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Ask HN: Emotion hacks? How do you work despite crummy love/life things going on?

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71–80 of 82 posts

Re: Ask HN: Emotion hacks? How do you work despite crummy love/life things going on?

#71
post #70

Earlier quoted context omitted.

haha! w00t hit me up: darkxanthos at gmail dot com My life would be improved ten fold by knowing a woman with interests like yours even if just as friends. EDIT: Also it's email how badly could I possibly stalk you?

HN dating-site spinoff anyone?

I don't think the world needs "Ruby babe in search of Django framework" :-)

That said, if those two get together they should let the rest of us know.

Re: Ask HN: Emotion hacks? How do you work despite crummy love/life things going on?

#72
I work for a non profit whose purpose I believe. It adds an element of fulfillment and influence to my work that I otherwise find absent. (keep in mind professionally I'm a low level worker, while in the non-profit I am exclusively an executive or administrator)

Re: Ask HN: Emotion hacks? How do you work despite crummy love/life things going on?

#73
post #27
post #7

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I second this. I can't relate the the part about a sense of security, but I've found that it's very important to "take care of myself", in whatever form. For me that often means cleaning my apartment, taking care of business I've been procrastinating on, etc. Those are concrete, actionable tasks that are guaranteed to make me feel better, even if only a little bit. At work, I similarly try to focus on specific small…

100% agreement on cleaning my apartment. I find this is the single most useful thing I can do in terms of my day-to-day emotional health.

Definitely! I feel more productive when there is less clutter in my real life as such clutter seems to translate to mental clutter for me. That's why when PG wrote his essay a while back called Stuff (i think?), and I was in the middle of moving, I chunked/sold/gave away a lot of the stuff I hadn't touched in a while. Unfortunately I moved to a larger place so I had to buy more stuff to fill it up, sigh.

Re: Ask HN: Emotion hacks? How do you work despite crummy love/life things going on?

#74

I blogged. I had a pretty big readership (three hundred or so followers on Tumblr, not sure how many followed on RSS), and I wrote a lot about how I felt and what I was going through. The conversations I had with my readers led to a lot of self-growth and peace. I grew up a lot writing about the experience. There were also some moments of personal vindication: After writing about a particularly assed argument with he…

I'm on tumblr too, hit me up (profile). :-)

Re: Ask HN: Emotion hacks? How do you work despite crummy love/life things going on?

#77
post #44

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Does this really happen? Does this count? Another soldier, Staff Sgt. Daniel Shannon, told CBS that his PTSD changed him completely. "I started smashing furniture, very rapidly; so I didn’t know what I was doing ‘til it happened. I’d get mad so fast, so angry fast, and just lash out." ( http://www.thecommentfactory.com/irregular-army-the-prevalen... ) It only takes a bit of googling to find all sorts of information o…

I don't doubt that people flip out. I don't even doubt that thousands of people among the millions who served in the military have flipped out. What I'm wondering about is whether otherwise undamaged people who repress their emotions eventually go nuts, or whether people who control their emotions end up in control of their emotions. People who eat small portions generally don't suddenly devour a turkey. People who o…

> What I'm wondering about is whether otherwise undamaged people who repress their emotions eventually go nuts, or whether people who control their emotions end up in control of their emotions.

imho the opposite of repressing one's emotions is not controlling them; it's bottling them up.

to me, controlling one's emotions means feeling the pain, happiness, sorrow, anger, whatever, and then choosing how you want to act based on feeling that emotion. most people assume that emotion dictates behavior, but you always have a choice about how to react. i.e. you can feel the sting when someone insults you, but you can choose not to punch him even though you're feeling hurt.

bottling up one's emotions, otoh, represses them. you choose to ignore (usually negative) emotions. these are the ones that tend to come up in destructive ways later on.

Re: Ask HN: Emotion hacks? How do you work despite crummy love/life things going on?

#78
post #14
post #6

You need to communicate your situation to family/friends, make yourself not feel isolated. Many people feeling anxiety and depression think they're the only ones they know, whereas many people are vulnerable. And when i see people prone to chemical dependencies or extreme behaviors, i urge them to seek counseling. One thing that helps me is multiple 5-15 minute exercise breaks over the day. You can walk up a hill or…

I agree 100%. Ubuntu has a program built into gnome that forces you to take breaks. Go to Keyboard preferences > Typing Break. I set it to 10 minutes of work / 5 minute break. I can focus more, take short breaks to get things done (eat, brush my teeth, clean), and get more done than I do if I just stare at a screen for an hour straight.

Wow, that typing break thing sounds really cool! Does anyone know if there's a similar application or system preference for OS X?

Re: Ask HN: Emotion hacks? How do you work despite crummy love/life things going on?

#79

Thank you for asking this question, especially at this time. Responses of other people are a lot helpful for me as well. Sharing how I deal with similar situations: I go out and try to stay out as much as possible. Working in a coffee shop gives the illusion that you are not alone. I also cook elaborate dinner involving pasta, sit down with a glass of wine and watch a movie as a picker-upper. But of late I've been us…

escapepod.org is another great "read-to-me" site. It's not full-length books; it's sci-fi short stories instead. In my opinion, it's much harder to write a good short story than a good novel.

EscapePod is also great for the commute to work, road trips across the country, and exercising (if you have a routine, anyway).

It rarely fails to keep my spirits up. (Even the sad stories are pretty cathartic.)

Re: Ask HN: Emotion hacks? How do you work despite crummy love/life things going on?

#80
post #12

Slightly tangential, but I had this thought the other day. In our industry, shutting oneself into a room with a computer and being alone with our own thoughts is considered functional and praiseworthy. I think a lot of my most productive colleagues deal with almost everything in life by diving deep down in this mode. Is this really a good thing?

So long as one has options, I think it's okay. A few years ago, I was at the point where I was going into this "deep down" mode daily because social interaction just wasn't very accessible to me, and I got pretty depressed.

I've read recently about extreme social deprivation (like solitary in prison) and I've begun to wonder a bit about similarities.

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