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Ask HN: How do you tackle your own negativity?

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Re: Ask HN: How do you tackle your own negativity?

#71

Post by hvasilev »

You are either optimizing for the wrong thing, or don't know what you want.

If want to be as frequently correct as possible, then your "negativity" is strength. The issue with this strategy is that it will prevent you from engaging with the real world the way that positively thinking people do. You will take less chances, since you realize the probabilities of failure are so big.

Positively thinking people are kind of delusional. They try to ignore the ugliness of reality and focus on the positive side of things. However they are the risk takers. They might fail a lot but at the end of the day they are the ones that succeed in changing reality for the better.

Both ways of thinking have their advantages and their drawbacks. As far as I can tell, it really depends on the type of person that you are.

Re: Ask HN: How do you tackle your own negativity?

#72

Post by cupcake-unicorn »

There is a form of therapy you can do by yourself called Internal Family Systems therapy. There are many books about doing self therapy but the one I was suggested was Self-Therapy: A Step-By-Step Guide to Creating Wholeness and Healing Your Inner Child Using IFS.

Re: Ask HN: How do you tackle your own negativity?

#73

Post by villasv »

It's usually a matter of framing to me. Criticizing and finger-pointing is always easier than a nuanced and tradeoff-minded view. It is also easier to engage people with negative feelings, so much of the media/Internet follows the same path.

Reality is boring: the bad parts of whatever are usually there for a reason, be it historical or goalposts that moved over time or lack of information/time/resources in general available at the critical point in time. But going through the gritty details of how the bad came to be is tedious work. You can sound just as smart for pointing out what's wrong and you can sound brilliant by signaling that imperfections make you angry.

It's just a bad habit for thought workers that you can overcome with attention and deliberate practice.

Re: Ask HN: How do you tackle your own negativity?

#74

Post by zz865 »

Negative is normal right now. We're all burnt out, we're all sick of working from home, Covid is fading but its been an extreme time. Plus some people have made loads of money while we watch front line workers basically dying doing their job. Meanwhile the summer heat was just too much and we're watching the planet die. All the while we've been restricted from seeing work colleagues, friends and family. How can you not be negative?

Re: Ask HN: How do you tackle your own negativity?

#75

Post by _3u10 »

zz865 wrote: post #74

Negative is normal right now. We're all burnt out, we're all sick of working from home, Covid is fading but its been an extreme time. Plus some people have made loads of money while we watch front line workers basically dying doing their job. Meanwhile the summer heat was just too much and we're watching the planet die. All the while we've been restricted from seeing work colleagues, friends and family. How can you n…

All of those things are incredibly positive. Think about how much lower the carbon footprint is now that so many have died.

Imagine knowing how the world ends and thinking it’s awful when you’ll be alive to see it. Will the oceans drown everything or will it become an oven / steam room. What a mystery and the answers will be revealed to you and only you.

Re: Ask HN: How do you tackle your own negativity?

#76

Post by tchock23 »

ruckadub wrote: post #58

All decisions are based in love or fear. Find your purpose, make sure it's ambitious, make sure it's equitable and helps people. When you are ambitious about your purpose you will be conscious of how little time you have. When you're overwhelmed with progress it's easier to mitigate negativity, you'll be too focused to chime in on the little stuff, or you will empathize for what used to annoy you, and realize you're…

Any advice on the "find your purpose" part?

Re: Ask HN: How do you tackle your own negativity?

#77

Post by kodah »

Going through some of your comments, I didn't see anything overly negative. There are a lot of things that'll make you more negative or nihilistic, I do my best to avoid those. I also jetison myself from conversations that are what I call "negative entertainment". I read a thread on here a year or so ago about managing stress and the like that seems worth sharing. The gist of it is the poster put themselves in the position of a 14,000 year old man. What would he care about, what would he respond to?

Re: Ask HN: How do you tackle your own negativity?

#78

Post by rramadass »

You may find the psychological technique of "Self-Distancing" pretty useful in regulating negative thoughts/emotions.

Overview of Psychological Distancing : https://positivepsychology.com/psychological-distancing/

Self-distancing as a Mechanism for Processing Negative Emotional Experiences by Lena Etzel (Warning: PDF) : https://cpb-us-w2.wpmucdn.com/campuspress.yale.edu/dist/a/12...

Self-Distancing as a Strategy to Regulate Affect and Aggressive Behavior in Athletes : https://www.frontiersin.org/articles/10.3389/fpsyg.2020.5720...

Re: Ask HN: How do you tackle your own negativity?

#79

Post by russelldjimmy »

seaknoll wrote: post #40

I'm not perfect about this but one experience in particular helped me. I was a new employee doing on-the-job training for an even newer employee, while we were trying to meet a deadline. We were the only two people working on this project, in the middle of rural NM, out of cell range, and having to improvise. He kept making suggestions and I kept explaining why they wouldn't work. Suddenly he point-blank asked me why…

This is such an important realisation. You basically awoke from a state of sleep, a state of dreaming, and straight into reality. This is great.

Re: Ask HN: How do you tackle your own negativity?

#80

Post by spacelamb »

zz865 wrote: post #74

Negative is normal right now. We're all burnt out, we're all sick of working from home, Covid is fading but its been an extreme time. Plus some people have made loads of money while we watch front line workers basically dying doing their job. Meanwhile the summer heat was just too much and we're watching the planet die. All the while we've been restricted from seeing work colleagues, friends and family. How can you n…

Here are my views to try and answer in good faith, "How can you not be negative?" as someone who feels positively:

>"Plus some people have made loads of money while we watch front line workers basically dying doing their job."

Yes, that is terrible. But to be really honest, I haven't really thought about it much because none of this directly affects me. I don't follow the news as much, and I'm not close to any front line workers. It's abstractly terrible, but I haven't turned negative because of it.

>"Meanwhile the summer heat was just too much and we're watching the planet die."

I vote in favour of parties who support climate measures, but besides that, I'm not in a position where I can do meaningful activism to enact policy changes to materially curb climate change. In the meantime, I don't believe my personal behaviours make too big of an impact on the environment, in comparison to emissions and waste from major companies, countries, and militaries, so I don't feel guilt about my actions. The rest is not up to me.

>"All the while we've been restricted from seeing work colleagues, friends and family."

I don't miss my old work colleagues, and have actually gotten along really well with a couple new people who I've only seen once in-person (rest via text and video chat). I only really have one or two friends. I'm not too close with my family.

So in short, I don't really think about most of these world issues. The biggest issues directly affect me, via working from home and restriction from seeing others. For the former, life is returning to normal at work. For the second, I learned to be happy by myself, and I'm a lot calmer because of it.

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