51–60 of 90 posts
I've run into a fair bit of this stuff recently: people who encourage me to "think positively" or "remind yourself how awesome you are."
I think it's all nonsense. I believe that self-doubt and self-interrogation are usually healthy. Obviously there's a line to be drawn. At some point self-doubt will impede your ability to act. But, in general, I think a skeptical internal dialogue is a healthy thing.
I didn't get through the article so apologies if I missed the point. I've run into a fair bit of this stuff recently: people who encourage me to "think positively" or "remind yourself how awesome you are." I think it's all nonsense. I believe that self-doubt and self-interrogation are usually healthy. Obviously there's a line to be drawn. At some point self-doubt will impede your ability to act. But, in general, I th…
Earlier quoted context omitted.
I'm struggling with this as well. Working for the sake of pleasure. It seems that I'm so fixated on how the end result will turn out that I've forgotten the joy of actually doing the work.
If you want a more sociological take on this, read "The Craftsman" by Richard Sennett.
It seems to me that the more you have a propensity to think (or over-think), the more likely it is that you may be able to construct rationalizations (excuses) before/during the moment as to why you might not be able to do something. More insidiously, you can construct these excuses after the moment passes, like an endless negative Nancy TiVo gone berzerk in your mind. There is no one-size-fits all solution to self-d…
I didn't get through the article so apologies if I missed the point. I've run into a fair bit of this stuff recently: people who encourage me to "think positively" or "remind yourself how awesome you are." I think it's all nonsense. I believe that self-doubt and self-interrogation are usually healthy. Obviously there's a line to be drawn. At some point self-doubt will impede your ability to act. But, in general, I th…
The first step is to keep awareness of your thoughts and feelings. Next is to remove partiality towards thoughts - you learn to take every thought as is and you learn to not have feelings towards the negative ones. That is you realize that you're partial to negativity - for some it's an excuse or explanation, for others it is deeply engrossed beliefs in certain ideas. Whatever it is you have to realize that you're more gullible to some type of thoughts than others.
Next is evaluating the impact of the thoughts on your real actual life in terms of steps you can take. Often times there isn't anything you can do about those thoughts and you drop'em like hot coal. Sometimes you find you can do things differently or avoid certain circumstances to not let those thoughts recur. Some other times it's a longer term thing. Point is to map thoughts to concrete actions and drop the ones that cause you negativity but have no action possible to counter. In yet another words drop the madness and keep the actions.
Rest is practice - you'll initially fail but so long as you notice it it'll get better the next time. You can also use distraction initially if your thoughts are too overwhelming.
It's a slow process especially for adults but it works!
This article hits home. Five years ago, I created a SaaS app that did well, followed by one that did less so, and another that flopped (all eBay selling software). New projects weren't having as much an impact and making me feel good, so I sat around reading books. A turning point came when I read two: Flow by Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi and On Writing by Stephen King. The first teaches we get optimal experience out of w…
I didn't get through the article so apologies if I missed the point. I've run into a fair bit of this stuff recently: people who encourage me to "think positively" or "remind yourself how awesome you are." I think it's all nonsense. I believe that self-doubt and self-interrogation are usually healthy. Obviously there's a line to be drawn. At some point self-doubt will impede your ability to act. But, in general, I th…
In addition, it's common for people to feel a sense of threat from their own negative thoughts, and the sympathetic nervous system doesn't very effectively differentiate psychological threats from physical. Subsequently, attacking oneself can lead to fight-or-flight response, which can cause a cascade of changes throughout the body, including the brain, which can manifest as cognitive biases, for instance attentional bias towards negative stimuli or interpreting ambiguous stimuli to be negative.
Hopefully you can see how the combination of these effects could create a negative feedback loop, causing typically rational skeptic to veer off into unfounded, inconsistent thoughts blaming oneself and generating further negative emotion.
So ultimately, I'd agree with you 100%, there's a line to be drawn. The unfortunate thing is that it's very fuzzy from within one's own mind to discern where that line should be drawn, and negative feedback loops can set up instability that overshoots that line, even when meaning well. For individuals with this kind of pathological negative self-examination, framing things positively can have a huge impact on how they are actually perceived and acted upon. And for people struggling with depression/anxiety, it can make a world of difference in outcome to simply reframe a thought like: "I should have worked harder on that work deadline. Now everyone hates me because I missed it and I'm going to get fired." as "I'll feel better about my work and my relationships with colleagues if I give myself extra time and raise concerns early about deadlines."
At the same time, an excess of positive thinking can absolutely create it's own share of psychological effects and reactionary feedback loops. For example, in bipolar disorder we see a grandiosity of thought and excess of confidence that leads to underestimating risks and inflated expectations, which collide with reality (often disastrously) leading to a large down swing in emotion, and the resulting post-manic depression.
The world, and Silicon Valley startup culture in particular, is filled to the brim with oblivious narcissists. You can pry my nagging self-doubt from my cold, dead fingers, thank you very much.
I think this is worse in California than other places, and infects Silicon Vally the worst.
I think it leads to a 'shotgun approach' where if enough people "try try try" then yes some do succeed spectacularly while everyone else around them crashes and burns. But for people who just want to get things done properly, being on the hurtling train of "YES WE CAN" is frustrating.
Growing up with an immigrant European (German) father, I have a hard time shutting off the critical voice, and it has led to lots of culture conflict for me within workplaces.
I think there is definitely a distinction to be made within oneself between needless and mean negativity and critique, but I think the crucial point is that when the latter is repeatedly ignored, it leads to the former.