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Thinking too much can be bad for you (2012)

economist.com

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Re: Thinking too much can be bad for you (2012)

#111

Post by hnick »

seankimdesign wrote: post #84
float4 wrote: post #69

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'm exactly the same, only I've done it ever since I was very little and it simply never went away (I'm in my early 20s now). Usually I'm awake in my bed for at least an hour. Sometimes two. I just really can't stop thinking. It's not anxiety in my case. Any people here who were in a similar situation and were able to get rid of it, or make significant improvement?

I've been dealing with a similar condition for a while. I've learned that it's impossible for me to "not think". Any attempts at emptying my head will only invite more anxieties and problems to be solved. Instead, I've learned to fill it with trivial, creative challenges that occupy keep my brain busy enough to ward off negative thoughts yet introduce no stakes. Some examples include: - If I found myself stranded on…

Funnily enough these are the exact kind of thoughts that keep me up. I get really into it and can't let go of consciousness. Technical or problem solving are the worst for it.

Brains sure are different and weird across us all.

Re: Thinking too much can be bad for you (2012)

#112

Post by Jtsummers »

borroka wrote: post #92
Jtsummers wrote: post #33

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Practice, relaxation and the relief of (self-induced and exaggerated) pressure. By practicing your writing and getting feedback (from self-critique or others) you have an opportunity to properly internalize things you'd been consciously thinking of before. Maybe it's your style, your choice of terms, whatever. Practice permits the internalization. Relaxation and relief of pressure permit you to actually practice with…

"Failure is often a better teacher than success, you can succeed all your life by dumb luck and never learn a thing or misattribute the success to the wrong elements." - It certainly sounds reasonable in at least some situations (e.g. failing at losing weight does not teach much), but is it true? Luck is necessary to succeed, since most complex situations or actions have probabilistic outcomes, but I have not seen ma…

You're overthinking it. First, what I wrote was not an absolute. Second, if you feel like a failure because you tried something challenging and failed, and couldn't be bothered to try again, you need psychiatric help. I don't mean that flippantly, you really need help. Giving up on something challenging because you fail once is not at all healthy. Very few people succeed on their first try at challenging, skilled activities.

You don't need a cool and serene mind. That's an extreme that most people don't get to. But you also don't need to be filled with anger and self-hatred and depression. It's perfectly feasible, and most healthy people are in this range emotionally, to be somewhere between a zen master and a raging, depressed Hulk.

Some people learn from their own mistakes, some people learn from mistakes made in a live performance (or at a critical juncture), some people learn from mistakes in practice, some people learn from mistakes by just imagining the possibility, some learn from the failings of others. Healthy people do all of those things, with an objective of avoiding failure in the live moment. But you can't just study successes because it's never enough.

Re: Thinking too much can be bad for you (2012)

#113

Post by Robotbeat »

MaxBarraclough wrote: post #99
Barrin92 wrote: post #58

In chess there's an idiom for this. "Long think, wrong think" because it's a quite common phenomenon that very good players will ruin positions by rather than playing with their good instinct, over-analyzing a position, there's a related situation of the hardest games to win being already won positions because there's so many ways to win that people will on occasion start doing something really stupid akin to the exa…

> civilisation advances by extending the number of important operations which we can perform without thinking of them Interesting take. My first thought was that this relates to societal trust, a cornerstone of civilization. I can buy food from someone I've never met, and keep myself fed, 'without thinking'. Related: * https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Liars_and_Outliers * https://www.schneier.com/books/liars-and-outlier…

That’s an interesting point. Makes me think of the loops that are required to be jumped through to enable a trustless digital currency like Bitcoin. The entire network, with transactions of about 1kB in size, can do at most 7 transactions per second (3-4 orders of magnitude lower than Visanet, which itself is lower throughput than all the world’s physical cash transactions could theoretically do if everyone bought one or two things a day on average). That’s the same data throughput of a mid-1990s modem, but with power consumption of about 10GW to secure the transactions.

Pure trustlessness indeed has a massive computational and mental overhead. Some compromise (like the Lightning network, or even a central trusted banking institution) is essential to get anything done. (Even with Bitcoin, you’re trusting open source software, often an actual intermediary like Coinbase, etc... Try to do it without any crypto libraries whatsoever—writing it really from scratch—and it is an enormous project. How many people teach themselves Finite Field theory before doing Bitcoin because they take the trustlessness seriously?)

Re: Thinking too much can be bad for you (2012)

#115

Post by RancidChocolate »

seankimdesign wrote: post #84
float4 wrote: post #69

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'm exactly the same, only I've done it ever since I was very little and it simply never went away (I'm in my early 20s now). Usually I'm awake in my bed for at least an hour. Sometimes two. I just really can't stop thinking. It's not anxiety in my case. Any people here who were in a similar situation and were able to get rid of it, or make significant improvement?

I've been dealing with a similar condition for a while. I've learned that it's impossible for me to "not think". Any attempts at emptying my head will only invite more anxieties and problems to be solved. Instead, I've learned to fill it with trivial, creative challenges that occupy keep my brain busy enough to ward off negative thoughts yet introduce no stakes. Some examples include: - If I found myself stranded on…

I agree, it's nearly impossible to stop thinking on a dime. What you ignore gets invited back into your head. If I try not to think of a pink elephant, it only reinforces that image in my head. I found that tiring it out through a diverse set of means is the only way to drain the gas, so to speak. I also watch/read/listen to dreadfully boring media to mentally tune out.

Re: Thinking too much can be bad for you (2012)

#116

Post by coryrc »

seankimdesign wrote: post #84
float4 wrote: post #69

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'm exactly the same, only I've done it ever since I was very little and it simply never went away (I'm in my early 20s now). Usually I'm awake in my bed for at least an hour. Sometimes two. I just really can't stop thinking. It's not anxiety in my case. Any people here who were in a similar situation and were able to get rid of it, or make significant improvement?

I've been dealing with a similar condition for a while. I've learned that it's impossible for me to "not think". Any attempts at emptying my head will only invite more anxieties and problems to be solved. Instead, I've learned to fill it with trivial, creative challenges that occupy keep my brain busy enough to ward off negative thoughts yet introduce no stakes. Some examples include: - If I found myself stranded on…

Get away from computers for three days. Camp in the woods. I guarantee it will be easier to quiet down your mind.

Re: Thinking too much can be bad for you (2012)

#117

Post by thaumasiotes »

fnord77 wrote: post #93
ChipSkylark wrote: post #55

Being already known by my friends and family to be an "overthinker" and prone to "analysis paralysis", I sometimes wonder why I'm still a SWE. I've slowly started to realize over time that my profession is filled with overthinking and over-engineering, and that our interview process can even select for it. IMO its hard to be the person that aces the technical interview gauntlet then walks out of the building and turn…

"if it's dumb and it works, it's not dumb"

"You can't argue with success."

Re: Thinking too much can be bad for you (2012)

#118

Post by ylem »

It reminds me of a graduate quantum class I had. The professor gave what he called "infinite time length exams". We would come in during the afternoon and we could stay as long as we wanted to work on the exam--though we had to slip it under his door by say 9:00am. You could bring as many books as you wanted (apparently at one point you could bring "anything" and someone brought a professor--but that could just be a story). But, if you didn't finish in a reasonable time, you probably weren't going to get the answer.

Re: Thinking too much can be bad for you (2012)

#119

Post by xvilka »

flippinburgers wrote: post #94
amatecha wrote: post #59

Earlier quoted context omitted.

As someone who's been programming for years, one of my biggest complaints in software is over-engineering. It's so universally prevalent, I literally expect to get downvoted for even making this comment. I strongly advocate for simplicity in software implementation, allowing for maintainability and flexibility... the cleanest solution that reaches the goal and doesn't lock us too far into a narrow approach that may b…

I like to believe that experience will eventually drive people towards using scientific parsimony when creating solutions to engineering problems. I don't think over-engineering is the only problem: shiny-new. Shiny-new syndrome wherein the typically junior programmer cannot help but jump from one new thing to the next, advocating that some new system must use the new tech that they recently discovered. While the ent…

> Another problem: we are facebook too! In the sense that small companies heartily believe that they actually have problems at the scale of a company like facebook (or will ever get to that level).

Precisely! It's tiresome how many people setup Kubernetes for a network of 2-6 computers.

Re: Thinking too much can be bad for you (2012)

#120

Post by TaupeRanger »

asimjalis wrote: post #37

I find it hard to disentangle the concepts of overthinking and Economist. Could this article lead to subscriber flight?

haha - I was thinking the same thing, only a corollary headline came to mind: "Saying too much can be bad for your listeners".
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