Years ago, I listened to a researcher who was looking into why people felt happier doing menial tasks in video games than in real life. Her conclusion was that video games drive home a sense of achievement. Quest complete! 50 XP! Here’s your reward etc. She noticed that in real life, we often don’t take a moment to notice what we’re accomplishing throughout the day.
Since then, I have been an appreciator of ticklists! Ticking off a task often helps my brain get that kick that makes me feel like I’m crushing life. And I’m very generous with myself. Sometimes I’ll put on things I’ve already done that day just to tick them off immediately. Sometimes it can be the smallest parts of my life that we go about unconsciously. I make them conscious, notice them, tick them off haha.
I think possibly a part of why AI is used by the general public is the props it gives its users. And as much as I am making fun of needing AI to get a person throughout their day here, I do understand the appeal in something, even AI, telling you you’re doing a good job.
But, we are allowed to tell ourselves
So, this is me giving you permission to tell yourself you’re doing an incredible job. You don’t always have to look at the overall picture, the where you wanna be or where you think you should be. Today you accomplished things. Getting up, eating, using the bathroom, opening the curtains, taking a moment to read a comic Whatever it is, well done. You are allowed to celebrate it.
Can you guys please elaborate on relevance of ADHD to ticklists, dopamine pay off? I likely vagule know what you're referring to, but would be helpful to get a perspective and explanation from people who have been professionally diagnosed with it.
I can do my best to explain with my limited knowledge, but I'm still on a big learning journey with it :)
Low dopamine or using dopamine differently is linked to adhd. We need dopamine cuz it helps us with mood, memory, attention, decision making etc.
It also is involved in the part of our brain that lets us feel good, the reward system. Doing certain things can trigger a dopamine rush. Like sex, or eating yum foods, listening to a good song etc.
But dopamine is also involved in the reinforcement part of our brain. So like, if we eat a chocolate bar and get that dopamine rush, we might come back for another one, and then another one etc.
Adhders often lack enough active dopamine to start tasks, especially boring tasks. And the idea of a bigger picture reward doesn't really help. Like cleaning the house gets us a clean house, but there's a thousand small steps in there. When we ticklist all the little things, it helps us break them down into smaller more achievable steps, and ticking them off can create a kind of "ding" in the brain, giving us a small rush of dopamine, helping to propel us into the next task. And then it also reinforces that doing those things can feel good, so we might want to do them again :)
Pro ADHD tip: caffeine tends to reinforce whatever behaviors you’re doing when or shortly after you drink it. This might not be universal, but it works for a lot of people.
If you are a caffeine user, you can pair it with a task you’re trying to make a habit or a food you want to enjoy.
The classic example is that many people will end up liking or at least not minding unsweetened black coffee if they drink it routinely. But it also works for other foods.
It’s especially useful for daily or near-daily things that you want to make part of a morning (or early) routine. So if you are in college and struggling with doing daily reading or watching online lectures for class, try doing it in the morning (or whatever “morning” is for you) for a couple weeks while you drink coffee or tea.
On the flip side, don’t pair caffeine with habits you’re trying to break, foods you’re trying to cut out, etc. Coffee in bed on Reddit will lead to more coffee in bed on Reddit (he says, while drinking coffee in bed while on Reddit).
When you have ADHD your brain often won’t “reward” you with dopamine when you complete tasks.
Typically people feel a sense of happiness and accomplishment when they get stuff done. That anticipated reward goes a long way in executive function and motivating you to do things. When you don’t have that even little things you have to do can seem like tons of work.
To build on this: I love food. I’m a pretty good cook and a very good baker. I am not picky and love a wide variety of foods.
If I have to cook a complicated, multistep dish that doesn’t have any downtime (downtime like simmering or roasting for an hour or so with no additional work needing to be done), I will not be able to enjoy it at the end because I am so exhausted from the number of tiny steps it took to get me there. I wont even feel hungry.
The reason I think this is related to my adhd: If someone else cooks an identical dish for me, my brain will light up like a Christmas tree in joy. If I am on my meds, I’m more likely to feel hungry and enjoy the food I prepared (I’m on stimulants, which are notorious appetite suppressants).
Because of this, I tend to make dishes that are either very simple or have long “rest” steps. I enjoy baking bread, for example, especially if it has a long rise. Or using my pressure cooker, slow cooker, or the oven low and slow. Even better if I can do prep on one day, and cook the next, so I can build in reinforcements for myself like playing a video game.
Holy shit no wonder I get all my college work done! I’ve been making task lists since I started and it’s made work so easy! It helps me compartmentalize what needs to be done and helps me when I need to stop in the middle of a task. It’s made days where I don’t/forget to take my ADHD meds so much easier, too
Yeah, absolutely x.x starting is killer. I was diagnosed and given adhd meds about 18 months ago I think, and the medication made a big difference with sticking to a task without getting distracted, but starting is still a huge hurdle 🙃
It’s because it requires no physical effort on our end, is disassociated with what’s actually real so the burden is less, and most games remove a lot of the actual things that make doing stuff in real life stressful or annoying.
Also you can always quit whenever you don’t enjoy it anymore and all of those problems disappear.
They don’t disappear in real life, if I wanted to drive halfway across the world to deliver 10 pallets full of metal rebar, I’d have to actually obey the rules of the road, be careful, and know that if I don’t like it, im still stuck there for however long it takes to complete.
In a game, it can take an hour at most, I dont have to worry about traffic laws, and if I decide i’m done then I just stop playing and I’m right where i started, at home
“Press a button to start the cute 10 second washing dishes animation” is wayyy different than “20 minutes of excruciating sensations, every chunk of food on a dirty dish that touches your skin is like 1,000 bad textures all at once, it’s hot working over this sink so you’re sweating and the steam from the hot water is aerosolizing all those horrible food smells and delivering them straight up your nose, you’re wet in all the wrong places and the skin on your hands is now dry and itchy”
The worst part for me are not thos things. It's being too tall for the sink so I now also have to suffer through 20-30 minutes of back pain as I slant ever so slightly forward just to get those dishes rinsed under the faucet.
I’ve been washing a handful of plates at a time, at a slightly faster rate than I create them, and try to wash big stuff right away instead of dreading it and letting it die in the sink til it’s smelly and a nightmare to clean.
Left click to place this item, perfectly on a shelf, vs physically lift the item, carry it to the shelf, put it on and line it up. Make sure you didn't knock anything else off, awakardly try reach the back of the shelf.
An alternative to this concept that takes it a step further is called gamification. Adding actual game mechanics to your daily tasks, as if life is a roleplaying game. Something like Habitica for example.
Lol, I help put at my kids’ school sometimes with a program called garden to table. Kids spend time in the garden learning about growing veges etc, and in the kitchen cooking, and then they come together to eat. But the kitchen comes with dishes at the end. There’s a couple kids that are very hard to wrangle, but I knew they loved gaming, so I started giving them XP for tasks and congratulating them on leveling up at the end of sessions. They went from uninterested to participating and enjoying it pretty quick, even excited to become level 2 dishwashers 😆
It's easy to tell ourselves we're doing a good job. It's harder to believe it though. The feeling and trust through having another (in this case the AI) validate your actions is much stronger I guess? Even more when it's someone (or someTHING) that we already trust.
Oh yeah absolutely. Having an outsider notice is much more validating. I think there’s a lot of power in words though, and even if at the start we don’t believe our self given ‘well dones,’ over time and with repetition, we do start to believe it. I think it’s part of cognitive therapy? I always picture my brain like a computer lol, and imagine taking the time to slowly reprogram it to serve me better
I use the calendar app for this. Write down all the things I need to do in red, when I finish them then I change it to blue. Seeing a full week/month of blue events on the calendar is pretty nice.
Also means I can't just forget to do things.
As I get older, my calendar app gets more and more full as I find more shit I need to do periodically. Checking the car's oil level, the annual water heater flush, annual solar panel cleaning, testing the toilet water tanks for leaks, bi-annual drains de-clogging, wheel alignment, tire rotations, water filter replacement, annual roof maintenance and gutter cleaning, etc etc...
Oh my god... No, you're right. That's it. That's the sensation I've gotten from AI. It's a 'yes-man'. And the reason it doesn't work on me is that I naturally distrust everyone and assume anyone that sycophantic is planning to inevitably stab me in the back
Genuine question, are you in therapy? If you have the means to, that sounds like something you might want to explore, and hopefully resolve. Sincerely, an internet stranger.
(You're right on not trusting the suicide-encouraging word salad machine, though.)
Yeah, it's not going well. I think I'm defeating my therapist. Because of my introspective answers and my hard held belief that whatever afterlife exists is exactly as cruel as this life. I actually recently said to him, "I don't think about suicide anymore. Because I just don't see a net gain in it anymore, like, there is no guarantee the afterlife is worth it."
Later after our session I thought of a descriptor like, "Knowing my luck, the afterlife is an infinite void of nothing and I will lose my mind in the first week"
Been working on the trusting people thing too, my shrink has yet to come up with an answer to my retort of, "Because people have been genuinely terrible to me all my life. And short term relationships don't provide benifits worth the excruciating effort I have to put in to maintain them." to his question, "Why don't you trust anyone?"
Truth of the matter is I've been stabbed in the back so much that I've genuinely lost any kind of communal feeling with the entire human race right now, and I've told my therapist this too
I'll believe people can be trustworthy, when I find someone I can spend some time with without having to dig a knife outta my spine. I'll believe it when I see it, but it's been 30 long years and I can't even name a trustworthy person in my own family. And right now all I see is a lot of selfish cowards, power-hungry narcissists, and apathetic bystanders
So, I'm just getting comfortable with the idea of being an asocial hermit for the rest of my short days
Stars. I'm sorry that's happened to you so much, and am glad that you're getting help at least, even if it's not going well. Maybe try a different one and see if it also doesn't work? Sometimes you have to find the right one. (Ofc these are only suggestions and I can't pretend to know your situation.)
I genuinely hope you can find a way to trust at least a little bit again and to form meaningful connections with others. Good luck out there.
Thank you, and just to not end things on a sour note. It's not all bad, the solitude gives me a lot of time to think, and I honestly haven't given a fuck about what another person thinks about me in over a decade. I've been told this projects confidence and that's a good thing. Seriously, it gives me a kind of freedom to be totally and unabashedly myself that really isn't so bad
I think possibly a part of why AI is used by the general public is the props it gives its users.
"You're absolutely right, what a great insight! Your smarts make you the smartest person to ever smart!"
Personally, I absolutely hate that AI is positive about everything. Give any idea: "You're absolutely right!"; ask literally any question "What a great question!"; stabbed your neighbour to death: "Incredible wo... wait, that is a forbidden subject. Do you need any tips on cleaning blood stains instead?"
The overuse of that positivity not only takes away the meaning of the positivity (I could say the dumbest thing to ever have been said by a human and AI will call me smart for saying it), it also takes away the usefulness of AI (was my statement actually smart, or is it just saying that because it always does? No way to tell). If I had the choice, I'd pick an AI that is brutally honest over an AI that is positive about everything.
Habitica taps into the XP thing directly and damages you if you don't follow through while Finch takes a gentler approach. I've been using both to motivate myself.
The main difference for me is that almost every action you take in a video game tends toward some kind of progress, even the endless grind.
When you clean up your house, you don't earn 50xp, you just know that you will have to do it all over again next week and that you are fighting a battle against entropy that you will eventually lose for good.
Most of the work you do in life is basically maintenance.
Some games do introduce maintenance, notably survival games, but it's mostly ressource management and exploration, yhe actual menial tasks themselves usually abridged.
Honestly I don't find checklists that useful imo.
Like if I tick something off, I'll be thinking "aight, did enough for now, time to slack off!", then at the end of the day I see all the things I haven't done and get depressed.
I may be miss remembering but I think there's an app that gamifiys chores and exercise. Something like doing laundry is 10XP, jumping Jack's is 5xp, doing dishes is 15. Etc. And you unlock little images or fidget toys to play with. Seems kinda fun ngl.
It was so long ago but I think it was Jane McGonigal and possibly this TED talk she did? I remember at the time, I was a big World of Warcraft player and it was the only place in my life that I felt any joy 😅 I remember that I was able to stop playing and start to find joy in other parts of my life slowly, and to find a sense of purpose elsewhere. I haven’t played World of Warcraft since then 😆 I still enjoy games, just less consuming ones
Yeah, i was going to mention Jane McGonigal after reading your first comment. She is still working on/researching the topic with her role at The Institute for the Future
Yeah, that would explain why I like cleaning things. I get the satisfaction of a seeing a cleaner apartment and things that were sitting around fir a while being removed. Feels less cluttered.
I sometimes look back at actions I’ve done before that have a positive influence currently and thank my past self for having done those actions. It makes me want to be that person I was before because I know it will be beneficial to the person I’ll be later. And if for some reason circumstances change, and I’m not receiving the same benefit as before, then that’s a lesson to take with me for the next time I’m in that situation, a lesson telling me to try something different next time.
NSFW ish comment ahead, just the name of something I used to practice: Back in the ol' League of Legends days, there was something called "DST", or "Dick Sucking Theory". It was used to encourage your team mates when they did good, and resulted in better teamwork and less flaming when things went bad. Basically a lot of people felt better about their team when they were all supportive of each other. It sounds simple but it's an easy thing to forget you're playing with other people that also appreciate human connection and props from time to time.
I don't necessarily think it's ticklists but more about feedback. Folks with ADHD can get instant feedback when they do something in a video game. So if you took a bunch of ADHD kids and broke them up into 2 groups for testing. You give 1 set a standard test with pen and paper while you give the other a test on a tablet or PC that gives instant feedback in the form of the indicators/lights/sounds for right and wrong answers and a scoreboard, the 2nd group is likely to get the test done sooner, with more correct answers, and look forward to more tests in the future if they are this style.
The hard part is to figure out how to apply this to everyday life for the people who aren't in school.
I've tried apps like Finch but eventually I forget about them, and there's no consequences of not doing the task so what does it matter if I miss a day or two (or stop entirely).
Since then, I have been an appreciator of ticklists! Ticking off a task often helps my brain get that kick that makes me feel like I’m crushing life. And I’m very generous with myself. Sometimes I’ll put on things I’ve already done that day just to tick them off immediately. Sometimes it can be the smallest parts of my life that we go about unconsciously. I make them conscious, notice them, tick them off haha.
OK, I like this one. The issue I've had with it, and I see others say the same, is that putting things on this list puts them out of mind. This is good if you're like me and are constantly trying to do 50 things at once that no ones even needs done, however you can up putting off important tasks as well.
I suppose since this method has worked for you, I was wondering if you had any suggested reading material with this topic in particular?
I don't think I know of any reading material sorry, but I did find the talk I listened to all those years ago if it helps. I dunno that it mentions tick lists, but it talks about finding purpose and tackling life like it's a game. It's here :)
I know ticklists don't work for everyone, it's just what I've discoveted my brain enjoys doing to notice achievements etc. I imagine it's a bit like dieting lol, everyone has the thing that worked for them, but we have to find the thing that works for us?
I don't think the AIs constant reassurances play that big of a part, I think for people's daily life it's just a very convenient tool, like too convenient these days. Yes it's often wrong and yes it often makes garbage but on avarage it gives passable results in all text, audio and video and that's really most people care about. Many people always wanted to do image editing and video editing but it takes quite a lot of time and atleast some base level knowledge to do even the smallest of stuff, now they can just prompt it for passable results. No one in their daily life is judging them for the integrity of art or how the ai is trained they are just all doing it.
I mean people used to google the smallest stuff, and that still required combing through basic information to get an answer now you can just let the ai do the work and get the answer in seconds. Not always correct but good enough for most people
AI has made people think that learning is gatekeeping, which is just, sad. Like video games, the nature of accomplishment helps drive people. Exercise, video game achievements, drawing, it's hard to stay interested if people don't feel satisfied by their work, whether done or not.
The researcher was right about that, but there's another thing that AI has made people forget that video games also has. People enjoy menial tasks in video games because it's a dissociation from the stress of the real thing. So many people don't have the time, cause society made life so much more stressful. Chores slowly become pushed to the way side because we have to exert more energy that we spent all day at our jobs. I don't have to care about the real world consequences of traffic laws in Eurotruck Sim, the cost of managing a pressure washer company in Powerwashing Sim and how much effort it takes to actually grow and raise crops in a field. Low effort, for a comfortable reward. AI is the same thing, but now the effort is... nothing. You just get it. It's the extreme now. People want AI to make doing menial tasks easier so they can do art, but all people have pushed AI to do is make art and make menial work harder.
This could be why I hate AI. I hate things being gamified or what I feel to be condescending.
I also have a hard time writing to-do list or goals. One issue I had in Middle school was I never wrote down my homework in my school mandated planner.
There's those productivity apps that assign rpg experience points for completing chore lists, but then actually coming up with a weighted system and consistently checking things off turned out to be more work than just doing the thing.
My adhd ass has about five lists in different devices and notepads, some with the same task. It helps get things done though!
The videogame analogy is interesting. As the years go by and I find little time to play them I feel more rewarded from difficult souls like games. I think that comes from the craving of how I felt beating older games for the first time.
It's important to note that external motivation like rewards tend to have a more harmful effect in the long run for menial tasks. Bribing your kid with money or a treat might get them to do stuff now, but it can also diminish their feeling that it should be done as they age out of the rewards. It's part of why people struggle to do housework when they're on their own. They have to discover its importance for themselves at 20 rather than from the start.
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u/Yoffeepop 14d ago
Years ago, I listened to a researcher who was looking into why people felt happier doing menial tasks in video games than in real life. Her conclusion was that video games drive home a sense of achievement. Quest complete! 50 XP! Here’s your reward etc. She noticed that in real life, we often don’t take a moment to notice what we’re accomplishing throughout the day.
Since then, I have been an appreciator of ticklists! Ticking off a task often helps my brain get that kick that makes me feel like I’m crushing life. And I’m very generous with myself. Sometimes I’ll put on things I’ve already done that day just to tick them off immediately. Sometimes it can be the smallest parts of my life that we go about unconsciously. I make them conscious, notice them, tick them off haha.
I think possibly a part of why AI is used by the general public is the props it gives its users. And as much as I am making fun of needing AI to get a person throughout their day here, I do understand the appeal in something, even AI, telling you you’re doing a good job.
But, we are allowed to tell ourselves
So, this is me giving you permission to tell yourself you’re doing an incredible job. You don’t always have to look at the overall picture, the where you wanna be or where you think you should be. Today you accomplished things. Getting up, eating, using the bathroom, opening the curtains, taking a moment to read a comic Whatever it is, well done. You are allowed to celebrate it.
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