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Ask HN: How to stop feeling depressed about whether you will be successful?

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Re: Ask HN: How to stop feeling depressed about whether you will be successful?

#11

Post by goodroot »

You can mitigate a lot of these feelings by being aware of your exposure. This community in particular can make even the dazzlingly brilliant feel lumpy and unmotivated.

There was an interesting study[0] done on Facebook users in University that had the following conclusion. A quote from it:

The multivariate analysis indicated that those who have used Facebook longer agreed more that others were happier, and agreed less that life is fair, and those spending more time on Facebook each week agreed more that others were happier and had better lives.

We tend to get blasted with other peoples' expectations and visions of success. Without establishing our _own_ definition, we'll never find that illusory success that we've projected upon other people and other circumstances.

What's _your_ definition of success? Everyone's will be different. It might be helpful to shorten your question: How to stop feeling depressed? The bleak patterns of depression are masterful at creating a monster to slay, in this case, for you: "being successful". If that dark knot was gone, would it matter?

[0] http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/22165917

Re: Ask HN: How to stop feeling depressed about whether you will be successful?

#12

Post by medhir »

Practice gratitude for the things that are going right in your life. Try and be kind to yourself.

People you perceive as “successful” may themselves be facing internal hardships. Placing self-worth in externally-controlled goals sets you up to feel bad about your place in life.

I used to beat myself up about my current progress and constantly comparing myself to others. Once I stopped doing that and instead focused on making small incremental goals, I started to feel much happier. It seems counterintuitive, but once I stopped focusing on “success”, I became much more successful in what I actually wanted to accomplish.

Re: Ask HN: How to stop feeling depressed about whether you will be successful?

#14

Post by pjc50 »

Define "successful".

That's not snark, it really does mean different things to different people, and your own definition will change over time.

Also consider how many people can reasonably meet a particular definition, and what they have to give up to get there.

Re: Ask HN: How to stop feeling depressed about whether you will be successful?

#15

Post by glibgil »

Maintain multiple independent identities. Exercise and make friends with people who do your preferred activity.

If you have a startup or a high profile job, blog or tweet as your own persona about topics that do not fall under your line of work, but are still interesting to you.

Keep up friendships and dating and when you talk about work, only do so when it is a good story.

Socialize with people that live differently than you. There’s nothing as encouraging as talking with a bartender your same age that has a few housemates and can’t decide if they should go to grad school. You realize that you have lots of time to figure things out and to try many things in life

Re: Ask HN: How to stop feeling depressed about whether you will be successful?

#16

Post by comboy »

Being depressed is a state of mind. Being successful or not has not much to do with it (which is proven in many papers). Anxiety about failure is just a way that it manifests. Your brain always finds some ways to rationalize things that it observes. That's its job.

So if you feel a bit of rush because you really want to succeed, or if you think about things that may go wrong in order to take actions to minimize the risk - that's perfectly fine and embrace it. But if it really brings you down, then it's a depression problem, not a startup problem and that's what you want to solve.

I'm sure you've heard many many times how failures are necessary learning experience and all that stuff. But if your brain chemistry is not ok, your brain will rationalize it away - "but that's my only shot" and so on. Once again, you need to fix that chemistry. HN will offer you many suggestions some of them very reasonable, but it's likely that a professional will give you some better options.

Re: Ask HN: How to stop feeling depressed about whether you will be successful?

#17

Post by probinso »

Multiple critically important things in your life. Prioritize all of them, and set boundaries to maintain this with yourself and others.

This allows your metrics of success to be distributed, success in any topic on your critical list will tend to outweigh your stresses. Also your successful topic will likely rotate among these as nature allows.

argmax happiness through ensemble methods

Re: Ask HN: How to stop feeling depressed about whether you will be successful?

#18

Post by atak1 »

glibgil wrote: post #15

Maintain multiple independent identities. Exercise and make friends with people who do your preferred activity. If you have a startup or a high profile job, blog or tweet as your own persona about topics that do not fall under your line of work, but are still interesting to you. Keep up friendships and dating and when you talk about work, only do so when it is a good story. Socialize with people that live differently…

this is great advice, and something I wish I took more to heart when I was doing my startup out of college.

to add my 2c to this answer, I've found it's a lot easier if you've worked in a team in a more established company for 2-4 years. you know what you can and can't do, and don't have to "prove your worth". you can establish friendships, dating patterns, blogging, vlogging.

ultimately, I suspect the depression comes from a sense that you're not part of a bigger group with a shared identity. the above advice works to remind you that you are: you're part of the working class, a boxing gym, a family, etc.

Re: Ask HN: How to stop feeling depressed about whether you will be successful?

#19

Post by psyc »

Work on not desiring outcomes so much. You have little control over it. Do the best you can, and appreciate the journey. You can even learn to appreciate pain and suffering as interesting phenomena. Meditation can make them less overwhelming or vexing. Let go a little. Be in the moment. Notice and observe. Judge yourself less. Enjoy cheap or free entertainment, fresh air, and exercise.
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