Five ways to soothe a mind overstimulated by anxiety, stress and information | Hacker News Reader

Five ways to soothe a mind overstimulated by anxiety, stress and information

nytimes.com

53 pointsaxiomdata31644 comments

archive.org link https://web.archive.org/web/20230306233158/https://www.nytim...

People say, "stop reading news". But you might have to for your work, for example, if you're trading equities.

My suggestion is to have a, "who cares?" mentality. Bus full of baby elephants got hit by a tank? Yeah, who cares? Someone in a state far away did a horrible thing to someone you've never met? You know it... who cares? Did your local chieftain cheat on his sister's husband? You get the idea.

Despite the quality of posts being much higher than the internet at large, I still maintain a "who cares?" attitude towards 90% of Hacker News posts. It's great! Highly recommend.

> But you might have to for your work, for example, if you're trading equities.

And what if you get kidnapped and put on a gameshow where you have to know about absolutely current world events or they'll kill you and your whole family? Then keeping up to date on the Twitterverse would be literally life saving!

Neither one applies to most people.

Subscribe to a news magazine and read stuff a few weeks after the fact when it's been digested and the dust has settled. Way better than trying to keep up with stuff as it's happening.

"who cares" is an attitude able to be held only by those that have cauterized their own souls (or had their souls cauterized by others.)

I'd caution you against leaning too far into this attitude. Some day your own children, for example, might bring to you an injustice or sadness, and they'll see the emotion in your face proclaiming "who cares?" and they'll know... you sure don't.

Suppression of emotional reactions is not a good long-term strategy for mental health.

What seems to be bad is not communicating your emotions. Like being sad but not showing it, because you want to show how strong you are.

But it is not exactly that here. "Who cares" is not something you do for others, it is something you do for yourself. And I don't think it is bad, at least compared to the alternative, which is feeling helpless because something horrible happened somewhere and there is not much you can do about it, you may try, but then another horrible thing happens and you really can't do anything about that one, and again, and again...

That sounds likely.

The problem I am having in this century though is the firehose of really shitty news that I didn't used to get deluged with.

I suppose I probably knew that statistically someone, somewhere might be shooting up their family, tossing their daughter off a bridge or some other such horrific thing. Perhaps we lived in a much smaller world when I was younger or perhaps the newspaper and TV news acted as a filter that kept some of these awful things in the marginalia (so to speak).

Doom scrolling, cataclysm overload can be extremely mentally unhealthy I have found. I may not be as flippant as the person you were responding to, but I too feel I have to take the negative news in moderation lest I get pulled down with it.

I like that idea, but instead of "who cares?" I just say to myself "most likely bullshit." or something along those lines. Never forget that you're getting, at best, one side of a story. Even if the fundamental details are accurate, you're not getting them all, or unfiltered.

Lately I've been trying especially hard to condition my immediate family to treat basically everything they see online as "most likely bullshit." We play with ChatGPT and the AI image generators just to drive home how easy it is to create this flood of bullshit.

> > if you're trading equities

'Trading equities' is a profession borne out of anxiety, stress and overstimulation from information.

The real 'who cares' test is when you have an intuition that some news could make you money if you study the scenario and execute the trade well, but instead you say 'who cares!?' to yourself because it's not worth the mental resources that will for sure take you far away from the present moment.

So in other words it was never the news as much as it is always yourself.

The cause of and the solution to any external problem lies inside the skull of the observer

"If you are distressed by anything external, the pain is not due to the thing itself, but to your estimate of it; and this you have the power to revoke at any moment." --Aurelius

"People are disturbed not by things, but by the views they take of them." --Epictitus.

"There is nothing either good or bad, but thinking makes it so." --Shakespeare.

My suggestion is to grow up and face reality.

A lot worse shit than baby elephantcide is going on in the world, and always has.

I think framing it as "who cares" plays into the narrative these things have significance to ourselves too much. If you live in a first world country then there's no reason to be distressed by climate, disaster, or political news. Life just isn't that bad in first world countries despite what activists of every stripe will tell you (which isn't surprising because they want your attention the same as the news outlets). But as a society it's been decided that just dismissing things as "nbd" because they don't affect you personally is somehow hateful or ignorant when the reality is that it's just the nature of the issues.

> If you live in a first world country then there's no reason to be distressed by climate, disaster, or political news.

This is true until it's not, extreme one off weather events are getting more common very rapidly.

I'm surprised at the number of negative reactions to your take. It just seems like common sense to me:

* 8 billion humans on the planet

* Bad (and good) things are happening to someone on it so frequently that they might as well be infinite

* It's far beyond the ability of anyone to care about all of them

* Ergo the only actual question is which ones you choose to care about, and if your caring is triggering anxiety or depression, by definition you have a problem with your filter

The negative takes are not thinking this through (but maybe this shouldn't be a surprise, since not thinking things through is a hallmark of depressed or anxious thinking)

> which ones you choose to care about

we are not wired to choose what to care about, that's not how care works.

I'm pretty good at it. I consider it an essential skill for the information age, because the alternative is essentially to let Mark Zuckerberg or Elon Musk choose for you.

I'm good at it too, it's called autism. but that doesn't make it good general purpose advice to give.

It's called agency. It's not wrong and it's not a disorder. If you can't change your own state of mind, how are you going to change the world?

But you can, outside of certain mental disorders, choose what you pay attention to. Presented with distressing news which you care about but can’t realistically change, you can choose to read more about it, or you can choose to occupy yourself in other ways to take your mind off of it.

there are multiple subreddits devoted to pictures of cute baby animals, lovable pets, etc. They have rules against posting death mentions for your beloved pet, because it affects some other people too much. I'm just saying, it's not a choice unless you're to give up looking at cute animals which mostly brings joy to your life.

I'm not like that, it wouldn't affect me in the least, but we aren't all the same.

A lot of what gets posted to HN would not be deemed "news" in a lot of circles. Most stuff billed as "news" is bad news.

If you need to keep up with current info in various subjects, there are ways to do that without consuming tons of the "Dirty Laundry" variety of news. ("The bubble-headed bleach blond....etc...is the head dead yet? etc)

It can also help to have a broader perspective on some topics. I'm an environmental studies major. I'm usually the weirdo saying "How about y'all chill? Actual recorded temperatures go back less than X number of years. The rest is based on inference from various mental models and those are sometimes later overturned. We don't actually have as much hard data as many people assume, so record-breaking highs for this area isn't necessarily the scary shit the News tends to spin it as."

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=27658488

When the massacre at Bucha was discovered, my now ex-wife told me: Why do you care, your family isn't there...

So I guess, who cares?

P.S. I grew up in a bad place...they targeted rich folks like you for home invasions and their opinions were similar to yours...who cares about those people? They're rich. Just remember that when your family is targeted, you should forgive those people because who cares about some random statistic.

Putin invades Ukraine. Who cares? ..... Putin invades Poland. Who cares? Putin invades my country and throws me in prison for saying the word "invades". Now I give a shit.

There is a second side of that coin. Great quote from 1930s Germany:

First they came for the socialists, and I did not speak out—because I was not a socialist. Then they came for the trade unionists, and I did not speak out—because I was not a trade unionist. Then they came for the Jews, and I did not speak out—because I was not a Jew. Then they came for me—and there was no one left to speak for me.

Here is one simple way to soothe your mind.

Pack your gear and go camping. Turn your phone off when you arrive and turn it back on when you leave.

Or work in a SCIF. I get forced no news time that way.

Camping is definitely more fun, though.

> I really look with commiseration over the great body of my fellow citizens, who, reading newspapers, live & die in the belief, that they have known something of what has been passing in the world in their time... General facts may indeed be collected from them... but no details can be relied on. I will add, that the man who never looks into a newspaper is better informed than he who reads them; inasmuch as he who knows nothing is nearer to truth than he whose mind is filled with falsehoods & errors. He who reads nothing will still learn the great facts, and the details are all false." - Thomas Jefferson

This is not new. Don't subject your mind to this dreck.

I smoke two joints before I smoke two joints, and then I smoke two more...

Smoke two joints...

Not enough. I need 10 ways.

I find it entertaining that the best solution, "Not reading the news as regularly," is happily enforced by their paywall.

> LIMITED TIME OFFER

Well, as my time is clearly limited, I'll take your offer and go elsewhere!

"LIMITED TIME OFFER", in other words this deal is available all the time, indefinitely, and it's not even that great a deal.

tl;dr - mindfulness, connect with loved ones, and the usual stuff. Never found it particularly helpful.

For me - comedy. My job is relatively high stress and this impacts my sleep significantly. In low-stress times I listen to an audiobook to get to sleep, but when things get intense I can’t focus on it and just sit there thinking all night. So now, in those times, so avoid audible and instead head to Spotify - where many stand up comedians have their live shows available in audio format.

Ok, sure, it’s a distraction technique. But there’s the catch - if I’m stressed it’s for a reason, and no amount of mindfulness nonsense is going to remove the underlying reasons. “Ah, yes, we have a major deadline this week and my senior dev responsible for the current blocker is sick, other seniors don’t have the knowledgebase, the juniors are cracking under pressure, management is making things worse because they mistake pressure for motivation, and we’re in a hiring freeze anyway, so it’s left to me and this pack of energy drinks - but nah, I’ll just meditate and ring my father for a heart to heart”.

Stress, anxiety, excessive worrying, etc all have reasons and causes you could use to justify them. Mindfulness is really just a deeper state of awareness and introspection. Observing your mind and beginning to see the patterns of thought and behavior that cause you unnecessary pain and suffering, and experimenting to find healthy solutions that work for you.

You seem to be focusing on mental stress with mental remedies, however the best remedy for mental stress is physical remedies. The mind reacts to stress as if you’re being attacked, and the historical remedy to being attacked is to fight (flight, or freeze, but those just get you killed). So to remedy mental stress, go do something physically demanding. Run, scream, punch stuff (safe stuff, like a punching bag or a pillow). Simulate what you’d be doing during the “fight” response.

That image and the context made me think of Jeff Noon. Sadly, it was not espousing virtues of Vurt.

https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/17401136-vurt

Darn it, I think the article has some good advice for us:

Tl;Dr: Practice mindfulness

Try the Bullet Journal method

Declutter your physical space

Reconnect with the people you lov

Edit: oops, deleted Reduce information overload

archive link?

Some were just shared on the thread.

FYI, you can generate these yourself at https://archive.ph (and other services).

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