also suggest the phone foyer method. My phone gets plugged in by the front door in the kitchen. When I get home, if I need to look something up or check text messages, I have to walk over there and read it there. It is not with me on the couch.

It is not with me at the dinner table. God forbid it's not with me in the bathroom. So you still have the phone in your apartment, in your house. You still have the conveniences of, oh, I need to look up what time this thing is tomorrow or text someone on meeting later, but it's not on your person.

And that makes all the difference. So now your brain is getting used to this idea. Sometimes we get distraction when we're bored. Sometimes we don't. And this is a withdrawal period. Give that a couple of weeks and your brain will get much more comfortable with it. You can also do interval training with your ability to concentrate on hard things.

Let me just do 20 minutes, 20 minutes with a timer. And if I break and check email or my phone, I have to reset the timer. Your brain says that I can do. I might freeze when you say, right, this thing is going to take five hours, but 20 minutes I can do.

And you start with that 20 minutes with a timer, intensely working on things until you can do that pretty regularly without it being too horrifying. 20 minutes doesn't seem too bad. And then you add 10 more minutes. And then once 30 minutes becomes comfortable, you add 10 more minutes.

So you might literally need to retrain your brain for longer and longer intervals of focus as you escape dopamine sickness. Finally, I think you need to care about location. You need to care about rituals for your work. So you mentioned that working from home is a big part of work seeming very hard for you to get started with.

This is a tricky thing. When your home environment, your work environment is the same. You're trying to wrench your mind from a domestic context into professional context. It's hard to do. Your mind is still largely ensnared in the domestic context. It's hard. Therefore, you don't have as much resources to actually focus on the thing ahead.

It messes with your motivational senses. So Em, I would say go radical here. You need a really different location. You do your work, renovate the garden shed, rent some office space in a small town, spend money on this. You have a big problem. You're unable to get work started.

So you have to see this as an issue that might require big solutions and build much more elaborate rituals around your work. This is my work day. I have a big walk I do to get coffee where I think I plan my day at the coffee shop. And when I get back to my desk and my exotic location near my house, I immediately start working at the end of the day.

I go to that same coffee shop and do a shutdown routine and then do another walk to switch my mindset. You need radical rituals. You need radical locations to help your mind separate work from non-work, to help your mind more automatically generate the motivation it needs to get going.

You're not just forcing it, white knuckling it. Hey, let me just put this laundry basket down, walk past my kid over here who's homesick and just say, "Concentrate now." And you're staring at the computer amidst all of that chaos. So I don't know if you have deep procrastination. I don't know if you have dopamine sickness.

I don't know if it's some mix of those two things. But think about those solutions and the types of solutions that seem to resonate with you. Go with those. That'll probably point you towards what the real problem actually is. Did you come up with a term, dopamine sickness? I think so.

Yeah, I think you did too. Yeah. I mean, it might be around. I just made it up, but- I like it. You come up with a lot of terms. I like terms. Well, there's a show about the opioid crisis called Dope Sick. Oh, there is? Yes. That's probably what I'm implicitly playing off of.

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