goals, productivity, stress response, and bad habits

“I’m ambitious, but not motivated,” has been running through my head alot of late. It encapsulates something very true about my personality, though I think “motivated” may not be quite what I’m looking for.

So, this morning, I tried to log on to final fantasy xi, only to find out my account had been suspended for lack of a current credit card. The one I’ve been paying with expired in March. I have the replacement card, and I nearly pulled it out and got started again. But I paused to consider how good an idea that is.

I don’t buy that video games are my problem, any more than I buy that they cause teen violence. I definitely feel that I sorely misallocate my time, with video games taking up more time than they should. I’ve never been a nose to the grindstone student. In high school, my video gaming privileges were yanked a couple times, but it didn’t change my tendency to stay up late and not be ready to go on time in the morning. Entertainment reading took up most of the slack. Though I had many hours of laying in bed staring at the ceiling doing nothing but thinking and being miserable.

Instead I usually attribute it to having no good work habits. Which is pretty true. I don’t think I’ve finished a paper more than a day in advance in my life. I’d guestimate that I turned in 1/3 of all the papers I’ve done outside of class after the due date. But I think there’s something more.

When I was at CMU, I occasionally signed up for psych experiments. It was easy money (though not much) and I helped advance science. Pretty rockstar in my opinion. One of these experiments revealed a bit about how I work in my head. When I came in the experimenter went through the methodoly as per usual. Part of the story on this one was that we’d be getting electric shocks. Nothing dangerous she assured me, though it might hurt a bit. I shrugged and said I was fine with it. She repeated the point, and I told a story about when my family was moving from the middle of nowhere to the outskirts of nowhere. I was reaching behind some appliance (the microwave, I think) only to discover that mice, or something had gnawed through the cord. So, I got a pretty good voltage jolt. It wasn’t pleasant, but it wasn’t all that horrible either, I assure her. I’d be fine, maybe it was what got me into Electrical Engineering in the first place.

She had to go prep for the experiment, and left the waiting room. I sat down and started fiddling with some little brain puzzle. The next thing I know, she comes back into the room and thanks me. Then she explains that the experiment didn’t really involve shock at all. The experiment was all about how people reacted to anticipated unpleasant situations. I asked how I’d reacted, and she replied that I’d sat down and played with the brain game for 15 minutes (one way mirrors, gotta love ’em). She thought that my prior high voltage experience might be some sort of disqualifying factor. But I think I actually participated flawlessly. My usual reaction when faced with some sort of stressful situation is to dismiss it as non-stressful, and completely manageable, then distract myself with some sort of brain puzzle.

Great stress response for a student, right? Wrong. It’s only great if you can channel it productively. Since I typically direct my nervous analysis towards games or other recreational analysis and away from things I get graded on, it’s a terrible habit. It’s not my only stress aversion response, but it is one of the more annoying ones. Another big one is cruising on gay chat media. I used the excuse that it’s a way to meet people in the town I’ll soon be living in. And it is, but it’s a very time consuming way, and it has other problems to boot.

So, the real answer is “just do it”. Fuck gay.com, fuck ffxi, fuck excuses and other activities. Just do the work.

I’m still not reactivating ffxi. At least, not today. Maybe later this month, we’ll see how things go.