Part 2 - The Road Map

From: Healthy Gamer with Doctor K

The Second Part of Hope, Which is a Road Map

One of the biggest problems that you can do if you're anhedonic and passively suicidal is to have a lot of goals. 

“I look at my life and I see all of the things that are wrong with it.” I think to myself “I have to fix everything.”

This is the worst thing that you can do, trying to fix everything in your life. 

When you try to fix a lot of things, the reward that you get from fixing them, goes down!

We have this idea that, as I make progress, my motivation will increase. Right? “Oh, I have 10 things to fix.  Let me start working on one.”  And we start working on one.  And then what happens? We give up.

When you have a lot of things to fix, your anhedonic and nucleus accumbens dopaminergic circuitry gets screwed.

The worry of all the things you still have to do just weighs you down.

The normal pleasure that you would get from your progress, gets diluted by your thoughts of all the things you still have to finish. And this kills your motivation and drive to continue.

What you need to do is focus on one thing at a time.  Make small tasks.

When you finish single fun tasks, your brain releases lots of dopamine of pleasure to reinforce the motivation to do it again.

But when you have a lot of things to do and your thoughts are busy planning on the other tasks, you brain releases less dopamine while you are doing the task, resulting in less motivation to continue doing it.

You can’t experience pleasure from progress in life based on long “to-do” lists.

In short, have one goal at a time.  Or you can have multiple goals in your mind, but don't let other goals pollute the goal that you're working on.

However, if you start activating your brain, in the same way that a video game does, the opposite will happen.  You will become addicted to progress.  You will get so much motivation for each step forward that you take, you're like “Yeah, let's go.”

How do we do it? Three things

Number one: anticipate the internal reward of doing an action. It's not about accomplishing anything. Think about positive ways you will feel about something in the future.

 Second thing that we want to do is bias towards the positive. The principle of bittersweetness, you have to be able to see both. Even people who are very positive all the time, they're going to be unhappy too.

The third thing, I encourage you all to just notice, just pay attention to what happens in your mind when you make progress.

For others that achieve this, their brain is different, because their brain, when they make progress, they feel very satisfied, and they're like “Wow, that was great.”