Being an engineer, I use the analogy of SNR, signal to noise ratio. Depression and anxiety, often comorbid, raise the noise floor to the point that it is incredibly hard to feel confident that a decision can be made. This in turn results in a decision NOT being made and progress dragging on... which only raises the tension around the situation. It is a horribly vicious downward cycle.
I have seen this first hand in loved ones and also experienced it occasionally myself, though thankfully less frequently. I am extremely adept at compartmentalizing, including work and life... but a deep depression knows no limits easily bleeds over into everything. The mental noise is deafening. I was shocked how strong the effect was during a recent episode of depression, despite my typically strong executive functioning skills.
Equally amazing is the 'blue skies' and 'quiet mind' that can be achieved with proper treatment, for which I am infinitely grateful.
> Depression and anxiety, often comorbid, raise the noise floor to the point that it is incredibly hard to feel confident that a decision can be made.
maybe replace 'depression' with something else but, at work, if i'm on a call with more than 10 people decision making becomes almost impossible. I think anxiety in the virtual room is high and everyone just becomes paralyzed. I've resorted to random dice rolls to make decisions in some of these cases hah.
edit: i'll add that the threat of one of my random dice rolls sometimes triggers the team to come together and figure something out.
> I think anxiety in the virtual room is high and everyone just becomes paralyzed
I don't think that's necessarily anxiety. I'm sure there's a name for it, but it's a bit like the "bystander effect", where no one does anything because everyone expects someone else to deal with it. Something similar seems to happen in meetings with too many participants.
Even that process isn't easy. I've struggled with depression and anxiety most of my adult life, and only recently learned that ADHD is a major part of it. Just getting to this point (40+) has been an incredible struggle. Even when you're in the system, it feels like you have to do a lot of the work yourself, which can be impossibly hard. So hard in fact, that you some times wonder if it's even worth it. I'm in a pretty good place now, but it also feels like I still have a long way to go, because it turns out just getting ADHD meds doesn't really fix anything, and also brings with it new problems.
I guess it maybe sounds like I'm trying to dissuade people from getting help - I'm really not, but it's just the first step of an unknown amount of steps.
>'blue skies' and 'quiet mind' that can be achieved with proper treatment
I'm not there, but knowing that it's possible is what keeps me going.
>I still have a long way to go, because it turns out just getting ADHD meds doesn't really fix anything, and also brings with it new problems.
Maybe it's down to cases of badly made self-diagnosis, and physiological and brain chemistry differences among people, but on this site alone I've seen opinions on treatment for ADHD that are all over the place.
On the one hand you'll easily find many, many comments describing how X or some combo of X and Y medicine made them feel dramatically better and more able to improve their focus/executive function, and then I also find a wash of comments like yours.
With all that noise, i'm curious about what the actual averages are for how effective treatment is for most people.
How is it difficult to get ADHD meds these days? Half the people I know are taking them, and (to hear them tell it) mostly they just described their self-diagnosed symptoms to a doctor or telehealh person and boom, script written.
I'd also say that any time you feel like you're in a "system," consider whether it's helping. I'm not sure what you mean here, but systems don't care. Systems don't exist to help you. Systems exist to take your money (or your insurance benefits), or just to perpetuate their own existence.
You'd swear the process of getting diagnosed + treated for ADHD was deliberately designed to filter out anyone who actually has it. It's maddening.
I helped my girlfriend through the process a few years back, and it's so many phone calls, so many forms, she had to basically trick her mom into filling out some of the paperwork (long story, her mother is perfect and anything wrong with her child is a mark on her "record," it's frustrating) and even then, even once diagnosed, she was fired from a job for seeking accommodations under the ADA, and I swear every single month she has to take multiple calls from pharmacies and her fucking insurance company to reaffirm that yes, she does still need her damn medications.
Fortunately all that shit has kept her too busy to really wonder if RFK is going to send her a fucking farm or whatever.
I hear you. You are 100% correct, it is NOT easy... for a LOT of reasons. I hope you didn't feel like I was making light of it or implying that it was easy. it is not. Full stop.
Congrats on making it so far against such odds. That is a massive accomplishment. Day by day... use your amazing progress to help you motivate continued growth.
Hope is critical and I am glad I was able to provide a tiny bit for you. We are all different, so what has worked for some / many may not work for you. Frankly that was the hardest part of our journey, the 'unending' iterations. Hoping each would provide relief... waiting for weeks and months, only to move on to another cocktail.
On the flip side, there are a LOT of different treatments now and some very promising 'new' ones that are helping a lot of people.
It sounds like you have come a long way without much help or relief. I am glad it was helpful to know that relief is possible and that may help carry you forward just a little further.
Ooh, something in the same spirit as The Hacker's Diet (How to lose weight and hair through stress and poor nutrition)[1] which I legitimately used (well, kinda did some of) to lose about 20kg over the space of ~2 years, and then keep it off semi-indefinitely (I started in ~2010 and kept pretty steady since then, I've had a couple of times where I got up about 5kg from my target but it's not too hard to fix at that point.)
There was someone that framed it like "Emotional API" but I can't remember who the guy was, and searching that on the internet now brings up a lot of AI stuff.
Your post inspires me to think of how to package some of my work of emotional conflict and health for engineers. If you're curious to talk more about it, I'd love to chat here or you can send me an email to the address in my bio.
Something my wife and I decided very on in our journey into the space was to be as open as possible about it; both to help with distigmatjzation as well as just general knowledge sharing. I certainly knew nothing about mental health and illness until severe mental illness arrived on our doorstep and we had to get educated fast.
With 5% of the US population suffering from severe mental illness and another 20% having experienced an acute or less significant issue, it is quite common. The more we know, the more we can be helpful to those around us or ourselves.
I gave a 'co-learning' presentation on mental health to our company... maybe I should consider expanding the scope of my shared experience. Thanks for your encouragement.
That's a good idea for a book and the parent commenter may indeed be a good person to write it, but subject experience is known to be a terrible source of information about psychology and mental health.
> Depression and anxiety, often comorbid, raise the noise floor to the point that it is incredibly hard to feel confident that a decision can be made. This in turn results in a decision NOT being made and progress dragging on.
That's an interesting way to put it! I used to think of it in terms of switching off the parts of my brain that do all the useful thinking, it's like I'm reaching for a tool and the tool is just not there. Last time it happened I even convinced myself that I would never be able to work again - thankfully my boss was very supportive, gave me some time off and allowed me to ease myself back into work. This was almost a decade ago now.
During a period of depression it was insanely hard to focus on work because I would spend literal hours ruminating on the same things. And even while working the negative thoughts would never be far away.
So I can easily believe that this correlation exists. Always found it interesting when people said to separate “work and personal”. When I’m not doing well in my personal life, work won’t go well either.
I recently read a book called "Don't Believe Everything You Think" by Joseph Nguyen which tackles this problem directly through a bit of mindfulness and eastern philosophy. In the book, he starts by distinguishing between "thoughts" and "thinking" and outlines how/why he believes the latter ultimately leads to most self-inflicted human suffering.
He has some techniques in the book for trying to break the cycle of rumination, but ultimately it comes down to willpower and repetition. As someone going through/coming out of serious depression for the past month, even if I'm able to stop my own rumination, if its severe or overwhelming enough, it will likely come back very soon if not immediately. I think time and healthy distractions are great complements.
Here's a quick story. It's unrelated to depression but it's something related to asking yourself "are you sure?".
I once had stitches which had to be removed after about 2 weeks. It was the only time I've gotten stitches.
It's a weird experience which involves a fair bit of tugging and feeling things you've never felt before along with maybe a little blood.
The doctor told me to let him know if it hurt. After the first tug I said is it normal to feel pain?
Then he asked me if what I'm feeling is really pain or is it a sensation?
Then he did it a few more times and he was right. I wasn't feeling real pain.
I was feeling a combination of sensations I wasn't familiar with. Yes there was a bit of tugging, pressure and a little bit of pinching but I wouldn't register it as "actual pain". Maybe it was like a 1.5 out of 10 on a pain scale. A minor discomfort at most and completely manageable.
But even now, years later I sometimes think back to that experience in other contexts and ask myself "are you sure?" when evaluating situations or thought processes. It's not a lack of confidence, it's more about making sure I'm assessing things in a fair and reasonable way.
I dont think you understand the problem. And neither did I when a loved one suffered through something like this.
What you miss is that solutions like the one you suggest simply cannot be implemented by those that are suffering. Folks who have not encountered such a problem cant even understand it. "logical" or "reasoning" solutions do not work. What is required starts with empathy to slowly rewire the brain in those that are suffering.
There is a spectrum in sticky thinking and all of us fall somewhere in that spectrum.
But I like your idea, and those of us who are "normal" can use something like it to eliminate chains of worrisome thinking.
>"Don't Believe Everything You Think" by Joseph Nguyen
I was flabbergasted to hear this, because there's a german book with the very same title (albeit in german, of course) by the comedian Kurt Krömer about his own history of severe depression.
So I wondered who of them borrowed the other one's title, and it turns out both books were published in March 2022 only about two weeks apart. What a strange coincidence.
Yes, I believe so, or at least a subset of it. The author is not a therapist of any kind, I get the impression he was just a guy who wrote a book about how he overcame his personal struggles. This was off-handedly recommended to me by my therapist via text as she thought of me while reading it as I told her I was struggling with recurring thoughts, ruminations, anxiety, etc so that might lend some credence to it.
Also recommend "Feeling Good: Overcome Depression and Anxiety with Proven Techniques" by David Burns. Lots of good content, helped me a lot. Past the initial general chapters, there are some on specific things, such as dealing with trauma from difficult parents, which you can easily skip if they don't apply.
I went through this after my divorce. The term we used in therapy was 'unhelpful thinking'.
I've seen people sharing this tip on HN for dealing with tinnitus: Picture a volume equalizer or the FFT waveform and image yourself lower the volume until it goes away. In therapy after we unpacked the unhelpful thinking, we talked about 'rewiring' these unhelpful connections in the brain. We pictured a old style phone switchboard with wires, me finding all the unhelpful thoughts and rewriting them one by one. It felt very similar to the tinnitus tips and it was surprising effective.
There are many paths to overcoming this; none of them easy. I'm finding a lot of help in Martial Arts and Eastern Philosophy. Acknowledge thoughts and emotions, understand them, but don't hold on to them deeply. It's a hard skill to acquire, harder still to master
There is a definite psychological component to depression - CBT and meditation are effective treatments - yet a point often absent is how one becomes depressed in the first place. We tend to moralize a lack of resilience and a bad attitude. A more empirical perspective is to look at studies using animal models which show that depressive symptoms can be induced via factors like chronic stress, social defeat, and general deprivation of wants and needs.
I'm concerned by the pervasive thought pattern held by many, but especially engineers: that you can think your way out of any problem. This bias leads to preferential seeking and over-prescribing of therapeutic treatments.
Yet how many people who self report depression are also satisfied with the various external factors in their life? Perhaps the correct framework is: a healthy environment is the cornerstone of a healthy mind.
I'm sure it's possible with enough meditation and medication to achieve enlightenment whether you're exiled in the Siberian wilderness or locked up in a castle dungeon, but to do so is working against the grain of nature. Unhealthy environments have a negative impact on individual health. The Foxconn "safety nets" come to mind.
Though I could be mistaken, perhaps zoo animals are only depressed because we haven't fully translated "mindfulness" into ASL.
Is it daydreaming about negative future outcomes based on a decision? (If I do this and it doesn’t work, everyone will laugh at me / partner will leave me)
Or is it hyper focus on past bad decisions (I missed out on this / did it wrong and that’s why everyone else is so far ahead. Now I am scared to make same decision again)
Either. The main issue is there are so many things in your life outside of your control that trying to use your brain to put a path through decisions based on what might happen in the future or what could have happed in the past will put you in an infinite loop.
In my own experience, I've accepted that my brain is really great at taking in inputs and processing them in the background. I rarely need to actually "think" about things.
Tracks strongly with my perception of my own mental health during a sequence of bad jobs in big tech over the past decade and a half. Once a rumination started I would have zero awareness of near _anything_ else either in the room or on the computer. I'd go through some suffering while reliving a shitty experience or interaction in my head, and then feel extremely testy and frustrated with my work and colleagues. I often did nothing in a day and then smashed out a couple tickets at 4:45 before dragging my angry ass back to my family. Somehow this was still enough to get sterling performance reviews in that enshittification industry. Awful, just awful.
To anyone out there experiencing regular repeating ruminations over workplace bullshit, you are not alone. It might be the job, it might be your manager or colleagues, or it could very well be you, but it doesn't matter once you're losing days to that headspace - I would strongly advise you to just get out when you can.
I will add that in my opinion, white collar jobs increasingly /are/ this emotional labor. We don't need as many people to "do stuff" any more (at least not as part of our organizations directly -- it's mostly been outsourced to workers in the far east), but there is endless demand for people to "drive things forward". This is the case for management of course, but that's been their purpose since their position was invented some time in prehistory. Increasingly, this is also an explicit ask of workers, and some jobs are nearly-explicitly nothing but this (product/project/program managers, scrum masters, etc.), even at the IC level.
"Drive things forward" is shorthand for "stress about and take blame for". If you are being asked to "take ownership", you are being asked to earn your bread by conflating your own self worth with the success of some project, usually one whose success is mostly beyond your control. The paycheck is compensation for the sleepless nights and distant stare you affect with your family at the beach. This /is/ the job.
I think this dynamic will only get worse with AI tools doing more for organizations. Project managers are at least somewhat paid for their organization skills and executive function, even if they're mostly being paid for stress. If a machine can organize and coordinate, the only thing left for people to do is...have emotions, worry, absorb threats and abuse.
Another way to think about this is that the ownership class can probably find machine substitutes for most white collar labor, but these machines can't be motivated and managed in the ways that B schools have been teaching for 100 years. Yes, Claude can try to fix a bug, but you can't threaten it to squeeze more out of it. Alice has three kids and a mortgage. It's trivial to threaten Alice -- you don't even have to do it explicitly. If her productivity is enhanced with AI, and her bargaining position softened, this becomes even more attractive because the owners can pay her less to do more.
It's interesting this happens. I'm going through it now, and idk why. It's illogical. Feeling wronged by someone just irritates me and there's no recourse for it. Yeah leaving seems to be the only option, but idk if it's sustainable.
Readit News
I have seen this first hand in loved ones and also experienced it occasionally myself, though thankfully less frequently. I am extremely adept at compartmentalizing, including work and life... but a deep depression knows no limits easily bleeds over into everything. The mental noise is deafening. I was shocked how strong the effect was during a recent episode of depression, despite my typically strong executive functioning skills.
Equally amazing is the 'blue skies' and 'quiet mind' that can be achieved with proper treatment, for which I am infinitely grateful.
Please seek out help if you are struggling.
maybe replace 'depression' with something else but, at work, if i'm on a call with more than 10 people decision making becomes almost impossible. I think anxiety in the virtual room is high and everyone just becomes paralyzed. I've resorted to random dice rolls to make decisions in some of these cases hah.
edit: i'll add that the threat of one of my random dice rolls sometimes triggers the team to come together and figure something out.
I don't think that's necessarily anxiety. I'm sure there's a name for it, but it's a bit like the "bystander effect", where no one does anything because everyone expects someone else to deal with it. Something similar seems to happen in meetings with too many participants.
Even that process isn't easy. I've struggled with depression and anxiety most of my adult life, and only recently learned that ADHD is a major part of it. Just getting to this point (40+) has been an incredible struggle. Even when you're in the system, it feels like you have to do a lot of the work yourself, which can be impossibly hard. So hard in fact, that you some times wonder if it's even worth it. I'm in a pretty good place now, but it also feels like I still have a long way to go, because it turns out just getting ADHD meds doesn't really fix anything, and also brings with it new problems.
I guess it maybe sounds like I'm trying to dissuade people from getting help - I'm really not, but it's just the first step of an unknown amount of steps.
>'blue skies' and 'quiet mind' that can be achieved with proper treatment
I'm not there, but knowing that it's possible is what keeps me going.
Maybe it's down to cases of badly made self-diagnosis, and physiological and brain chemistry differences among people, but on this site alone I've seen opinions on treatment for ADHD that are all over the place.
On the one hand you'll easily find many, many comments describing how X or some combo of X and Y medicine made them feel dramatically better and more able to improve their focus/executive function, and then I also find a wash of comments like yours.
With all that noise, i'm curious about what the actual averages are for how effective treatment is for most people.
I'd also say that any time you feel like you're in a "system," consider whether it's helping. I'm not sure what you mean here, but systems don't care. Systems don't exist to help you. Systems exist to take your money (or your insurance benefits), or just to perpetuate their own existence.
I helped my girlfriend through the process a few years back, and it's so many phone calls, so many forms, she had to basically trick her mom into filling out some of the paperwork (long story, her mother is perfect and anything wrong with her child is a mark on her "record," it's frustrating) and even then, even once diagnosed, she was fired from a job for seeking accommodations under the ADA, and I swear every single month she has to take multiple calls from pharmacies and her fucking insurance company to reaffirm that yes, she does still need her damn medications.
Fortunately all that shit has kept her too busy to really wonder if RFK is going to send her a fucking farm or whatever.
Congrats on making it so far against such odds. That is a massive accomplishment. Day by day... use your amazing progress to help you motivate continued growth.
Hope is critical and I am glad I was able to provide a tiny bit for you. We are all different, so what has worked for some / many may not work for you. Frankly that was the hardest part of our journey, the 'unending' iterations. Hoping each would provide relief... waiting for weeks and months, only to move on to another cocktail.
On the flip side, there are a LOT of different treatments now and some very promising 'new' ones that are helping a lot of people.
It sounds like you have come a long way without much help or relief. I am glad it was helpful to know that relief is possible and that may help carry you forward just a little further.
[1] https://www.fourmilab.ch/hackdiet/
Your post inspires me to think of how to package some of my work of emotional conflict and health for engineers. If you're curious to talk more about it, I'd love to chat here or you can send me an email to the address in my bio.
Something my wife and I decided very on in our journey into the space was to be as open as possible about it; both to help with distigmatjzation as well as just general knowledge sharing. I certainly knew nothing about mental health and illness until severe mental illness arrived on our doorstep and we had to get educated fast.
With 5% of the US population suffering from severe mental illness and another 20% having experienced an acute or less significant issue, it is quite common. The more we know, the more we can be helpful to those around us or ourselves.
I gave a 'co-learning' presentation on mental health to our company... maybe I should consider expanding the scope of my shared experience. Thanks for your encouragement.
That's an interesting way to put it! I used to think of it in terms of switching off the parts of my brain that do all the useful thinking, it's like I'm reaching for a tool and the tool is just not there. Last time it happened I even convinced myself that I would never be able to work again - thankfully my boss was very supportive, gave me some time off and allowed me to ease myself back into work. This was almost a decade ago now.
Damn, those simple words just did a little magic in my brain.
So I can easily believe that this correlation exists. Always found it interesting when people said to separate “work and personal”. When I’m not doing well in my personal life, work won’t go well either.
He has some techniques in the book for trying to break the cycle of rumination, but ultimately it comes down to willpower and repetition. As someone going through/coming out of serious depression for the past month, even if I'm able to stop my own rumination, if its severe or overwhelming enough, it will likely come back very soon if not immediately. I think time and healthy distractions are great complements.
I once had stitches which had to be removed after about 2 weeks. It was the only time I've gotten stitches.
It's a weird experience which involves a fair bit of tugging and feeling things you've never felt before along with maybe a little blood.
The doctor told me to let him know if it hurt. After the first tug I said is it normal to feel pain?
Then he asked me if what I'm feeling is really pain or is it a sensation?
Then he did it a few more times and he was right. I wasn't feeling real pain.
I was feeling a combination of sensations I wasn't familiar with. Yes there was a bit of tugging, pressure and a little bit of pinching but I wouldn't register it as "actual pain". Maybe it was like a 1.5 out of 10 on a pain scale. A minor discomfort at most and completely manageable.
But even now, years later I sometimes think back to that experience in other contexts and ask myself "are you sure?" when evaluating situations or thought processes. It's not a lack of confidence, it's more about making sure I'm assessing things in a fair and reasonable way.
What you miss is that solutions like the one you suggest simply cannot be implemented by those that are suffering. Folks who have not encountered such a problem cant even understand it. "logical" or "reasoning" solutions do not work. What is required starts with empathy to slowly rewire the brain in those that are suffering.
There is a spectrum in sticky thinking and all of us fall somewhere in that spectrum.
But I like your idea, and those of us who are "normal" can use something like it to eliminate chains of worrisome thinking.
I was flabbergasted to hear this, because there's a german book with the very same title (albeit in german, of course) by the comedian Kurt Krömer about his own history of severe depression.
So I wondered who of them borrowed the other one's title, and it turns out both books were published in March 2022 only about two weeks apart. What a strange coincidence.
I've seen people sharing this tip on HN for dealing with tinnitus: Picture a volume equalizer or the FFT waveform and image yourself lower the volume until it goes away. In therapy after we unpacked the unhelpful thinking, we talked about 'rewiring' these unhelpful connections in the brain. We pictured a old style phone switchboard with wires, me finding all the unhelpful thoughts and rewriting them one by one. It felt very similar to the tinnitus tips and it was surprising effective.
Often we amplify a thought by thinking that it is important to us. Fair enough. But is thinking that thought helpful to our behaviour or happiness?
It's hard to directly control our emotional impulses but we can tweak their impact ever so slightly by, as you said, observing them.
https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC8111503/
I'm concerned by the pervasive thought pattern held by many, but especially engineers: that you can think your way out of any problem. This bias leads to preferential seeking and over-prescribing of therapeutic treatments.
Yet how many people who self report depression are also satisfied with the various external factors in their life? Perhaps the correct framework is: a healthy environment is the cornerstone of a healthy mind.
I'm sure it's possible with enough meditation and medication to achieve enlightenment whether you're exiled in the Siberian wilderness or locked up in a castle dungeon, but to do so is working against the grain of nature. Unhealthy environments have a negative impact on individual health. The Foxconn "safety nets" come to mind.
Though I could be mistaken, perhaps zoo animals are only depressed because we haven't fully translated "mindfulness" into ASL.
Is it daydreaming about negative future outcomes based on a decision? (If I do this and it doesn’t work, everyone will laugh at me / partner will leave me)
Or is it hyper focus on past bad decisions (I missed out on this / did it wrong and that’s why everyone else is so far ahead. Now I am scared to make same decision again)
To anyone out there experiencing regular repeating ruminations over workplace bullshit, you are not alone. It might be the job, it might be your manager or colleagues, or it could very well be you, but it doesn't matter once you're losing days to that headspace - I would strongly advise you to just get out when you can.
"Drive things forward" is shorthand for "stress about and take blame for". If you are being asked to "take ownership", you are being asked to earn your bread by conflating your own self worth with the success of some project, usually one whose success is mostly beyond your control. The paycheck is compensation for the sleepless nights and distant stare you affect with your family at the beach. This /is/ the job.
I think this dynamic will only get worse with AI tools doing more for organizations. Project managers are at least somewhat paid for their organization skills and executive function, even if they're mostly being paid for stress. If a machine can organize and coordinate, the only thing left for people to do is...have emotions, worry, absorb threats and abuse.
Another way to think about this is that the ownership class can probably find machine substitutes for most white collar labor, but these machines can't be motivated and managed in the ways that B schools have been teaching for 100 years. Yes, Claude can try to fix a bug, but you can't threaten it to squeeze more out of it. Alice has three kids and a mortgage. It's trivial to threaten Alice -- you don't even have to do it explicitly. If her productivity is enhanced with AI, and her bargaining position softened, this becomes even more attractive because the owners can pay her less to do more.
I assumed it was unlikely I’d be able to do the self-work needed while still suffering all the indignities of the employment.
It’s fucking hard work to dig out of that place mate but keep at it. You can and will get there.