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Comment by DeusExMachina | Hacker News Reader

> Anxiety, inadequacy, and shame are just not helpful. It is good to reduce them if we can.

Uhm, not really. All emotions have evolved because they are useful. The ones listed here could keep you from doing something stupid, dangerous, or potentially deadly. They are also likely to make you notice something wrong earlier than others.

Are those emotions not helpful in some cases? Absolutely. Sometimes they are not justified. But that's true of any emotion. Even positive emotions can make you reckless and take too much unwarranted risk.

One might argue that for a programmer those statements are more accurate, but I'm not so sure. Blow some deadlines because of too little anxiety and too many positive emotions and you'll take a hit for sure.

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I watched a Robert Sapolsky lecture which made a lot of sense on this topic. His point was that our psychological reactions to things evolved because they were useful to our ancestors, but not necessarily because they are useful to us.

The classic example would be the stress response. It's perfectly useful to go into a flight-or-fight mode if you need your body to be ready to escape an imminent threat like a lion you spot in the long grass 100m away. But when you have the same physiological reaction for weeks at a time due to a looming work deadline, this is not something our minds and bodies evolved to tolerate.

I edited this sentence to make it clear that I mean only it in the programming context. I believe that we could use positive or neutral emotions instead of negative ones, at least in most cases. Curiousness instead of inadequacy as the drive for learning; humbleness instead of shame; desire to make something great on time instead of anxiety. Of course, the more difficult question is how to do that.

Your personality largely determines your emotions and you can't generate them at will.

"Twin studies and other research have shown that about half of the variation between individuals results from their genetic inheritance and half from their environment. Researchers have found conscientiousness, extraversion, openness to experience, and neuroticism to be relatively stable from middle age through old age" [1]

What if you don't feel any curiousness? Or you feel it for something that is counterproductive at the moment?

What if your desire of making something great clashes with your boss order to make some more boring CRUD software because that's what the client wants?

In these cases, anxiety and inadequacy could be the very emotions that recenter you on what you should to do.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Big_Five_personality_traits

I think this is a good point why it would be good if we, as an industry, accommodate these emotions rather than force them away or pretend they don't occur.

At the same time, it doesn't have to mean that one cannot improve things independently. We can't change personality, but we can change beliefs, which also affects what we feel.

Consider this: I used to feel really bad about having my pull requests getting reviewed, because other programmers would leave insensitive comments full of criticism. At one point, I just realized that they are not motivated by shaming me, but that they just care about the codebase's quality (and are not very good at conveying emotions in written comments). This change in perception literally changed how I feel about it.

I think you cannot control how you are made, but you can control what you do with it. It's up to you to figure out how to put yourself in situations where your personality will be an asset rather than an obstacle.

As far as emotions like inadequacy and anxiety, I think mindfulness is a useful tool in terms of differentiating between having those emotions and dwelling in them.

For instance, recognizing one's sense of inadequacy, and from a sober state of mind being able to decide whether that is a signal to reenforce one's skills in some area, or to remind oneself why that reaction is inappropriate in this case is a healthy response. Just walking around feeling bad all day due to imposter syndrome is not a healthy response.

On a societal and evolutionary level they're necessary feelings, on an individual level they're just burdensome. You can reason your way to the same results.

Yeah this is a lesson I learned during the NBA playoffs sometime in the mid 00's - I was supporting the Cavs, and the whole series was hanging on a 3 foul shots by Lebron James. I was watching in a bar, and was super agitated along with everyone in the bar, and everyone in the arena as we could see on TV. But I noticed that James him self was completely stone-faced and calm. And I realized in that moment, that all this agitation wasn't actually useful, and would not affect the outcome. And even if I were the one in position to affect the outcome, that kind of agitation would actually make things worse.

That said, I've had colleagues who could probably do with a bit more shame. Confidence and self-assuredness is great for self-promotion, but if you can continuously produce shitty output with a smile on your face I don't want to work with you.

Can you? A lot of psychological literature shows that we are far from being masters of ourselves.

Depresses people cannot reason themselves to any result at all. Addicted people cannot reason themselves out of addiction. You can fix many things with therapy, but that's far from just "reasoning" and takes a lot of time and work.

Emotions come from a much older part of your brain than the one for your reasoning skills, and thus have a far stronger pull on your actions. That's not to say we are completely at the mercy of our emotions. But controlling them is a matter of practice and reinforcement, not pure logic.

"All emotions are useful" is wrong, they just were useful at some point. Anxiety in particular has very little utility today and big downsides for health. It's a fight/flight response thing that temporarily switches off important systems like digestion while heightening our senses and making us feel worried and alert. In the 21st century it creates far more problems than it solves.

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