Dealing with anxiety, absent-mindedness, ineffectiveness as a developer | Hacker News Reader

Dealing with anxiety, absent-mindedness, ineffectiveness as a developer

19 pointslewisflude17 comments

I'm a developer and I need some help with being the best I can be mentally, but I'm not sure where to get it.

By "mentally" what I mean is I feel anxious, absent minded or otherwise less effective than I feel like I can be (and have been in the past).

I'm generally a happy person, confident in my technical abilities but I feel really held back by my mental state sometimes. It's so hard to talk about mental health, because so much of it is qualitative and everyone's experience is different.

I'm not sure where to find help. Ideas I've had are going into therapy or finding some sort of mentor/sounding board. I'm looking for suggestions, because I thought there must be people out there in the community who have had similar experiences.

If anyone out there has any thoughts/recommendations/advice then I'd really appreciate it!

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Hi, I've got complex PTSD, and my mental state is an issue pretty often. I recently received a warning from my employer because my performance had been slipping. My anxiety of not working fast enough was causing me to rush my work, but my inability to focus introduced a lot of bugs, which in turn caused issues for my coworkers.

It was a big slap in the face for me, because it made me realize that, while my employer is very accommodating, they are still a company, and cant stand for bad performance.

At least where i work, they care more about quality than quantity, so in my case, I've been trying to focus my anxiety towards writing tests and test cases, and just generally trying to be as diligent as possible. Another big sticking point for me is staying focused in those 1.5hour + meetings... I still don't have a good answer for that. I have a follow up today to find out if my performance is better, and if i get to keep my job. I hope this doesn't make you more anxious. I more just wanted to let you know that you aren't alone

If you're looking into therapy, not every therapist is good at the same things. Look for one who specializes in cognitive behavioural therapy. They'll focus on actually teaching you how to deal with things, instead of just letting you talk through them. It's helped me a lot, but like everything, it takes time and commitment.

Remember you have a super-power. If you can make anxiety your friend you will be able to get into a hyper-focus state.

How to get into that state: Trying to calm yourself is actually the wrong thing to do. Meditation works right before the episode or if you're a master meditation expert. It does work for some but I found that my ADD and Anxiety make it really hard to meditate.

Like many of the comments here, do an activity that excites you; jumping jacks, powerlifting, running, taking a shower etc. Anxiety has a similar pattern in the brain as when you exercise. So you're tricking your brain to divert the feelings to activity instead of panic.

Then when the tightness in your chest subsides and you spent yourself, CODE!!!!!

You'll realize the focus is different. Your thoughts are still there but now you can put them aside and use that anxiety to power focus.

My routine is to pace, pumping myself up, acting like Muhammad Ali then for hours I can work.

It's hard, this is very hand-wavey, your struggle will work; you just need to find your inner strength buried beneath worry and uncertainty, trick your brain and unleash your super power.

1.) SLEEP!!

I hope this doesn’t sound like an ad, but I learned how sleep was last year, and I bought a Fitbit to track my sleep (but any hardware sleep tracker will do). I never realized how little sleep I was getting until I started tracking it and reading the stats. 60% of my anxiety disappeared over the course of a week.

For example: going to bed at midnight and waking up at 8am != 8 hours of sleep. The average person awakes in their sleep 10-20 times per night, even if just for a few moments. I thought I was getting 8 hours for so long, but turns out I was getting between 6-6.5... And that was on a good day! (I assumed I slept for 8)

2.) STRETCH!!

I’ve been doing a 15 minute stretch right before my morning routine, and it has changed my mood, and nervousness, anxiety, etc by SO MUCH. Getting blood flowing and relaxing your muscles first thing in the morning will make so much anxiety, tiredness, back pain, etc DISAPPEAR. I’ll post a routine below. For best results, play it at 0.75x speed to get a better stretch and more time to follow along.

https://youtu.be/L_xrDAtykMI

3.) SUPPLEMENTS!!

Most people are Magnesium deficient, and I take a Magnesium supplement before bed, and the next day, I’m so relaxed, less anxious, and at peace & focused. This is the first thing I ever started doing to help with my anxiety, and the results are night & day. Magnesium helps the muscles, so it plays a big part in the stretching routine as well. Take CBD!! 10-15mg of this in the morning will have you feeling SOOOOOOO relaxed and laid back. It’s a godsend for anxiety and stress.

tl;dr get more sleep, stretch in the morning & supplement with Magnesium and CBD. I would also mention my meditation routine, but everyone in HN knows about that anyways. Good luck dude.

BREATHE!!

Take a deep breath. Get a sense of your surroundings. Make an alarm/calendar schedule to remind you to take a breath.

I smell a fellow Wim Hoff enthusiast! I may be wrong, but dang that man is awesome!

LOL, I don't even know who Wim Hoff is.

But seriously, looking at the big picture always helps with anxiety and the likes. Sometimes we simply don't have visibility over where we are, when we are, and how we are, and not knowing is always scary even though we sometimes don't realize it.

I don't have much advice for emotional issues but you could try taking stock of how the day went. What was good and what wasn't?

If you have trouble remembering you could keep notes about what you're doing while you work so you can review things later.

If you identify misses on your part, you could start digging into what didn't work, why, and what you could do in the future[0]. Like a mini retro for yourself. Hopefully you'll be able to catch when you're slipping on something and implement a strategy that helps you improve. Are there software tools you could build for yourself to give yourself guard rails or automate error prone tasks? Could you have applied your focus elsewhere to get different results? Do you have knowledge gaps anywhere?

This works for things that are going well too. Are there ways you can increase your velocity or bring helpful stuff to your team?

Keeping notes on tasks and issues talked about during meetings is really helpful too. It's easy to forget details if you get context switched out of things or lots of time passes. Pay attention to what business is doing and other teams are up to too. Sometimes you can see patterns and suggest things that help the larger org in nice ways.

Don't freak out - you got this!

[0] sort of like this but probably less extreme - http://edweissman.com/Wiki0205.html

The only issue I can address is the absent minded: Write it down. I use a day planner. Each day is about half a normal sheet. It has a silly string to mark the current day. Each item I put a little box so I can check it off when done. At the bottom of each page I write things I know of ahead of time. e.g. [] attend webinar on SP. As the day goes on I write stuff on the top going down. Periodically (usually Friday) I review my week to make sure I did not miss anything. Also I use a different notebook for general notes from meetings etc.

I have found this helps with the anxiety of fear I forgot something. As an added bonus, when someone tries to task me, I have a list of other things I am trying to do, and I can understand if I can accept the task. Especially when its my boss and I can then reply 'is this new task more important than that task'

Lifting very heavy weights gets me out of a funk faster than anything. I'm talking intense exercise, not little rubber pink dumbbells or whatever.

Suffering brings clarity for me. Literally. I think humans need a certain amount of stress to be healthy - when you don't get it, it ends up leaking out as this constant anxiety that never seems to go away. Putting your body through physical stress melts that constant low-grade anxiety like butter.

I would like to support this argument with my own experience. Running, biking, lifting, camping, fasting, and generally suffering in a positive way has made me feel so much better.

It's like my hind brain thinks I need to get out and hunt/gather or I'll starve to death and that involves the above ordeals. If I just eat and do nothing my brain thinks I'm going to end up destitute and starving or something.

Echoing your thoughts. For me, it’s cycling. With proper suffering I’ve found the body reverts back to a more primitive form and the only thing it’s trying to do is keep providing the muscles with energy.

Not much time for your brain to wander and latch on to anxiety.

Personally i had the same problem plus brain fog.

Here are some things that helped alot.

1. Meditating 1 hour everyday first thing in the morning helped me alot.

2. Exercising.

3. Not eating breakfast.

I'd suggest therapy to drill into why you feel this, it could be due to your past. I would also carry out an extensive private blood test to check if all vitamin levels are normal.

Weightlifting, Provigil, and 2000 IU Vitamin D if I'm not getting serious sunlight

Now I am almost always operating above 95% quality.

- Get more sleep

- Lift

- Take vitamins

People coast from their youth but as you get older you do need these things, otherwise the body will come to collect.

You need to find a way to development mindfulness. There are many apps but when you are talking about being able to manage your feelings, think of this way; those monks who sat down and burned themselves alive as a protest...that's what mindfulness can do.

Sam Harris has an app called Waking Up that, in my opinion, is one of the best courses on breaking down a rather complex skillset. Good luck.

The mindfulness well help you recognize when you are starting to allow an emotion to build, so if you can catch the snowball when it's tiny, it won't become an avalanche and wreck your life.

EDIT - I couldn't be more emphatic about this - other than getting 8 hours of quality sleep, prescribed medication or therapy, this is the next best thing.

maybe find a new profession - your job shouldn’t give you chronic anxiety

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