Hacker News Reader

Comment by Dowwie | Hacker News Reader

Additionally..

1. Give yourself permission to just try, for a little while

2. use fear-setting for really tough moments

A technique that I've found helpful when dealing with anxious thoughts is I become mindful of the anxious feeling, realize what I'm feeling anxious about, and then give myself permission to just try, regardless of the outcome. I'll explicitly granting myself permission to "just try" and even throw in "just for a little while, see how things go". This at times has turned into a productive, multi-hour session.

Tim Ferriss talks about a technique use to confront fears, called "fear setting" [1]. Essentially, I put together a 3-column table and think through the worst that can possibly happen. It helps me think about risks and realize what I can handle. This helps to manage worry.

[1] https://tim.blog/2017/05/15/fear-setting/

View on HN

I would add take care of some low-hanging fruit to your "just trying" item.

Get the menial, "paperwork tasks" out of the way before you to get to the hard, problem-solving stuff.

Also, know when to walk away and think about things away from sitting in front of a monitor and keyboard. Showers are great for thinking. I also like to swim laps to do hard work - thinking work.

I do some of my best work while walking my dog! :)

Gardening for me. These are good examples of one of the main benefits of working from home. At many workplaces you need to simply be present at your desk hammering away at the keyboard to signal productivity, but it's easier for remote workers to get up and do their coding while engaged in something like walking or working outside. It's amazing how clearly the solutions for programming problems can come in those scenarios.

I have a similar trick. When I need to write something (code, email, etc.) that I don't know how to start, I tell myself that right now I'm only writing a draft. It might turn out to be a final revision later, but right now it's just a draft. This reduces the stress and allows me to experiment. The problem is that it doesn't work for things that I can only do once, like talking to someone about a difficult topic.

Many people rehearse difficult conversations beforehand. Would that approach help?

I’d like to add onto this a bit. The point of rehearsing beforehand is not to come up with a speech to recite, but to give yourself a chance to edit your communications. Often, the brain’s first pass at articulating something is suboptimal, and it takes some critical analysis to refine that into something that fully communicates the desired signal with minimal noise.

The problem occurs with fear setting when you have naturally pessimistic of cynical tendencies, because then you're just contemplating the severity of various bad outcomes. It sounds completely bonkers like some sort of backwards trick, but I've found (lessons from anxiety medication) that you shouldn't even consider bad outcomes a possibility; if a bad outcome occurs, then you deal with it. However, contemplating what bad thing may happen so you can 'be prepared' is really just wasted effort and self imposed resistance. You need to adopt a mindset of 'dumb optimism'. Granted, the meds made that much easier for me, and life was great during those periods. being off them I see my old thought patterns returning, namely dwelling on imaginary 'bad' scenarios. Its counter intuitive, but it works.

I don't think it's counter-intuitive, but rather a simple trade-off. The benefit you get from closing off the majority of your anxiety is worth more than the slight amount of extra preparation you might get from considering certain outcomes. It's not too different from the calculus involved in deciding to quit social media, with the hit on mental health not being worth being in the loop 100% of the time.

Same here.

Another point is that many things are "anxious" because we are doing it for the first time. Like something you used to fear about few years ago, now turns out easy because you have done it tons of time.

Something we can do better is speed up this process intentionally, by deliberate practicing.

While fear-setting can help you get started on "anxious" tasks when you have to do, dedicate some time to exercise the same thing everyday will make "anxious" thing less anxious to you in the long run.

Ben Franklin method: https://medium.com/personal-growth/the-benjamin-franklin-met...

I read your link but couldn't find the 3-column table. Can you elaborate what you do with it?

Begin by thinking of a goal that is important to you but that you've kept yourself from attempting, and divide a piece of paper into three columns.

    In the first column, write down all of the things that could go wrong should your attempt fail. Think of the most terrible things possible.
    In the second column, determine ways that you can mitigate the possibility of each of those bad consequences from happening.
    In the third column, think of how you would recover from each of the scenarios you imagined and wrote in the first column.

source: http://www.businessinsider.com/tim-ferriss-on-exercise-to-ov...

This is amazing. Thank you!

Reply on news.ycombinator.com