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> I've been diagnosed with cPTSD, GAD, Depression, and ADHD.

Depression adds to what we were just talking about.

See, one of the key symptoms of depression - or more specifically of major depressive disorder, which is what you're talking about - is that it warps perception. Not to the point of actual delusion, but in a way that works more like mild colorblindness. It's not that you can never see anything positive, it's that in the absence of very strong signal, you'll default to more negative interpretations (in the same way that a mildly colorblind person CAN tell the difference between red and green, but often needs clear contrast and cue to do so).

This was something I fundamentally misunderstood about depression. During my worst years, when someone told me I was depressed, I'd get upset with them. Of course I am! Everything's terrible and unfixable and I'm a horrible human being! Why wouldn't I be depressed?

I didn't understand it until I was on an antidepressant for the first time. (Or rather, after it started working a few weeks in.) For the first time I could remember, I could operate without the constant screaming voice of negativity and pressure towards negative interpretations of everything that, until then, I thought was just "me". But medicated me wasn't not-me. It was just me without a voice that, today, I don't really think of as part of "me". I think of it as a chronic illness I have to manage.

At the end of the last section, I talked about the idea that your thought processes don't focus on the rewards of your actions. What I'd suggest is that that's because, right now, you can't feel them at all. The power of a reward comes from (a) intensity, (b) certainty, (c) proximity, and (d) what I'll call "salience":

- An intense reward is the difference between "making a million dollars" and "getting $20". Obviously, bigger rewards help more.

- A certain reward means the degree to which you think the action will result in the reward. Video games are often appealing because they set up an artificial environment in which certain rewards are always available, for example: if you finish this quest, you WILL get a +6 sword of orc slaying.

- A proximate reward means you don't have to wait too much. The classic marshmallow test is an example of this. I would argue that what it is testing was the innate tendency the study subjects had to discount future rewards, which is a classic symptom of executive dysfunction. And that's because...

- A salient reward is one you can "feel", not just know exists. The more you can feel the reward NOW, the more you can connect the reward to the task, the more the task itself feels inextricable from its reward, the more the task itself takes on the rewarding color. But if you, like me, suffer from executive dysfunction, this is very hard to do!

Depression hurts a, b, and d. It dampens intensity almost by definition - a lack of pleasure from otherwise-pleasurable activities is a key symptom of depression. It lowers certainty because it will underestimate your chances of success (and when you struggle with executive function, there's a vicious cycle of "I won't succeed so why even try?"). And it cripples salience because it fills your consciousness with negative immediate problems and leaves little room for visualizing and enjoying future rewards.

Again, this is not YOU doing something wrong. This is an illness you have that is making things that are easier for others harder for you. It's not impossible to overcome, it just requires more deliberateness.

My advice is this: one, you may or may not be in a position to try to push yourself to do better right now. Depending on your life situation, you may need to rest and work on building a better immediate environment (both externally in your living spaces and internally in your mental landscape first. But once you are ready, pick ONE thing, focus on THAT, and figure out WHAT IT IS YOU WANT from that thing.

To use my recent weight loss as an example, I started losing weight shortly after a chair broke under me. It felt horrible. I felt humiliated by how my body was. That HURT. It provided immediate emotional salience to my weight. And so, when I got a little momentum a few months later, I had the emotional leverage to start dieting and exercising more.

I developed hard rules (exercise by climbing a nearby hill to X height every other day, 2000 calorie hard cap) that gave me a success criterion, where I could feel good as long as I'd done those rules. The task I needed to do was not "lose weight". It was "manage to follow these two rules today". And then tomorrow-me would follow them tomorrow, and the next-day-me would follow them the next day. 784 days later, I'm still following them, because there's an immediate salience to stopping: the second I stop, I won't get it back, and that will hurt IMMEDIATELY. I'll feel terrible if I stop.

I don't diet because I'm motivated, I diet because stopping dieting would hurt more than dieting does. And that's how motivation usually works. I'm going to go do my work after this post because I'll feel immediately terrible if I don't, not because it means I'll get paid for getting someone a job in a month.

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