I have found out recently that at seemingly random days, mostly after or before my productive days, after doing my first batch of productive habits, I would procrastinate on the afternoon until my phone is out of charge, where I would take some sleep to charge it up, only to wake up when it's already evening and I have to cook rice.
Taking this phenomenon with a gentle curiosity, not with an obsessed perfectionism, I am wondering how and why this phenomenon happens.
For every phenomenon, there is a set of factors that leads up to the event, and there's a trigger that starts the entire event, which may or may not be part of the factors that led to the event.
First, we'll brainstorm the possible set of factors that may led to this phenomenon. We will answer the question, "what might be the reasons that this happens?"
I can think of few possible factors:
After habitual productive work, I have an entire three hours of time dedicated to myself. It's basically free time, where I can do anything I want. This is a time I've designated for rest and freedom. However, this is exactly the reason why I feel like I have no control of my life and this period of time is meaningless.
There is too much choices and possibilities. Logically, one would pick the best choice, but you never have the time to check all the possible choices one by one. To make choices then, we narrow it to the ones we want and the ones we need. What I want that time is to win a game to have fun. What I need is to take some rest.
Thus, I planned that I will first win a game, then take a rest after. The problem is, I never won the game. The internet is too laggy that I get disconnected mid-game. The game is too difficult that my characters dies before I can win. The condition for taking rest then, is never satisfied. The reality has disappointed the expectations.
One of the key similarities that I've noticed with my unproductive and procrastination days is that there is always an element of devastating defeat within them. Either all my plans suddenly got shattered or when I keep losing the same the game. This sense of defeat deals a huge blow to my self-esteem and I fall into my knees, trying to recollect and find out my reasons to keep living.
There are always mistakes, and that's okay. But when all these mistakes pile up in a row, they create sense of failures that are in vain, without any sense or meaning, that not only did we fail at something, but it feels like we didn't learn anything from it, and there's no guarantee that we're going to win next time we try again.
We humans maintain our sanity in this world through our belief in meaning. There are very few people in this world who can live healthily without believing in any form of meaning.
We surround ourselves with meaningful things that helps us wake every morning, but when we are suddenly confronted with failures and losses that doesn't seem to make any sense, it feels as if the ground we are standing on suddenly disappeared, as if we have forgotten which direction is up and down, backward and forward.
Everytime this happens, we are forced to redefine ourselves and recreate our reality, to remember which objects and activities makes life worth living. This is exactly what happens to me whenever I'm confronted with devastating defeats. As someone who is extremely sensitive to meaning, I feel like my entire reality crumbles when this happens.
Good thing I've gotten used to it that I can recreate my reality within a maximum of 5 hours.
Most of life is a struggle, a constant struggle for meaning and for the satiation of our desires, as if we are always in a constant tug-of-war with the universe. Fortunately for us, not every second of life is a struggle, or else there would be no beautiful things in the world. We have friends to cheer us up, family to nourish and protect us, and there's the sun to greet every morning.
But for me? Not so much. I have no to little emotional attachments to my family nor anyone else. My life is always plagued with misfortune and interruptions. The mountain of life that other people so happily climb together with their family, friends, classmates, and teachers, I climb all by myself alone for most of my life so far.
So what happened? With my burning passion to live and survive, plus the help of countless books, I have now climbed so high in the mountains, higher than what most people have climbed so far. You can say that I'm now an experienced metaphorical mountain climber, armed with an array of life skills and vast knowledge of philosophy, psychology, and spirituality.
The place up here is cold and full of fog, but that's not the problem. You see, it seems that I have been extremely obsessed of reaching the top of the mountain recently, that I would climb and struggle each day with minimal rest. My eyes are filled with obsession — with sheer madness not just to reach the top of the mountain, but to reach even the stars up above the sky.
Unfortunately for me, I'm still a human and this constant struggle is taking a toll on my body, that I would sometimes unknowingly take so much rests and be useless all day long.
And these are all the reasons I can think that leads to this phenomenon. I believe that the trigger that ignites all these factors and effectively turns my day unproductive is...
The fatigue slows our thinking speed and prevents us from taking on high-focus meaningful tasks, so our mind would gravitate towards the domain of rest. We don't want to sleep so early in the morning, so instead of taking rests, we want to either play a game or watch a video.
Since we want more action and progress, and our pride won't let us slow down in anything, we would inevitably play a high-paced adrenaline action game where we would fail most of the time, only to try again and again until we have lost track of our time and everything feels meaningless.
Surrendering to life, we proceed to sleep everything up without any time restrictions and then we'll wake up when it's already nighttime then regret everything we have done.
This is the usual sequence of events once the main trigger "fatigue", hits up and freezes our ability think rationally.
Rather than playing a game, we can watch a movie until lunchtime, then take some sleep after that. And rather than playing a game until we win, we can play a maximum of two full rounds until lunchtime, them proceed to sleep.
Basically speaking, we're going to make lunchtime, the main stopper of the dopamine break and prevent excessive procrastination. Plus we're going to make ourselves either choose watching a movie or playing a game.
This isn't a complete solution, but it's the easiest and fastest one we can do for now. Once we have enough time, we're going to devise a full solution to the philosophical and psychological factors presented above.
"Understand the root of the injury and focus on the first-aid treatment before taking the patient to the hospital."
"Taking proper rests is an important part of the training."
"The cells of a tree grows only to die and serve as a foundation and protection for a new one. The tree dies countless times just to reach peak maturity and be truly alive, and everytime a part of it dies, new parts are born."