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Ask HN: Emotion hacks? How do you work despite crummy love/life things going on?

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Re: Ask HN: Emotion hacks? How do you work despite crummy love/life things going on?

#81
Being a pretty rational person, for me it always helps to focus on emotions and understand what the source of this emotion is, Why do I feel this? What is the reason? Does it make sense? Once you grok why your soul tells you things, you can react to them in appropiate ways, because you know the deep reason behind it.

This has helped me a lot with the fear of doing mistakes during development, because I understood that I hesitate to develop things, because often, I just lost interest. Since I understood this, I looked around for lightweight direction management and found something and use it. And even more, whenever this fear of mistakes crops up again, I usually can recognize the pattern (simply stopping to program, not beginning to type with some vi open, getting tired) and re-reason why this is not entirely true.

This has helped me to overcome some long growing dislike of completely dark areas, as there was always the fear of some danger jumping at one from the darkness. Understanding that usually nothing will be there and furthermore, beginning to train martial arts has helped with this (training MA does help a lot with respect to confidence)

This has and is helping me a lot understanding why I have problems at interacting with groups of people. It appears that I fear rejection very much, and thus, I usually want to see a persons reaction precisely whenever I interact with them. In a group of people with more then 3 persons, this just does not work, as it is just too much information to cope. I am working on this, though.

So, overall, I would say that meditating about ones feelings and the reasons why those feelings occur is good way to understand the feelings and the underlying problem, and given that, one will find how to handle this feeling and how to get this feeling out of the way for your daily work (or, you will understand that it is impossible to get out of the way. Talk with your boss then, and hope he will understand your reasoning).

Re: Ask HN: Emotion hacks? How do you work despite crummy love/life things going on?

#82
post #14

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I agree 100%. Ubuntu has a program built into gnome that forces you to take breaks. Go to Keyboard preferences > Typing Break. I set it to 10 minutes of work / 5 minute break. I can focus more, take short breaks to get things done (eat, brush my teeth, clean), and get more done than I do if I just stare at a screen for an hour straight.

Wow, that typing break thing sounds really cool! Does anyone know if there's a similar application or system preference for OS X?

AntiRSI: http://tech.inhelsinki.nl/antirsi/
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