Better living through respecting chemistry

I often talk to people about how getting better at self-driven work requires accumulating many small tricks and strategems to keep from falling off — like body doubling, app blocking, setting and stopping in the middle.

This topic can often sound defeatist, because surely there is more to it than tricking yourself into the right state of mind for doing the work. Where is the beautiful relationship to the feeling of mastery? The rewarding fruits of the labour? The satisfaction of competence? Aren’t these supposed to be the Good Motivators that drive one forward with a pure energy that has no need for silly tricks?

In practice, it is both. If you neglect either one, you can end up in a bad place, beleiving that neither drivers are effective since they didn’t work in isolation. You can set out on a Great Work, and give up in a week because you didn’t have enough tricks for preserving momentum in your toolkit. Or you can know all the tricks to energy management, and fail to follow through because deep down you don’t actually care about the outcome.

Similarly, chemistry is slightly embarrassing to think about, but will absolutely dominate your outcomes in practice.

The first-line treatment for ADHD is stimulants. Everything else in this post works best as a complement to, rather than as an alternative to, stimulant medication. In fact most of the strategies described here, I was only able to execute after starting stimulants. For me, chemistry is the critical node in the tech tree: the todo list, the pomodoro timers, etc., all of that was unlocked by the medication.

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Taking Ritalin with no plan for what you will do today/tomorrow/this week doesn’t work. Dually, an ambitious todo list will sit idle if your brain won’t let you execute it. So personal growth comes from using both internal and external changes, like a ladder with alternating left-right steps.

Fernando Borretti, Notes on Managing ADHD

You have to respect your chemistry because we are, in our mortal frames, as Fernando puts it: …automata, our minds are molecules in salt water. You can be driven forward by intrinsic fascination because you have a soul that can yearn and rejoice in the endevour. But you will be tying it down with all kinds of ballast if you ignore the things that govern the chemistry of it’s body; even things that don’t need medication.

1. Isolation is the absolute worst. It will crush your body on a hormonal level almost instantly, but it also does direct damage to the soul.
2. Chemicals that go into your body become temporary but recurrent parts of it. In case it isn’t obvious, everything is a chemical.
3. Energy is a physical process that needs calories and rejuventation, and is governed by external stimuli like vigorous activity or sunlight.

I want you to think of these things with the seriousness and impact that one very easily ascribes to the medication of debilitating conditions — and ignoring them as being akin to refusing a vaccination, or choosing to eat lead. Your soul needs it.

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