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Ask HN: Anxiety is limiting my enjoyment of a wonderful career. Can you relate?
111–120 of 120 posts
Re: Ask HN: Anxiety is limiting my enjoyment of a wonderful career. Can you relate?
#112I've struggled with anxiety for as long as I can remember. I used to approached it with a fight or flight relationship. As I shifted my ways of identifying with it, I was able to turn that fight/hostility into a gentle dance. From there I was able to start taking the small steps that would help me have better control of it. Start now, or do I let it manifest further for my future self? Here are some things that have…
Meditation/mindfulness and good sleep hygiene worked wonders for me too. As a grad student, I also suffered with anxiety due to imposter syndrome. Here is my shift in perception that helped me. Stop taking yourself too seriously. Listen to the stories you tell yourself about you. When your mind tells you that you don't know anything, or how come you didn't achieve anything "significant" if you are so talented. Will y…
> Stop taking yourself too seriously. Listen to the stories you tell yourself about you. When your mind tells you that you don't know anything, or how come you didn't achieve anything "significant" if you are so talented. Will you ever say this to your friend? Or to a child? Your relationship with yourself should never be worse than what you have with an acquaintance
Just posting to say I recognise a lot of myself in this, and your post struck me as very helpful. As a result I've already decided to change the things you talk about.
Sometimes, the trick is simply becoming aware of things. After that, you can work on them. Thank you for your post :)
Re: Ask HN: Anxiety is limiting my enjoyment of a wonderful career. Can you relate?
#113THIS BOOK MAY HELP:
Self Help for Your Nerves: Learn to relax and enjoy life again by overcoming stress and fear by Dr. Claire Weeke
http://www.amazon.co.uk/Self-Help-Your-Nerves-overcoming/dp/...
Re: Ask HN: Anxiety is limiting my enjoyment of a wonderful career. Can you relate?
#114THIS BOOK MAY HELP:
Self Help for Your Nerves: Learn to relax and enjoy life again by overcoming stress and fear by Dr. Claire Weekes
http://www.amazon.co.uk/Self-Help-Your-Nerves-overcoming/dp/...
Re: Ask HN: Anxiety is limiting my enjoyment of a wonderful career. Can you relate?
#115I have anxiety and I have quit 2 jobs when asked to assume tech lead role because the first 2 times I have taken on tech lead roles, I ended up in the hospital and started alienating my family due to depression, respectively. I can handle the toughest sr. engineer assignment, but I can't handle the most basic tech lead stuff where responsibility for other people's work is involved. I have since learned to hold back m…
I also have no aspirations to rise the corporate ladder. Pay goes up, maybe, but so do work hours and stress. Job stability goes down. Playfulness goes down. Free time goes down. Peon programming is where it's at. If I want more more, then I can freelance or start side projects and they'd likely both pay better and be a lot more fulfilling.
I had REALLY bad with anxiety, panic attacks and was suffering some depression too.
Without a doubt this book is the best help i have ever had!
Self Help for Your Nerves: Learn to relax and enjoy life again by overcoming stress and fear by Dr. Claire Weekes
Re: Ask HN: Anxiety is limiting my enjoyment of a wonderful career. Can you relate?
#116Earlier quoted context omitted.
I know this is a bit off topic and a touch on the personal side(feel free to not answer) but I am curious how you taught yourself to read body language? Did you use books or trial and error, or??
The first step was learning to make eye contact. If you're not looking at people, you're not even getting the chance to read them. I just didn't look much at people for the first 21-22 years of my life. I remember reading a bunch of articles about "how to make eye contact". I was on sites aimed at people with aspergers, as they're a niche most likely to actually need that kind of advice. Then you practice. And occasi…
I know this thread is long passed but I wanted to say thank you! I appreciate the depth of your response and I believe it will help others who have similar anxiety.
Re: Ask HN: Anxiety is limiting my enjoyment of a wonderful career. Can you relate?
#117Meditate! I still suffer with anxiety (muscle aches, shortness of breath, inability to focus on anything but how anxious I felt) and my therapist recommended meditation. I work in a cubicle city so I sneak away into one of empty conferences room and meditate for 20 min. I use the Headspace App (I have mixed but already paid for it kind of feelings toward it). Good luck!
Re: Ask HN: Anxiety is limiting my enjoyment of a wonderful career. Can you relate?
#118I have OCD tendencies and I have found it incredibly helpful to connect with others in similar situations. I feel almost exactly like you do on a regular basis. My automatic negative thoughts are a little different but the end result is the same. If you are like me, you are an extremely considerate/observant person that puts the perceived needs of others consistently before your own. I know it sounds stupid or crass…
I don't know what is the exact problem that I am having. What you said about being careful what others would think or do has always haunted in my head. That alienates me from other people and I know how hard it feels.when ever I have to face a new challenge I feel that I am not good enough and I even forget all the technical details of the projects I did, things I have learned. Now I am facing huge fear having to go to job interviews. I even forget words to describe what I have done in previous projects.
Once I was the brightest students in the School. But now I feel that I have no knowledge at all. I'm worried. I wish if something could rescue me.
Re: Ask HN: Anxiety is limiting my enjoyment of a wonderful career. Can you relate?
#119Coming late to this thread but I wanted to add something that has really helped me. I have had general anxiety peppered with OCD for the past 10+ years of my life, about basically everything. It affected my work, my health and my self confidence.
I started seeing a hypnotherapist/NLP therapist, and one of the most useful things he told me was to stop beating myself up about my anxiety. The whole time I was blaming myself for and being hard on myself about how I was feeling, which was only making things worse. Instead, he explained that I was behaving the only way my brain knew how to behave given the tools and experiences I had had.
It sounds a bit like blame passing but it's not - there's no blaming other people. It's just accepting that you're no less 'normal' and you're not a bad, weak person or letting anxiety get to you. The anxious behaviour is a product of your environment and experiences, and somewhere in your life you learnt to react that way (more than likely subconsciously). This helped me a lot as it took away the additional pressure I was putting on myself to 'push through like a normal person', and the additional anxiety it caused.
It's also worth mentioning that sometimes anxiety can be caused by something else medical, e.g. thyroid problems, so it might be worth thinking about that too.
Good luck!
Re: Ask HN: Anxiety is limiting my enjoyment of a wonderful career. Can you relate?
#120I have OCD tendencies and I have found it incredibly helpful to connect with others in similar situations. I feel almost exactly like you do on a regular basis. My automatic negative thoughts are a little different but the end result is the same. If you are like me, you are an extremely considerate/observant person that puts the perceived needs of others consistently before your own. I know it sounds stupid or crass…
I don't know what is the exact problem that I am having. What you said about being careful what others would think or do has always haunted in my head. That alienates me from other people and I know how hard it feels.when ever I have to face a new challenge I feel that I am not good enough and I even forget all the technical details of the projects I did, things I have learned. Now I am facing huge fear having to go…
Unfortunately, you must rescue yourself from yourself. You are not judging yourself on the same scale that you are using to judge everyone else. You are being critically harsh on yourself, holding yourself to standards that you don't expect from others. If you learned something once, you have proven something far more important than remembering the specifics of the problem. You have proven that you have the capability to think critically and solve a problem. That is far more valuable than remembering the nuances of some domain specific technologies. Stop comparing yourself to others and realize that you can be anything you want to be.