Having a successful career with depression, anxiety and imposter syndrome
80000hours.org
80000hours.org
"It seems stupid if you have some other urgent thing that is more important, but doing whatever it takes to overcome that ugh field today is going to take so much less effort than it will a week later when you feel a week more bad about it. And I think that creating these things that you're avoiding is one of the best ways to be self-undermining and do things like really hurt yourself, including hurt yourself in the medium term, in ways that really matter."
Good advice for the mildly or maybe even moderately depressed, but for severely depressed people telling them to "just do it" is much like telling them to "just get over it", like telling a person with an eating disorder just eat better, or telling an alcoholic not to drink.
Most of us realize our own behavior is harming us, but not engaging in such behavior is a lot easier said than done.
I liked that framing, as it turned it from a vague “just do it” (which always seemed to carry the shameful connotation that you should have been smarter than to let it come to this) to a more motivating “solve it for good and be free”.
If you weren't depressed you could say, "I will solve it for good and be free" or you could do nothing and say, "this can wait for another day" or "I have better things to do right now" and they'd all be ok. There are definitely things you can do to make it worse and some things you can do to make it better but in general changing the symptoms, difficulty making decisions, anxiety, doesn't do anything because they don't effect the cause.
If you want to simulate depression a great way would be to become extremely sleep deprived. That kind of sleep deprivation where you don't actually feel tired exactly but just wiped out. Now you're sitting on your couch, exhausted, and your friend comes in and says, "snap out of it, let's go to a party." You don't really want to go. You're not going to be excited about it and just want to stay on that couch. You could force yourself to go but you're not going to have a good time. You can list all the reasons why you should have enjoyed the party but you just couldn't get into it and just wanted to go home. Forcing yourself to go to the party doesn't fix the problem even though you might have felt a little better than when you were on the couch.
Often times there really isn't much more to be said than just do the thing, but there are better ways of saying it, this, is one of them.
For example: 1. Acknowledge I want to open this email. 2. Turn away and breathe deeply for ten breaths. 3. Turn back and click. 4. Turn away and breathe, do push-ups, whatever your temporary escape is that Diane take you completely out of the process.
Cold showers help build the confidence to do things I will otherwise avoid for longer than is healthy. The act of stepping in and minimizing thought as I turn the handle means sometimes I’m already gasping before I have time to dither, and the suffocating blanket of fear has dissolved.
[0] https://www.worldcat.org/title/i-crawl-through-it-a-novel/
[1] https://www.worldcat.org/title/breath/oclc/1249567607&refere...
There are times in my life where I have and haven’t actually managed this well. Medication is often necessary, sometimes therapy, sometimes admitting that it’s too much to people and taking a break to reset my responsibilities. But in the end it’s hard to say that anything other than “just do it” defines the way to make things happen.
From that link: "Across the industrialized modern world, clinical depression has reached epidemic proportions, despite a staggering increase in the use of antidepressant medication. In fact, depression is now the single leading cause of work-related disability for adults under 50. However, there is strong evidence that depression can be both prevented and treated through a set of straightforward changes in lifestyle. [like exercise, vitamin D, good sleep, social interaction, omega 3s and veggies, avoiding ruminant thinking, etc]"
"Deadly Psychiatry and Organised Denial" by Peter C. Gotzsche https://www.amazon.com/Deadly-Psychiatry-Organised-Denial-Go...
From that blurb: "DEADLY PSYCHIATRY AND ORGANISED DENIAL explains in evidence-based detail why the way we currently use psychiatric drugs does far more harm than good. Professor, Doctor of Medical Science, Peter C. Gøtzsche documents that psychiatric drugs kill more than half a million people every year among those aged 65 and above in the United States and Europe. This makes psychiatric drugs the third leading cause of death, after heart disease and cancer. Gøtzsche explains that we could reduce our current usage of psychotropic drugs by 98% and at the same time improve patients' mental and physical health and survival. It can be difficult, however, to come off the drugs, as many people become dependent on them. As the withdrawal symptoms can be severe, long-lasting and even dangerous, slow tapering is usually necessary. In his book, Gøtzsche debunks the many myths that leading psychiatrists - very often on drug industry payroll - have created and nurtured over decades in order to conceal the fact that biological psychiatry has generally been a failure. Biological psychiatry sees drugs as the "solution" for virtually all problems, in marked contrast to the patients' views. Most patients don't respond to the drugs they receive but, unfortunately, the psychiatrists' frustrations over the lack of progress often lead to more diagnoses, more drugs and higher doses, harming the patients further."
Other resources are in the health section here of a reading list I put together: https://github.com/pdfernhout/High-Performance-Organizations...
Blue Zones is helping communities transform themselves into healthier places by adding sidewalks, parks, healthier menu choices, walking groups, and so on. https://www.bluezones.com/blue-zones-results-albert-lea-mn/ "When Blue Zones and Blue Zones Project began working with Albert Lea in 2009 to transform its policies, places, and people, the focus was on helping people move naturally, eat wisely, connect, and have the right outlook—all of which can lead to living longer, better. To make transformation a reality, city leaders and the Blue Zones Project identified key opportunities for impact and sought pledges from businesses and residents. ..."
Dr. Joel Fuhrman has created an online "Nutritarian" community providing some support (although it costs ~US$8 a month for the basic level). I've found it worthwhile enough to pay for over the past decade or so. https://www.drfuhrman.com/membership
So, there are at least some people out there trying to help in various ways.
Eating better does nor have to take endless time, but it does take some time. One general idea that works for some people is to cook a lot once a week and refrigerate or freeze stuff. But that is more problematical if you eat out a lot due to office work or travel.
Like anything, the more you do it, the better you get at it. For example, just recently I realized I could microwave a bowl of frozen blueberries for 30 seconds to have a nice quick healthy treat that is also brain-boosting. https://www.lifeextension.com/magazine/2017/11/blueberries-e...
Still, yes, it can be difficult. The more people who do this and push back against unhealthy food, the easier it gets though, as more healthy options become easier to buy everywhere and more doctors become aware of what is possible nutritionally like reversing heart disease and diabetes and reducing cancer risks from seeing patients have successes. An an analogy, this is sort of like the more people who bicycle in an area, the easier and safer bicycling gets as there is more support for bicycle paths, bike racks, and workplace bike rooms -- and also motorists are more aware of bicycles.
Eventually maybe there will be enough political support to stop so many US Americans being killed every year via tax subsidies to various unhealthy foods: "Why a Big Mac Costs Less Than a Salad [due to government subsidies]" https://economix.blogs.nytimes.com/2010/03/09/why-a-big-mac-...
Related: "‘We’re losing more people to the sweets than to the streets’: Why two black pastors are suing Coca-Cola" https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/wonk/wp/2017/07/13/were-... "William Lamar, the senior pastor at D.C.’s historic Metropolitan African Methodist Episcopal Church, is tired of presiding over funerals for parishioners who died of heart disease, diabetes and stroke. So on Thursday, he and another prominent African American pastor filed suit against Coca-Cola and the American Beverage Association, claiming soda manufacturers knowingly deceived customers about the health risks of sugar-sweetened beverages — at enormous cost to their communities."
I've heard that Michelle Obama originally wanted to have a campaign against unhealthy food when she became First Lady -- but there was too much political pushback, and so her effort got morphed into the more innocuous "Let's Move" with a name emphasizing exercise. One remnant of her original idea was the White House organic garden which came first. Must have been one heck of a "conversation"... (Sadly...) https://letsmove.obamawhitehouse.archives.gov/achievements "In 2009, First Lady Michelle Obama planted the White House Kitchen Garden on the South Lawn to initiate a national conversation around the health and wellbeing of our nation. That conversation led to Let's Move!, an initiative launched in 2010 dedicated to helping kids and families lead healthier lives."
Related: http://www.dunkthejunk.org/blog/michelle-obamas-lets-move-ca... "However, if we judge the Lets Move campaign on its stated mission to "solve the problem of obesity within a generation" then the campaign has been a tremendous failure. This failure is no surprise to the scientists and doctors who work in the field of childhood obesity. The science based key to reversing the obesity epidemic lies in decreasing exposure to added sugars. If you tell a child to exercise more BEFORE you get them off sugary drinks then they actually gain more weight. The science is simple….A 30 minute soccer practice is NOT enough exercise to burn off the gatorade the child brings to "rehydrate" with. Every week I see children in my office who are frustrated that their efforts to exercise have failed to solve their weight problem. These children and families feel hopeless. They have followed the instructions of our national leadership and continue to gain more weight. The first thing we do is to explain the TRUTH about beating childhood obesity…. LETS NOT DRINK SUGAR. We challenge the children to battle SODATRON, the evil SODA monster, who is ravaging our communities. They must NOT drink the poison of the enemy for one month ( no sugary drinks for one month) and then they return to our office. Inevitably, upon return, their weight has plateaued or even decreased. More important then the successful weight loss is that THESE CHILDREN FEEL EMPOWERED, their sense of hopelessness has disappeared." [Emphasis in the original.]
Refined starches are also part of the issue since the body converts them quickly to sugar. Basically, people need to eat more fiber (e.g. blueberries, carrots, watermelon, lettuce, cucumbers, squash, beans, whole-as-in-visible grains, sunflower seeds, walnuts, mushrooms, etc.) and avoid overly-concentrated high-caloric foods while escaping "The Pleasure Trap": https://web.archive.org/web/20150430050047/http://drfuhrman....
But politically, the message to stop drinking sugar water etc (let alone stop subsidizing such industries with tax dollars) was something Michelle Obama could not directly say politically even if apparently she wanted to from what I hear. One can argue after-the-fact about whether she (and her husband) did the most that was possible at the time given many other priorities. Hopefully the political situation will continue to improve in any case -- perhaps including from legal actions like the one mentioned above.
An interesting search for anyone who wants to go down the rabbit hole: "sugar vs cigarettes".
And another search to link it back to the original topic: "sugar and depression".
At least wrt clinical depression-- there's a lecture by Robert Sapolsky where he makes the analogy to telling a diabetic to just will their body into producing more insulin.
It's more suggesting the thing that makes your stomach sink, that thing you want to procrastinate most on is also the most important thing you can possibly do.
And if you pick only one thing to do each day, prioritizing your tasks in that order will be a good start. While the reverse, the piling up of these tasks can be detrimental.
As a former severely depressed person myself, the top priority should be to hold onto life till you feel barely good enough to get professional help.
What it's describing is an alternative prioritization scheme for tasks. Instead of ordinary ways to prioritize like "do what's urgent" or "do what's important", the advice is to forget all that and just do whatever is bothering you most subjectively, even if objectively there's seemingly no need to do whatever it is right now.
As an example, suppose there's some email you need to reply to within the next 2 months. From an objective standpoint, there's no need to take care of it immediately, and there are plausibly more important & urgent things to do. But now suppose that even thinking about this email gives you anxiety--then the advice is that replying to this email should be the top priority among everything in your life, because the barrier to handling it will only get worse the longer it sits there.
Individuals take it hard and then we act like they are defective instead of acting like "the world has changed."
And there's a lot to that. It's not any one thing, but the institution of marriage is being seriously impacted and that's a biggie.
I don't know how the world begins that conversation, but it seems to be a conversation we aren't even having.
Historically, there were a lot of baked in assumptions about people marrying young, about the wife being primarily responsible for the women's work and the husband being primarily responsible for earning a living (and even that it would be a man and a woman -- we now let same-sex couples get married, at least in some parts of the world).
And there is just this huge amount of unspoken assumptions there that you can no longer rely on and it creates friction in relationships. Men who think that the key to everything is career success find that women don't necessarily see it that way anymore and women who want careers often don't want to pick up after their man and do all the cooking, etc. That competes with their time and energy and the ability to learn other skill sets.
So we have inherited a huge amount of assumptions about how life works and how relationships work and those things aren't necessarily true anymore. To the degree that we imagine they are, we are being set up for failure. This goes double when the two people in question are not seeing eye-to-eye on that.
Our entire employment structure is also rooted in this idea that for "serious" jobs, we will be hiring a man with a wife and kids at home and his paycheck and benefits need to provide for a family and his ability to work and focus on the job will be helped by the fact that his wife is handling a lot of tasks like cooking and cleaning that he doesn't ever have to think about or put time and energy into.
And we aren't thinking about the fact this doesn't work as an assumption for how to design our jobs anymore and we aren't thinking about how this impacts individual lives. Men who kind of implicitly assume that they need to be "good providers" and then all will be well and some woman will do the cooking and what not are getting the rug pulled out from under them when that same woman says "You are not worth putting up with." because she has career dreams of her own and no longer absolutely must marry to have much hope of some kind of reasonable comfort in life.
Marriage used to be something people did as basic survival and we kind of gritted our teeth and put up with each other even when it was really hard. And we are much more free to walk away than we used to be and then we aren't really thinking through a great many things that this change impacts, from the societal level on down to the individual level.
I agree that the roles in marriage or other long term relationships are less clear than they have been in the past. Overall that's probably a good thing in terms of creating the potential for each person to self-actualize, but as you point out, exactly what role each person expects to have in a marriage is not known without a very, very thorough discussion about each aspect.
What do you think about Suzanne Venker?
I've never heard of her before. So I don't have any opinions about her.
Because the vain "proto-marriage" of my youth collapsed like the author's, I am cursed to sojourn the earth alone, at least for a time. The bitter taste dissipates when I know that a real wedding hall is set for me. Better still, it may not even be too late to find its typological implementation on the earth. So I'll keep dunetreading.
The modern work week is ridiculous and everything costs exactly the maximum you would possibly pay for it, or takes exactly the maximum work you would possibly do to get it done.
There's no assistance and it never ends.
I don't know how people with less education/privilege/luck do it.
I feel like I'm right on the edge and I'm relatively rich/well educated, and have no health problems.
It doesn't have to be like this. The 85 Richest People In The World Have As Much Wealth As The 3.5 Billion Poorest. Our elected officials aren't working for the majority.
But it seems that people are too tired from work to make guillotines. Things are working exactly as planned.
I don't think any of this was planned. I think it's an emergent phenomenon.
Sadly that makes it a lot harder to solve, if it was planned we could find the people planning it and take back control, but when it is just chaos and general greed that makes this happen it is really hard to stop.
The hardest part of solving social problems is getting buy-in from the necessary parties. If it caused by guilt and intentional malice, you have little to no hope of getting buy-in from those parties.
If you can analyze it and figure out what went wrong without trying to find some scapegoat to pin the blame on, there is hope of something better arising from this.
Something better may already be quietly arising from it, just as yet unnamed and not fully understood. Good information would be helpful, sort of like having a midwife attending a birth. The baby is likely to be born anyway, but the right help will make a difference in the health of both mother and child.
What is less clear is what the unwashed masses can do to stop ever-growing wealth inequality, when the institutions which are our only hope of prevention are willfully inactive, and have been for decades.
That implicitly assumes that poor people are worse off than they used to be. I think it's more complicated than that, but I don't really want to invest more time and energy in this discussion today.
No it doesn't.
Poor people can be better off (debatable but could be true), while still not getting nearly their fair share of the profits from much increased productivity.
Except I didn't make that up. It's not original to me. So it won't be remembered as Doreen's Law.
HN had a better shot at naming a homeless phone after me and that went nowhere fast.
;)
Things are working exactly as planned.
Fast forward several millennia and Bezos, et al, look at other humans and think "Look, things I can exploit.". (although we're all probably guilty of this to varying degrees).
So some humans are probably living happy luxurious lives, but the rest of us...
Organisational or societal complexity will increase so long as the marginal returns of complexity are greater than its costs. The complexity will stop at the point at which marginal cost and marginal benefit are equal. That is, in an equilibrium condition, everyone is on average at the bare limit of their capability to cope and function.
This isn't a conspiracy, it's an emergent phenomenon. You'll find this in any circumstance in which complexity provides increasing capabilities with decreasing returns to scale.
One solution might be imposing some additional non-psychological cost on complexity. Another perhaps varying the environment in a way that pushing up to the complexity frontier is not sustainable --- some psychological reserve would be necessary to address exceptional circumstances, say.
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Notes:
1. See:
Red Queen's Race: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Red_Queen%27s_race
Parkinson's Law: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Parkinson%27s_law
Peter Principle: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Peter_principle
Putt's Law: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Putt%27s_Law_and_the_Successfu...
Also Gamesmanship: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gamesmanship and Systemantics: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Systemantics
To me, this feels even more depressing, because now it reads like I can’t even do anything to fix it without having or being able to obtain an insane amount of influence.
It's pithy, but this quote comes from Viktor Frankl, who knew a thing or two about hopelessness:
"When we are no longer able to change a situation, we are challenged to change ourselves."
They were tired of being on the road and on location and not together. That was not conducive to having kids or raising them.
If you look up the history, that show was the "Star Wars" of its era in terms of revolutionizing an industry. It is the first TV show made with film and archival quality footage which did not involve live acting twice a day for East and West Coasts with cheap temporary footage shown for the time zones in between.
I wish I could be more help, but the reality is that I am currently behind the 8 ball on this issue myself and desperately trying to escape. Posting wisdom for free on Hacker News while everyone tells me I'm a fool for thinking my blog writing should be something that can support me and also tells me my gender is absolutely not a factor in my intractable poverty is one of my biggest beefs in my life.
I post less than I used to here mostly because I'm mostly well and it literally doesn't pay and doesn't result in the professional connections I need to develop a career because most men are hesitant to email me unless they are hoping I will sleep with them. And when I say stuff like that, no matter how nice I am about it, I tend to get kicked in the teeth by multiple people.
I'm mostly well. I'm tired of the entire world telling me I'm a loon who made up the whole thing about having a form of CF and getting better and I'm tired of thousands and thousands of people watching me starve and acting like I'm some nutcase for not liking it and for thinking it is unjust and so on.
I'm doing my best to figure out how to walk away from Hacker News and from blogging entirely and do something the world thinks it's okay for a woman to earn money from, like start a clothing line.
I'm trying to solve my own problems and helping others solve theirs for free "out of the goodness of my heart" like the world expects me to do because I'm a woman or a mom or a former homemaker or whatever is one of the really amazingly bad habits I desperately need to break somehow because, no, other people aren't going to see the light and change and treat me better.
So I just need to stop doing nice things for other people which are never going to come back to me if one can judge by nearly twelve years of being regularly kicked in the teeth so far, with absolutely no end in sight.
You make me think. I appreciate that.
I hope you come to some arrangement in life that's satisfying and secure for you.
I mean this in the kindest possible way, but why did you ever start thinking you could change the entire world without an insane amount of influence? There are typically two 'solutions' btw:
- Focus on happiness for yourself and those around you, changing the area of concern from "the entire world" to "a piece of the world".
- Find a group of likeminded people and together try to effect the change you seek. Even if you don't completely succeed, you will probably improve the lives of many along the way (including your own).
FWIW, whenever I start feeling like that I reread the book "Meditations" by Marcus Aurelius. It is surprisingly relevant to todays society for a book that is 2000 years old. :)
I think i can be really happy to work at the place i am at. As the "Head of IT" for this company i can (mostly) manage to somehow juggle the problematic things around so that things (mostly) turn out well.
Of the big 5 personality traits, neuroticism and conscientiousness seem the most relevant here, to manifest these behaviors.
I think being high in neuroticism and low in conscientiousness are the key markers.
Given that everyone is on the neuroticism and conscientiousness spectrums at different points, no, not everyone is like this. Or, rather, some people are so unlike this that it's probably unfathomable to them/they can't comprehend it.
Edit: Hmm, okay, I just got to the point where he's been prescribed Adderall, so that could be it, too. Or, of course, he could just be a fast talker.
I guess it's a quirk of his, but it gets tiring...
We are all used to listening to people who've spent a large portion of their lives learning to speak to a public audience, many of whom have had professional coaching as well. It's rare to hear an amateur speak anymore.
Although his job seems to involve a lot of talking (management, not just sitting and coding), geez, if I were his colleague, it would get tiring after a while.