Get Everything Done

I posted that I am still having resistance when using vanilla question-less FVP. I also posted before that when I use FVP I was missing the feeling of focus when I was using my older systems. I think I found why.

I had been following a series of posts from the Wall Street Journal about stress and anxiety, and its articles say that a moderate level of anxiety is needed to work well. Too little will make you lazy and complacent; too much will make you too nervous and afraid to work, unless if the tasks is simple, in which there will be little effect on the work results but your brain would have to work harder than normal. This is all based on the Yerkes-Dodson law which was discovered in 1908 and since then has been time and again proven to be true. A summary of these is in the following article from the WSJ:

http://www.wsj.com/articles/SB10001424052702303836404577474451463041994

Now apparently it is hard to regulate anxiety because "humans' ancient threat-detection system hasn't kept pace with modern man's ability to fret about the future, ruminate about the past and imagine all kinds of terrible scenarios," according to the article. However, I may have stumbled unto how to regulate anxiety: giving oneself permission to be anxious. It may sound stupid but hear me out.

In my older systems like DECAF and CAF4, what usually happens is that I pick a hard task and then look for tasks that can help me do that hard task. It came to the point that I was picking up "helping" tasks that seemed to have no relation to the hard task, but still in the end helped me out in doing it. What seemed to be happening was that I was giving permission to myself to be anxious in some tasks (the hard tasks) while I was not in doing other tasks (the "helper tasks"). This, called "worry scheduling" or "anxiety permission", is what is encouraged by some websites on how to control anxiety like here:

http://www.lifeway.com/Article/Surrounded-by-worry

So I tried using this on FVP, which resulted in the following rules:

1. Dot the first task on your list.
2. Ask yourself: "Do I give permission to myself to become anxious for this task or not?" The rules for this are: give yourself permission to be anxious if it is a hard, complex task or a learning task; do NOT give yourself permission to be anxious if it is a simple task or a routine task. If you given yourself permission to be anxious, add another dot above or below the first dot to make it like a colon (:); if not leave it be.
3. Scan down and alternate between dots and colons until the end of the list; that is, if the first task was something to be anxious about (colon), then mark the next task where you will NOT make yourself anxious (dot), then mark the next task that you make yourself anxious (colon), and so on. On the other hand, if the first task was something to be NOT anxious about (dot), then mark the next task where you will make yourself anxious (colon), then mark the next task that you make yourself NOT anxious (dot), and so on.
4. Do the tasks by order as from FVP.
5. If you feel that you are not ready to do the next task, then mark a newer task where you are NOT giving yourself permission to be anxious (dot) then do that.

I have been doing this for the past week. Finally I am feeling the same level of satisfaction as when I was using DECAF. I also noted that my over all level of anxiety and stress in my life has gone down. But most surprising of all, I am having better sleep: whenever worrying thoughts start to crawl into my mind I tell myself I give myself NO permission to be anxious while sleeping, and I promise myself I will worry the next day.

From all of these I am hypothesizing: (1) satisfaction of the day is achieved when you have used your anxiety in a creative way, and (2) it is counterproductive to just try to banish away anxiety.

As I have been saying to people, the "bad" emotions are not bad at all, just misused.

Laby and Michael B.:

Actually it is less of identifying highly resistant and less resistant tasks than identifying which tasks one should release his full potential and which he should reign it in. Anxiety is the fear of the unknown and especially of the future, so logically when you are anxious most of your brain's limiters are cast off. This was pointed out by the article I cited, where it cited a study that if the task to be done is simple, anxiety will have little effect on the work results but the brain would have to work harder than normal.

That is why I use strict criteria for dotting and double-dotting, which I had posted above.

1. give yourself permission to be anxious if it is a hard, complex task or a learning task: double-dot such tasks.
2. do not give yourself permission to be anxious if it is a simple task or a routine task: single-dot such tasks.

A real life example for me would be such things as throwing away the trash and getting the mail. I really hated doing these tasks to the point that I would often skip them, because both the main trash bins and the mail box are out of the way in my apartment complex. However when I started using CAF4 and then DECAF they were done almost routinely without resistance, as part of the "helper" tasks prior to doing harder tasks. They then were relegated again to "high resistance" tasks while I was doing FVP. Now that I am doing this tweak of FVP they went back to being "low resistance" tasks.

What seemed to happen was that, since I had been tagging "throwing away the trash" and "getting the mail" in my mind as "high resistance" tasks because of the distance I had to walk to do them, I was getting too anxious in doing them, and like the people in that study I was using too much brainpower to do such simple tasks. This resulted to me getting stressed in doing them. On the other hand, by tagging them as "tasks where I do not have permission to be anxious" I was using much less brainpower, and still I am getting them done with less stress on my brain.

Another such example is answering posts such as here in Mark Forster's forums and elsewhere. These for me are "low resistance" tasks since I enjoy going here and making posts. There had been times, however, that I had not been able to finish my posts here because I had not been concentrating enough, letting my mind wander for too long until I run out of time. But ever since I had been tagging such tasks as "tasks in which I have permission to be anxious" I have been able to finish posts faster (at least that is my subjective opinion).

Mark Forster:

"There are times when I feel really sympathetic to Chris's contention that all one has to do is roll up one's sleeves and get on with it!"

But that would be tiring! LOL