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Prioritize mental health, and why communication is so important

ramones.dev

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Re: Prioritize mental health, and why communication is so important

#31

Post by consp »

Viacol wrote: post #3

My mother is a therapist, and I'd like to share a few things I've learned from her over the years. One piece of advice is to start with the biological side. Getting enough sleep, exercising regularly, and taking care of your physical health can have a surprisingly positive effect on your mental state. At the same time, don't hesitate to seek help from a therapist. They can help guide the way you think about your expe…

> At the same time, don't hesitate to seek help from a therapist

I'd like to add that for certain kinds of people, the process of doing this on your own is near torture.

Re: Prioritize mental health, and why communication is so important

#32

Post by skydhash »

quantummagic wrote: post #14
jvanderbot wrote: post #9

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This is one side of the elephant. It's true a steel inner strength is required in day to day engineering. It's hard , and it lacks positive reinformcement almost always . When you hear something it is bad. But let's define "buck up" and see the other side of the elephant. That blog post is a textbook example of negative self talk. You can have a world that looks down on you and spit back at it and do your best work,…

I think the point was that there are people who don't need all this extra work, it just comes naturally. And they are more suited to engineering than people who need to spend a lot of energy on emotional and mental regulation as well.

I think there are methods and patterns to be learned. Engineering is mostly a succession of problems, with a somewhat illusory prize at the end. But a lot of people currently in software development are not trained well to withstand the journey. And for some, it’s just that they have been doing it since high school or something.

One of the thing that is important is to segment the work and have checkpoints and mini bosses. You don’t climb a mountain in one go. That’s one of the reason I dislike LLM in coding is because coding is my down time after a deep thinking session.

Another thing is to have an end goal in mind, and plan the journey according to those. You do this by having enough information about the business domain. I’ve seen people rush blindly into solving problem and get a burnout in the process. This also help with pacing yourself to a sustainable rate of effort.

Re: Prioritize mental health, and why communication is so important

#33

Post by Shalomboy »

I've wanted to write something similar regarding anxiety on a blog of my own for close to a decade now, but I was always afraid to put my feelings to paper, in case they become real. If they stay in my head, I can dismiss them. OP, I hope you feel some relief having posted this; if it helped you, perhaps it could encourage other to let down their walls.

Thank you so much for sharing.

Re: Prioritize mental health, and why communication is so important

#34

Post by esseph »

Xortl wrote: post #10

I would love to read an update about your experience with antidepressants, as it's a path I'm thinking about more and more with the (losing) battle I've been fighting against my own long term depression. I really resonated with your eventual realization that while others have their own battles, they are very rarely similar to this. I guess I knew it was unusual, but I took way too long to realize just how weird it wa…

Stop thinking about it and go talk to someone. You are likely just delaying your healing and happiness.

Good luck!

Re: Prioritize mental health, and why communication is so important

#35

Post by esseph »

jason_s wrote: post #12

I agree mental health is important and have struggled with similar issues... but it is hard to read prose in fixed-width typefaces. Please consider a more readable serif variable-width typeface.

Many of us are used to monospace all day long in terminal

Re: Prioritize mental health, and why communication is so important

#37

Post by skydhash »

kgwxd wrote: post #22
travelalberta wrote: post #7

Most of y’all need to buck up. If day to day engineering tasks are so challenging for you maybe the anxiety and depression you’re feeling is your system telling you that you are in misalignment. Why are you an engineer if you are struggling to complete the basic tasks? Are you meant to be doing what you are doing?

Very, very, very little of real-world software dev is anything close to "engineering".

Take any long-running successful project, and you’ll find that they practice an engineering-like discipline to make it sustainable.

Re: Prioritize mental health, and why communication is so important

#38

Post by 6stringmerc »

An admirable start down a self-discovery path.

One of the major themes I pick up in this piece is an unfortunate, very common, misallocation of mental effort regarding the past-present-future mindset. As in, the described course is simply regarding treatment of symptoms. There is little to no awareness at this point in the journey that the sources of the mental issues may be much deeper than simply imposter syndrome or poor culture fit.

I am not a Psychologist. I am a Writer. Psychology is the invention of a Writer, facts. To write convincing characters or portraits of events, it takes a long and often painful study of the human psyche. When I finally fell into circumstances where I was able to apply this to myself, the process, after years, has resulted in a fundamental change in my own mind. For the better, though it is occasionally foreign or akin to feeling “adrift” in life - such is clarity.

Point being? Looking outside for help is problematic, and “friends and family” were in my situation the actual causes and “negative feedback loops” which had decades long consequences. Only by turning my back on them was I able to identify the nearly subconscious roots of my guilt and shame issues having no valid reason to exist. To the contrary, I found how my life had been quite a reflection of well formed morals, ethics, and principles of a high minded, pragmatic, and good quality of character person.

That’s why AA and friends and family suck as resources. They are unreliable. One does not repair the mind by continuing to engage with others also of a broken nature. Healing happens in solitude. Being unable or unwilling to take this path is the first thing to address in pursuit of real, lasting positive change.

Or, ya know, just take handfuls of pills and keep rowing your boat in the river of denial. Seems to be the way Mormonism keeps its catastrophically delusional dogma in play. Read the experiences of ex-Fundamentalist cast outs or voluntary abandonment.

One must turn their back on the broken culture that broke them to find the truth and spiritual health within. Good luck to all.

Re: Prioritize mental health, and why communication is so important

#39

Post by tycho-newman »

travelalberta wrote: post #7

Most of y’all need to buck up. If day to day engineering tasks are so challenging for you maybe the anxiety and depression you’re feeling is your system telling you that you are in misalignment. Why are you an engineer if you are struggling to complete the basic tasks? Are you meant to be doing what you are doing?

Robert Sapolsky has a fantastic discussion of depression as a form of learned helplessness. We see it in abused animals: https://youtu.be/NOAgplgTxfc?is=YnnSt1292XjiGbEE

You are not much different from any other animal at some level. With enough conditioning you will believe that you have no agency over your own life, and you’ll just sit there and take the shocks hoping it ends soon. Or worse, you’ll lose perspective and imagine the only solution to your current (likely temporary) circumstance is to (definitely very permanently) end your own life.

Re: Prioritize mental health, and why communication is so important

#40

Post by imrehg »

fwlr wrote: post #29

This could be due to ADD, I am still getting tested. Granted, that's a diagnosis, not a root cause. No, it’s a diagnosis of the root cause - in fact, it is plausibly the root cause of everything else described in the post. Inability to complete work, procrastination/distraction by focusing on nearby tasks, the pervasive sense that you struggle with things that other people do not, even the depression (untreated ADD c…

It's scary how your first paragraph describes by recent (but not long term) experiences. Looks like I have some checks to do as well.
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