With a 1/100 year pandemic sweeping through the world, recent progress with the #BlackLivesMatter movement and one of the worst economic recessions since the great depression, I think it's okay and appropriate to ask this right now. The goal is to provide emotional and psychological support to those that may be struggling in this unknown chapter of human history and through these challenging times.
How is everyone's mental health at the moment?
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Re: How is everyone's mental health at the moment?
#2I’ve transitioned to working full time as a software engineer after running two startups, right before the lockdowns started (February).
While I’m extremely lucky, I’m also at a very uncertain period in my life - as I assume most of us are.
Working from home (not being able to go to a coffee shop or co-working space) makes it hard to transition in and out of work, so days just feel a bit of a blur.
I know there are people doing way worse, going for months without jobs, so I don’t mean to diminish their situation - but this whole period just feels like waiting.
Re: How is everyone's mental health at the moment?
#3I’ve transitioned to working full time as a software engineer after running two startups, right before the lockdowns started (February). While I’m extremely lucky, I’m also at a very uncertain period in my life - as I assume most of us are. Working from home (not being able to go to a coffee shop or co-working space) makes it hard to transition in and out of work, so days just feel a bit of a blur. I know there are p…
Thanks for sharing.
Re: How is everyone's mental health at the moment?
#4I have been suffering from anxiety and depression for the majority of my adult life. Recent events have had an interesting effect on this. I was following the COVID-19 news in early January and I felt very anxious all the time. Strangely, my anxiety felt lighter when my country of residence locked down. I've seen this reported elsewhere too. I think seeing everyone reacting to the outbreak was almost comforting to me. For the first time in my life, people were reacting to an event with anxiety in the same way that I was. I no longer felt that anxiety was a disability but rather a reasonable response to events. Purchases of supplies slowly over a period of 8 weeks before lockdown proved a wise move and family members commented on my sensible reactions. Behavior that I have been trying to eradicate with therapy and medication for many years had proven to be the right choice.
This experience seems to have confused my brain. I am questioning old patterns of thinking and having to establish boundaries for negative thought-patterns again. It feels very odd and I feel I have gone backwards many years in my mental health development. My thoughts go out to the many people suffering from these problems, indeed many much worse than I.
Re: How is everyone's mental health at the moment?
#5Weird - there have been both good and bad things for my mental health. For example working from home has been great and bad at the same time.
- Great because I have more time to myself, am able to relax faster, I have more time to work on my side project or play video games.
- Bad because my routine is really out of wack now. My sleeping patterns are non-existent at times. I feel extremely tired most of the time.
Re: How is everyone's mental health at the moment?
#6I hate my job, but that was existing before all this stuff started.
Re: How is everyone's mental health at the moment?
#7Horrible!
Even before Covid I was already going through a bad phase, I think I will never be as good as I once was in my job. I make stupid mistakes, I have a hard time focusing, I used to be one of the top performers of the team and now I struggle to do basic tasks without making mistakes. I stop and check my phone or the news every 15 minutes.
I have a partner, a baby and a small kid and absolutely no family members to help with anything in an 8.000km radius. Kids can't go to school so wife is even more miserable by being stuck taking care of them the whole day while I attempt to work and fail miserably. I feel horrible that she has to take care of the kids while I'm here in the office absolutely failing to do my work.
My mother just did a Covid test yesterday and she is also showing sign of Alzheimer's. I can't travel to the country where she lives to see or help her.
I am honestly afraid of losing my job for being so unproductive. I even like what I do, I get excited thinking about the things I have to learn, but when it's time to sit down 9am to try to do work, I am just mentally exhausted to even begin to start. Then I check my phone.
I can't just quit my job due to the need for money. I don't think switching jobs will be any more helpful since I am in such a bad productivity stage right now that the new employer will probably fire me upon realizing how crappy I am.
I feel I will never be the productive programmer I once was, and this scares me.
Thanks for the attention.
Re: How is everyone's mental health at the moment?
#8It's not the virus directly or other issues.
It's the side effects.
Most of all my kids have been home and my happy working from home world for me, is horrible. Young kids don't understand working from home, and that's 100% understandable... but then I end up working after they go to bed, and before they get up.
My wife has to work from home.
In the meantime it's summer and there's no baseball, no fairs, no other things :(
Re: How is everyone's mental health at the moment?
#9Well, surprisingly good. Assuming I have no job, stuck alone in an asocial country, miss my home, and had a much worse mental state before entering pandemics.
TL;DR: stoicism rocks. the best thing I've adopted ever.
Secret? First of all, stoicism. When COVID started, I got into and quickly merged into my philosophy. I still have a lot to learn, read and internalize (finish the big 3 stoics, yudkovsky, taleb, kahneman), but even now it works pretty well. It successfully moves away from the orthodox version, so I'd recommend you to meditate a lot about the statements it gives instead of just accepting them. For example, I think I started to understand how all this "you can shape reality with your mind" stuff works. Nothing magical, just a proper mindset which is surprisingly similar to the stoic one.
Second - of course, I have savings. I anticipated a crisis long before so I started to stash money. In the best case, I have a couple of years of runaway (and even more if I return home).
Third - I have some ideas to build. So I plan to enrich my github / cv and in the meantime apply to interesting jobs (yes, I'm still picky). I planned to build the stuff anyway, so why not do it in a comfortable manner (and not tired after day job in the evenings). Plus, I can rehearse the proper escape to full-time tinkering which I hope the future will allow me to do.
Fourth - the upside of being a small asocial country is that it has already removed the quarantine. So I've already started going to coworking and got an awesome boost to productivity.
Re: How is everyone's mental health at the moment?
#10Fan-fing-tastic.
Coming to the table with low inherent trait extroversion and even lower trait neuroticism I was primed to do just fine.
Mix in a decent home office space coincidentally already setup, a job that lets me work from home, a great wage, absurdly low rent, decent savings, a caring partner also fine working from home, and top it all off with living in a country with a more help-others than individualistic culture that happens to be in a more progressive swing of the political pendulum, and I feel like a right lucky S.O.B.