Search the Community

Alright, nerds. It's time to apply good strategy to a bad game. In this mandatory and inescapable bad game, my battle is with the twin motivation-destroying curses, fatigue and resistance. They look nearly identical and both cause disinclination to action. But they require different strategies to defeat. Fatigue is a random attack that can only be reduced by by increasing rest and lowering the difficulty level. Resistance is an effect that increases over time unless offensive action is taken to beat it back. Rest is effective against fatigue, striving is effective against resistance. The tricky part is that excess rest raises resistance, while excess striving raises fatigue. I hope to walk the middle path between giving up and overextending myself. Thank you @Tanktimus the Encourager for reminding me of this. I will try to bring acceptance without resignation. My main task is to apply lore and strategy to the battle. First, I must identify my motivation debuff level in the morning on a five point scale. Do I have a severe, moderate, or mild debuff, a neutral status, or a slight buff to motivation? (There is no such thing as a moderate or high buff to motivation, don’t be ridiculous). Using @KB Girl's fantastic idea, this measure can be obtained by getting dressed first thing. Getting dressed will be the standard action by which I gauge my relative physical and mental fatigue and pain, if present. Trouser Lore, as it were. Sweater Measure. Undies Identify. I will try to identify how much fatigue is present versus how much resistance, since they require near opposite tactics. The second action is journalling: I will plan my day’s difficulty level (out of 5) based on the debuff severity, and by the likely contribution of fatigue versus resistance. I will apply the difficulty level to each of four level-scaled quests: training, art, meditation and chores. The easiest difficulty for each task is to skip it, but if I do that I must do five minutes of meditation instead. Clearly, that means there is no such thing as skipping meditation, which is a good fallback in case of a genuinely severe fatigue debuff. Resistance hates meditation. Get bent, resistance. I will also write down and check off the four non-scaled quests: get dressed, journal, groceries and an afternoon walk. I will not set a specific time for each activity, as that hasn't worked before. I'll just try to go through them sequentially as soon as I can, without rushing. Then after my afternoon walk I can play video games, read, or whatever. I will report daily which debuff/difficulty level I identified and whether I completed my 8 tasks. Diet is not a major focus right now. I will simply note that I am eating primarily dairy, fruit, meat and honey, and adding other plant foods back in slowly to see if anything triggers my anxiety. I think my anxiety is generally higher than on keto/carnivore, but my sleep and mood are improved. In fact my sleep has completely recovered, thank goodness.