Comment by zeroxfe | Hacker News Reader

Comment by zeroxfe | Hacker News Reader

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I really think that action changes attitude faster than attitude changes action. Learning this the hard way in my 40s, it's been really life changing for me. Particularly when you're depressed, demotivated, find yourself procrastinating, etc.

You can try this yourself -- the next time you're feeling demotivated, start with the smallest amount of tiny measurable action. If you can't get out of bed, move your fingers, shake your head, work your way up to standing up, walking, leaving your house, and very slowly building momentum.

If you're procrastinating about work, start with opening up a terminal, launch your editor, write one tiny snippet of code that just compiles, add another snippet, build momentum.

You'll find yourself making excuses, telling yourself that none of this matters, or that you're too tired, or that you're not in the mood. Accept the thoughts and push through the actions.

Very quickly, as the dopamine hits from these tiny successes arrive, you'll find your attitude changing, and this turns into a feedback loop where you end up performing more actions, further improving your mood and attitude.

"Motion before emotion" is a great little mantra to get you started on whatever - waking up, exercise, writing, working, etc.

Emotions are sometimes helpful, but in the case of starting things they're usually wrong.

I like your mantra very much. Hard disagree on emotions being wrong though. I am glad i learned to view emotions as messages from the more archaic parts of my brain.

The ones we label as positive come up if we do something that aids the survival of our species. Examples would be pleasure derived from food or sex.

The ones we label as negative are very important IMHO. To prevent harm to ourselves we need Fear, it is a good friend. My theory is that anxiety disorders are like an allergy of the mind. In our super safe world our Amygdala has not much to do, very few (if any) predators around. But it stays on the lookout and reactions to small (or imagined) threats are totally out of proportion.

The rise in depression for me is a symptom of feeling lost/uprooted. If we take the theory that we evolved to live in groups of 100-150 individuals, that we all knew and worked with to ensure survival of the group, as basis and compare our modern lifestyle to it, we come out as extremely alienated from our nature. Even animals commit suicide if they see no way out. Put a scorpion in a ring of glowing embers and it will kill itself.

<addition>

The root of anger is fear IMHO. Anger is there to ready us to fight in case of a real threat to our life. Nowadays anger rises in situations challenging our worldview, questioning our distorted view of ourselves or our status within the group. My favourite one is getting angry when observing behaviours in others, which we dislike in ourselves. It happens even if we are unconscious it. When i get angry about behaviour of others, i sometimes remember to ask myself if i act the same way.

The fight or flight situation leaves a third and fourth option. Freezing like a deer in the headlights, experienced it once myself. Read somewhere, that some predators only detect motion.

Anger might be expressed as (physical/verbal) violence against others. If it does not, it can turn against yourself and lead to depression.

The most healthy option i think is to accept your emotions and use your anger as motivation to change something for the better.

</addition>

Following Proverb helped me to accept my emotions:

  "Treat your feelings like a guest.
   Open up, attend to their needs and say goodbye when they leave."

Another useful one:

  "What you fight gets stronger." - Siddhartha Gautama

(edit) formatting, add anger

It's always tricky when people talk about emotions "being wrong", especially because there are at least three different things that one can mean: (a) they're not feeling that emotion, (b) they shouldn't feel that emotion, or (c) they shouldn't take the instinctual action suggested by that emotion. A doesn't make any sense, B is occasionally true, and C is usually true. That is, sometimes your emotions are misplaced (e.g. strong animosity toward a good friend for an innocuous action - maybe you're tired or hungry?), but it's much more often the case that your emotions do signal that someone is wrong, even though the gut reaction to that emotion is inappropriate.

Like you said, emotions are messages - but they're not very contentful messages. The value of most emotional messages is little more than a "mindfulness check" that should cue you engage your thinking skills to determine what to do. Very rarely is "acting on the emotion" the right thing to do - if you're angry, the correct course of action is almost never to cuss out or punch someone.

In many cases, the emotional signals shouldn't have been sent in the first place (e.g. there's no reason for you to get angry because your best friend likes vanilla ice cream (modulo contrived edge cases, of course)), and the correct course of action is to do nothing, other than figure out why the incorrect signal got sent at all.

> Anger might be expressed as (physical/verbal) violence against others. If it does not, it can turn against yourself and lead to depression.

Can you clarify what you're saying here?

Agree emotions are critical to understand as they're often signals for deeper unmet needs. RAIN is a great method for understanding emotions.[1]

But sometimes, emotions are also just learned reactions, with little of value underneath. Feelings like 'I want to stay in bed' or 'I don't want to start this report' can be useful to short-circuit through habit and counter-programming with things like this mantra. Practicing these these short-circuiting habits over time can lessen future emotional reactions.

In other words, mastery over emotions and building better habits can happen in multiple ways. The body & mind are a big homeostatic machine and if you update your physical state (e.g. having written a few paragraphs, or gotten up and started a walk), the mind will realize it's somewhere else and change its reaction.

[1]: https://www.mindful.org/tara-brach-rain-mindfulness-practice...

There's an even older term for this, from a little known "anonymous" organization - "bring the body and the mind will follow".

"Motion before emotion" - I love that.

At the same time, When it takes 5 minutes minimum to deploy my code changes to my vms to test, I lose all motivation. Momentum is really the right word and a workflow is just soul sucking.

Spend that time figuring out how to change it to unit tests in your IDE, or making the deployment lighter weight.

Work on the meta-problem that makes your problem easier. After all, you've got time if the baseline is low-productivity. And the lessons learned are portable.

Not everything can be unit tested. Figuring out what ide is doing and writing a plugin for what you actually want to do.. How to maintain plugin across ide updates...it's the start of rabbit hole and may not be worth it sometimes..

Break out of the IDE then -- run your unit tests from the command line. As an added bonus, it will be much easier to troubleshoot the headless CI builds too.

You're overestimating how much control I've got over the company-wide infrastructure.

Unit tests don't really fix the problem either. I'll have integration tests that run automatically during builds either way because I want to make sure other people are not breaking my stuff and there's no real difference in time between setting it up for 1 test or 1000.

The only solution I've found so far is try to bypass as much of the company-specific infrastructure as I can during development, but that requires learning a lot of docker/k8s/helm on top of knowing the company-specific stuff well enough to know what I can ignore on top of rake libraries that ~~abstracts~~ obfuscates the infrastructure.

Learning the k8s stuff I don't mind that much because as you say it's portable, but the company specific stuff... I doubt it's even portable across the company.

5 minutes is great, try 3 weeks (due to various "objective issues" aka fuckups across the organization).

5 minutes is actually on the low end. I put it more as a minimum that really disrupts my flow. Below 5 minutes is kinda tolerable... 5 minutes to 5 hours... not so much.

You have my deep sympathy. That sounds crazy!

My favorite way when I'm not up to doing something is to merely prepare an environment for the thing I'm not going to do right now in the simplest ways. Create a new empty directory not even thinking about its name. CD into it, leave a terminal tab in that directory. Maybe I'll copy/paste a config/makefile or something and search/replace the copied name with the arbitrary directory name. And so on.

Some point along the way, I'll care. Whether it's the dumb name I picked, or some specific thing in the config/makefile I want a certain way--I've been tricked.

I would recomend recommend adding the language specific .gitignore file.

(edit) https://github.com/github/gitignore

Also learned the same thing in my late 40s. It is surprising how many days that I would previously deem as useless (hangover, tiredness, "not in the mood", other "reasons") turn out to be really productive. All I needed is to disregard the internal excuses and start doing.

I have trouble getting consistency. I tried several methods, like you mentioned starting small, completibg small actions etc.. But I'm not able to consistently do it. It breaks when you are stuck at some problem. And in my job(legacy code base (~13yearrs), me with < 2 years experience, i find it harder to get that momentum.

My experience as well. I am often surprised how effective it is to just get started by doing anything trivial. Fix a spelling error, re-arrange a few lines to make it easier to read, and before you know it you look up and hours have passed and the problem is solved.

| build momentum

Yes! cadence also works.

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