Ask HN: How do you deal with your brain not being “on?” | Hacker News Reader

Ask HN: How do you deal with your brain not being “on?”

32 pointsc1yd3i31 comments

My brain isn't "on" 24/7. Depending on motivation, there may only be a few hours a week where I have enough brain power/creative energy to think critically about technical problems.

I feel like if my job were just to cut wood in the forest all day, then I'd be golden. I have the physical energy to do any monotonous task.

So how do you guys deal with it? I'm a "Senior DevOps Engineer." I'm getting to the point where my job makes me feel numb. I've already tried switching jobs twice. And I'd love to leave forever, but I don't want to lose my paycheck.

Right now, I'm a paid professional and just want to deal with getting _something_ done.

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That's a good thing. Don't stress about it.

Listen to yourself in terms of why you believe you're not functioning like you think you should.

I have about 3 to 4 hours a day, twice a week, of top-level cognitive bandwidth.

That's it. The rest is idle to a degree where I can do shit for brains work and help others.

But really heavy load work takes its toll and also takes a lot of mental capacity if the domain i work on is complex, relatively to what just accomplished. Hence context switching is hard.

One practical thing is to write a journal with the things you speculate about. Just sentences. Write it down and continue. Write. Continue.

It's a good way to have that kind of valve.

I turned my college career around by studying when I was alert instead of trying to force a "normal" study schedule. The 3 hours from 2:30 AM to 5:30 AM were the golden hours. When the music started playing in my head it was time to go back to sleep.

Can you flex your work hours so that they align with the times that you are able to focus on technical tasks? 30 years later I still get productive things done in the wee small hours of the morning. I save the afternoon for more brute force activities.

You have ADD. Source: I have ADD.

Curious what "mild" ADD looks like?

I've not necessarily had issues impacting my life but can be very forgetful (top of the stack always takes priority) which drives my wife crazy, and I often describe my work as "loading up for a few days to do a weeks worth of work in a 3-hour flow session" (which has worked well for me).

The problem is that ADHD (and its related disorders) can't really be measured (on a scale from 1 to 10, for example).

In reality, it's like a color wheel or a spiderweb chart of different symptoms/characteristics/idiosyncrasies, only said wheel/chart also has a depth component. There are so many nuances of behavior/habit and crossover with other disorders (depression, anxiety, oppositional/defiant disorder) as well as going hand in hand with much nicer stuff (creativity, introspectivity, intelligence etc).

When I was diagnosed, someone I knew scoffed at me and said "no way, I know a girl with ADHD and she's bouncing off walls, you don't have ADHD" and have known other people to say outright that it's a load of crap and is made up etc.

It's just... Not. That. Simple.

What I do know for sure is that since being diagnosed (10 years ago, at 31), and commencing medication, things turned around in a colossal way. Medication doesn't fix ADHD, it just helps break down that motiviational wall that makes it hard to just start. For me at least. For you, or the next person, it might help in different/more ways.

Long story short, mild ADHD is a little hard to characterise, because at the "mild" end, there can be a bunch of other factors making you distractible/unmotivated (health, diet, relationships, job dissatisfaction etc).

If you're in any doubt, just go start a conversation with your doctor and go from there. If you're trying to spot specific behaviours, look at the number of unfinished or abandoned "pet projects", degree of procrastination, poor impulse control... those were the red flags for me. Your mileage may vary.

I agree a lot of this sounds like ad(h)d. It’s odd how undiagnosed it can be. There was another ask HN thread with the OP having major ad(h)d symptoms, to me (I’m lso adhd) it’s almost painfully obvious there’s executive function issues.

Obviously too little information to tell, but I was experiencing the same thing consistently as a cloud engineer before finding out I had ADHD. Diagnosed at 28 & eventually found a good medication fit.

Now there's still a lot of the drudgery, but attention regulation has substantially improved. That feeling of having no energy to do anything regardless of how easy it might be, and the resulting brain drain was a huge weight. In the case of ADHD you don't have control over when your brain "Turns On", and unless there's some urgency or interest, getting started on any task at all becomes virtually impossible.

This sounds like me, only I'm 10 years past 28. How did you get diagnosed?

> I feel like if my job were just to cut wood in the forest all day, then I'd be golden

Trust me. If this was your job you'd find a reason to hate it, too.

My plan is to save money aggressively and then get one of those monotonous task jobs. Like cashier or stock boy.

I worked at Lowes as an associate as a second job. It's a nice balance of helping customers, stocking shelves, filling in on the register, or loading.

I switch to “lower intensity” tasks that could still be useful, like tweaking our Datadog dashboards and monitors, writing or editing some documentation, going through old company announcements, Googling some things, etc.

Or I go take a walk, make coffee or do household chores when I’m working from home.

If you’re able to get a few hours of productive work done in a day (let’s say 3 to 4 hours) and spend the rest of your time recovering from that and recouping your energy, I think it’s okay.

However, if any work is completely draining you, it might be a good idea to take some time off.

> I feel like if my job were just to cut wood in the forest all day, then I'd be golden. I have the physical energy to do any monotonous task.

Have you ever tried doing the same physical task for a year?

I recently had a period of intense stress, stomach aches and all of that. I'm normally pretty stress tolerant so feeling these feelings was very uncomfortable for me. Being this stressed obviously impacts your mental clarity.

This led me to discover Andrew Huberman, a renowned neruo-scientist at Stanford that talks publicly alot about well being.

Learning some things from him I came to realize that "feeling bad in any way" is pretty much just your body being out of whack. I implemented some of his tips into my daily routines and the feeling of stress went away, despite my external circumstances being roughly the same.

Not saying there is anything magical about him, but you could look into him to see if he's got anything that could help bring back your mental clarity.

Anything specific? He has a looot of content!

I don't believe this is a solution for all. I'm not even suggesting you have an unhealthy lifestyle. It might sound funny, but increasing the amount of protein helped me stabilize my focus for long period of time. It was amazing realizing how each macro-nutrient regulate the mode of focus differently. For example, carbs+coffee gives me multiple small bursts of focus throughout the day. While, protein+coffe gives me a single, long and steady focus for 5-6hrs a day and that's it. Sometime, I have hard time stopping and getting out that 5-6hrs of intense focus. Having said that, I don't believe that you can have 24/7 steady focus, it is not reasonable (it is not even needed)

What foods do you consider protein for your purposes

Mostly lean protein from meat. I've been trying collagen peptides too, and it helps.

I think it's pretty normal not to be "on" 24/7. We run on a circadian rhythm that is diurnal, i.e. has two cycles per day. Most people peak once some time in the late morning and then once again in the late afternoon.

Depending on your chronotype, this might be shifted - a super night owl would probably experience both of them later. E.g. I usually peak late at night, maybe between 8pm and midnight.

These cycles are measurable in things like nervous system, core body temperature, and so on. So it's no surprise that your brain isn't "always on." Nobody's brain is.

You could try finding your peak times and structuring your day around them so you can make maximal use of them.

Lumberjacks in the national forest actually make good money. Especially after a fire tears through and stuff needs to be removed. So don't necessarily count that career out.

When my mind wanders and I just don't care, then I just don't work, why pretend? I watch some stream on Twitch, then I'm back at it. I hate pairing because people have so much more energy, and I can't defocus. The first step is: that's ok. I am also a great teacher, job I do is valuable, and I have great vision on my job. - But please go and take a seat with a professional psychologist. This might as well be depression!

Sounds a lot like me. Only I'm a midlevel dev and have switch teams a few times in my company.

I have no answers for you. But there are others like us out there.

I have this problem and I got one of those light therapy lights on my desk and it helps me wake my brain up. Maybe try one of those.

'I feel like if my job were just to cut wood in the forest all day, then I'd be golden.'

I imagine there is a guy cutting wood somewhere right now, thinking the exact opposite?

Yes, and? People are different. There are Europeans who dream of living in the US, and Americans who dream of living in Europe. There are short people who wish to be taller and tall people who wish to be shorter.

I think you missed the point? We have a saying in the UK that the grass is always greener on the other side of the fence.

In other words, you may think some other job would be a lot easier or more enjoyable until you are doing that exact job everyday and dreaming of doing something else for a living.

I recommend "The Power of Full Engagement: Managing Energy, Not Time, Is the Key to High Performance and Personal Renewal" by Loehr and Schwartz.

it’s easy to change jobs into exactly the same job. if so, nothing actually changed.

try to find a way to work on things you’re actually interested in and excited to work on. you should wake up excited to play in the problem space.

if you are able to, be open to moving and taking a paycut if it makes it easier to access interesting problems.

>try to find a way to work on things you’re actually interested in and excited to work on. you should wake up excited to play in the problem space.

This is how I recovered from burnout. That and taking a few years off.

Did you have to explain a resume gap? How did you do it?

Sounds like undiagnosed ADHD. Coffee, walking/running in the morning, and going to sleep on time were the answers for me.

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