This might well be titled 'Five ways to stop ruminating' (which of course would need to be edited down for submission here):
1: Anticipate rumination-triggering events and acknowledge rumination when it begins
2&3: Use logic and intuition rather than imagination to relate to reality
4&5: Be patient with yourself as you practice not ruminating and expect improvement if you persist
I guess that all makes sense, but it's sort of like telling someone how to ride a bicycle by explaining balance and pedaling. Distraction remains a more practical and attractive option in this light.
I upvoted this post because I the advice he gave about reading up on cognitive distortions and knowing what they are. This helped me alot, just being able to identify that I was thinking very negative things that were purely a mechanism of my imagination and not reflected in reality.
Being able to see that there are common patterns of such thoughts and identify them and deal with them is very helpful
To be honest I'm not sure by reading your comment replies to me and other HN users whether you're biased or distorted. Because when you're engaged in any discussions that are not agreeable to you and was asked to produce some relevant proof or references normally you have failed to do that and instead keep relying on some abstract concepts that you considered as "facts". After that you normally resort to attacking the anonymity of the other users that is clearly unrelated and tangential to the subjects being discussed.
Your comment is totally irrelevant to this thread and moreover you are engaged in ad hominem attacks which you are advised to layoff. Your petulance simply affirms your intellectual bankruptcy given that i have dismissed your comments in other threads which you seem unable to grasp and come to terms with.
An important step for me was practicing mindfulness meditation. It's literally training the skill of recognizing your thoughts and being able to step back from them to observe. That distance is important for, say, figuring out what your triggers are or deciding how to handle these thoughts.
Honestly, everybody should be practicing mindfulness meditation and cognitive-based therapy. It's a powerful combination. Also, see a therapist. A decent one is worth their weight in gold. Even though I was practicing these things, it was clear it wasn't a perfect fix and adding a third-party perspective was a huge help in learning how to regulate my thoughts and emotions. Some things we simply can't solve completely on our own.
Same here, mindfulness is a great thing! Initially I had some troubles getting into it, because I always felt I had to wait for the right time to do it. But I've since learned a couple of techniques that can help you notice whether you're ruminating, and to then transition to a more mindful state. It's been a quality of life-improvement for me, maybe it helps somebody else:
- wear a small rubber band or something similar on your wrist. If you notice yourself ruminating, give yourself a little flick with it - the very slight pain signal pulls you into the here & now!
- designate a time and place to ruminate a bit when you feel the need, but have a timer running, and do something else afterwards. Controlled release in a way!
- generally, if you catch yourself ruminating, try to think of something indicating "STOP" or similar. Personally I imagine a big STOP road sign and also "shout" it in my internal voice.
It might sound silly, but after actively training for a few weeks you'll have much more freedom in your thoughts!
Just a heads up for anyone reading this, as a mindfulness coach I wouldn’t recommend this technique. The rubber band and “stop” voice are pretty harsh and rather we want to practice inner kindness and letting go.
Do you have an alternative recommendation for "strong" reminders?
"Counting five breaths" is a tool I got from some mindfulness resource. Focus on the breath as much as you can and count the exhales. When you get to five, begin again from one. Repeat until settled. If I'm fairly out-of-it, it may take me 10 repeats of counting five breaths to center myself. Sometimes it doesn't work at all.
Weird. Telling myself to stop works and doesn't feel harsh. It's possible to be kind and accepting and to recognize what's happening and give yourself boundaries. Being kind only goes so far if you literally don't stop ruminating. Telling myself to stop, that I've done enough ruminating, that these thoughts aren't going anywhere helpful and I can't change anything right now works far better than most other techniques I've tried. It's just another way of letting go.
Do you have medical credentials? "Coach" doesn't sound like it, but I don't want to presume. I've learned this from actual therapists, so I'll keep trusting their opinion until I see contrary data.
Interesting. I am definitely not a doctor. If you have medical advice to practice this technique, I would follow it.
I will say that I have been practicing mindfulness meditation for 7 years in various traditions and have never come across this technique. It also goes against the definition of mindfulness (paying attention to the present moment without judgement) as it is applying judgement to your thoughts.
I have experienced very difficult and dark periods of meditation when I was hard on myself for thinking, and learning to be very kind to myself in meditation was a huge step forward in my practice. Rather than “stop”, I say “thinking” to myself in a kind way.
I think I wrote my initial comment from a very different perspective, but we know how difficult it is to bring all this across in text :)
None of the techniques I described are meant to be judgemental. It's only about helping yourself passively recognize rumination. While it did them I never once felt I was being unkind to myself, since it's neither meant to hurt nor negatively judge. The "STOP" example is literally about picturing something, not about "screaming at yourself".
To get back to your initial points - you are definitely correct that you have to approach yourself with kindness, and if you feel that anything I described is unkind, you should find a way that works for you!
I think this is a great point about nuance and "what works for one person, at one point in time, may not always work."
For some the "rubber band" method may just be a silly reminder, but for others it could be a mild form of self harm. The same person may be in a very different emotional space from hour to hour or month to month.
The rubber band helps shift your focus back to your body. It can be an effective tool for people who struggle with anxiety. No need to judge it as being harsh or having a lack of kindness.
Agreed. I have ruminative anxiety and I found mindfulness (via the headspace app) + meds + therapy to be a very potent combo. Mindfulness was especially helpful for alleviating the distress in the moment.
...is an incredibly common fallacy. I don't say that to dismiss your experience, as I'm sure the things helped you and you are genuinely trying to help others- and that these things can help lots of people. My issue is solely with the word 'everybody'
Here is why it is toxic: for people who those things don't work, or for whom the proposed solution is beyond their ability, it's a short step to blaming them for their problems and writing them off. Which is a very common reaction to mental health problems, even among mental health professionals.
Furthermore, my observations among my colleagues is that the folks who do this meditation among other things are also not really successful at it either, for the most part. A great example is the Parks and Rec clip where Chris and Ron go for meditation [1] - quite an exaggeration to be sure but it is very conflicting that you actively try to not think. In the show the running line is that for someone who tries to do everything right Chris doesn’t really attain inner peace or even true good health.
I myself have never meditated much, but have had my dad who used to disappear in to the forest for a few weeks at a time (he has done that all his life, something he learned from his father etc, as part of the culture of a traditional medicinal healer). He meditates. To clarify, he meditates ALL the time. In a loud train. While my mom watches loud annoying soap operas. While lying down. Not on a schedule he puts in the calendar. To him that was the default state of mind. In some ways not very dissimilar to what Ron Swanson does in the clip. Maybe some day I’ll try that out, but it sure ain’t gonna be by popping headphones with an app playing white noise. It’s gotta be a fundamental change in what you do in every step of life.
Having said that, it looks like even forced meditation on a schedule still helps a bit. Just don’t expect to be a long term miracle cure. It’s safe to say anything Tim Ferris says works in helping him calm down is likely not a real solution lol.
Unclear TBH. He was a remarkable individual in his younger days but as he reached retirement wisdom did seem to part ways in an unfair way and all his calmness didn’t help slow down that decline. I continue to try and get what lessons I can from his life and others, and for me the lesson is not to meditate but just slow down, not to hurry on anything and just do things with purpose.
It's hard to do harm with meditation. It's a bit like saying everybody should exercise. Yes, there might be a person on earth who shouldn't exercise, although I find that hard to imagine, but the statement is still valid. Similarly, it's hard to imagine someone who wouldn't benefit from meditation. Just a few minutes is beneficial.
Meditation and exercise are not comparable. The latter is something our bodies were designed by our evolution to do. The former is something we ourselves developed in certain cultural environments. The actual difference in confidence of benefit between these two is enormous.
I'd argue that exercise (for some) can be a form of meditation and achieve similar effects.
Running for a long time will result in a focus on your breath and each stride and step.
I heard once that meditation is an inherently introspective practice. It brings your focus towards yourself and being present in the moment. Hence if you are narcissistic, the last thing you want is to draw more focus to yourself And meditate.
To loosely quote "McMindfulness", it's possible to be mindful about shitty things. The Western form of mindfulness has been largely washed of the Buddhist dogma that it's rooted in. This is because it was heavily coopted by corporations as a way for people to "meditate" towards tolerating a crappy work environment or coworkers.
Firstly, even if mediation was completely harmless in itself, there is such a thing as opportunity cost. Spending a year unsuccessfully thing to get something from mediation is a year when they could have been trying lots of other things. (You could try other things at the same time, but most medical professionals actively discourage that)
Isn't this a fallacy in itself? There is opportunity cost in everything. How would you know a year of meditation wasn't working out without actually doing the meditation?
If a year didn't work, how would you know that 2 years want going to work? or 5 years?
The problem isn't that you have to try it to see if it's works. The problem is that psych professionals a) have a poor grasp of decision theory and b) have an incentive to optimise their time and not the patients.
> If a year didn't work, how would you know that 2 years want going to work? or 5 years?
The time frame is not relevant as people differ in their abilities, as you have noted. Typically there would be some measurable change that helps determine how "you" are feeling overall in the process, not how other people felt at the indicated time frame. After all the goal is for "you" to feel better, which is subjective to everyone.
> The problem isn't that you have to try it to see if it's works.
I'm not sure I see how this would work any other way than trying it. A person is only trying the recommendation not perfecting it.
> The problem is that psych professionals a) have a poor grasp of decision theory and b) have an incentive to optimise their time and not the patients.
I'm not directly following how this relates to the original comment stating that recommending something for someone was toxic. Much like all professions some people are better at their job than others, sometimes you find the right fit, sometimes you have to keep going. We all have to walk our own path, no one can walk it for us.
*"you" is in the objective sense, not directed at you specifically.
I'm sorry, but I'm not sure how to explain this to you any further. Nothing you are saying is actually wrong, it just doesn't actually refute what I have been saying.
Unfortunately, I do think it refutes your point. You stated the following based on someones post of "everybody should try meditation":
>Here is why it is toxic: for people who those things don't work, or for whom the
proposed solution is beyond their ability, it's a short step to blaming them for
their problems and writing them off.
It seems very illogical to be on a recommendation engine of a site if its difficult for you to to reason with the recommendations posted and/or the direct feedback that people also post, relating to the topic at hand. I pointed out that this is what HN was based on. I disagree that it is toxic for someone else to make a recommendation, based on their perspectives, to try something on a site like HN.
If you had possible insight I would like to understand two things:
1. Why is someone one a site like HN if they aren't the intended audience?
2. What value would they derive from the site, presumably knowing their own mental health and that any recommendation they could read would be toxic to them because they may not be able to achieve the desired outcome?
If you want to figure out what someone else is saying, you need to figure out the way they have conceptualised the issue. You won't be able to do this by insisting on your conceptualisation.
By all means, please expand on this, preferably in more than a one or two sentence answer. I've posed two questions already to help frame what you are speaking too and so far I've only seen surface level responses.
How would you know a priori that doing it is better than what you could otherwise do with your life? Spending time to build meaningful relations with people around you could be a better use of time. With your spouse or kids, for example.
I'm not saying meditation is bad per se. But claiming straiht away that it can't do harm before you try it is just too strong of a statement. It's easy to dismiss the effect of opportunity cost.
>How would you know a priori that doing it is better than what you could otherwise do with your life?
You don't. Just as equally you can't say a recommendation is harmful that you haven't actually evaluated or performed yourself. No one dismissed opportunity cost, in fact its was clearly stated above that everything has a cost, both doing and not doing something.
There is a population who doesn't necessarily benefit, but we're pretty small: Those of us who have severe dissociative problems can sometimes not do well with meditation - we're basically so used to ignoring our mental and physical cues that training us to do so more isn't a good idea. It essentially reaffirms some toxic priors and heuristics we've developed. Also can really fuck with you if you have issues with things like derealization/depersonalization because you're contributing to that internal wall by detaching yourself.
It's hard to do harm with taking a one hour walk every day.
It's hard to do harm doing yoga for an hour a day.
It's hard to do harm with cooking a really healthy meal every day.
It's hard to do harm watching a self-improvement video on youtube every day.
It's hard to do harm writing down self-reflective thoughts for half an hour before going to bed every night.
...
No, if you compare it with sitting on the sofa staring into the wall, then no, it's likely not going to harm. But that's the wrong comparison. You need to compare with what you instead do not do with your limited time. And then doing all those things can do a lot of (relative) harm.
It's easy to do harm with claiming a certain thing is hard to do harm with.
This entire site is a recommendation engine. What the person stated above was a recommendation, much like advice, people don't have to do anything with it. Your example of something being toxic because not everyone succeed as well as others or do not poses an innate ability in something is very difficult to conceptualize for few reasons.
1. There are plenty of people who excel at items better than others. Athletes, researchers, hackers, plumbers, electricians, basically anyone.
2. Our entire human evolution has been taking chances on things that might not succeed.
3. This is literally what YC/Hacker News is and was formed from, i.e Things posted or commented on are not given with the intention that it will work for everyone. Its all an experiment.
To loosely quote Eleanor Roosevelt[1]:
> "No one can make you feel inferior without your consent."
This is all true. But my point is true as well. HN is recommendation engine, but it's kind of targeted to people who have the time and space to do a lot of experiments, because they are young and without responsibilities.
People who have mental health issues often have limited energy, so need to consider carefully the amount of time they should invest in each possible thing that might help them.
I believe your first statement makes a broad assumption about the targeted audience.
>People who have mental health issues often have limited energy, so need to consider carefully the amount of time they should invest in each possible thing that might help them.
This can apply to everyone not just people with mental health issues. The onus is placed on the reader here since we have established that HN is just an recommendation engine. Everyone is has a responsibility to do their own due diligence, especially from comments made on the Internet.
As a person making the recommendation why would you place bounds on it? There could be an unlimited number of conditions in which the suggestion could work as intended verse trying to consider all possible interpretations of your recommendation by all the people that might read it.
Why would the onus for this not be on the reader to place within their own bounds of understanding and abilities?
If it doesn't work for you, then you should work on finding out why not and what does work. It's also why I definitely recommend therapy. But most people just accept that they can't change or improve and that's that.
Being judged for recommending meditation is weird. I bounced off of meditation too. I don't actively practice it nowadays. I think at a certain point in my life, it wasn't helpful at all because of where I was psychologically and emotionally. It was way too painful. However, I learned from that experience, and I do think it was a valuable experience that led me to CBT, and tried different things.
I find your comment far more toxic and encouraging of doing nothing. How about you not blame people? I don't. Everybody is on their own journey and that's okay. If somebody feels meditation doesn't work for them, that's fine. Maybe something else will. However, I do feel that it's a universal skill that can benefit everybody. If somebody is unwilling or unable to train it, that's totally fine. I won't force anything on anybody or judge them for it. As an individual, it's up to you to make your own choices and decide what's best for you. All I can do is share my experience and my advice.
This has been a very controversial comment, but a lot of people who disagree are reading things into it that I did not say. All I'm saying is, people are different, and something working for you doesn't mean it will work for everyone. You don't need to let your enthusiasm for something lead you into making categorical statements which gaslight those for whom it doesn't work.
I guess there is something badly worded about my comment which appears to insult you, which was not my intention, so I apologise for that.
As a bit of insight, the first response you had referred to using the word 'everybody' as toxic. Further, it appears you have doubled down and condemned what has worked for Sakos and their shared enthusiasm for a topic, as psychological manipulation[1] to undermine random people that 'might' read their posting.
I think that if you are getting the feeling that responders are coming across as adversarial or misinterpreting what you are presenting, which happens with text, its a good time to reflect on things. Hopefully this helps.
I came here to look for a post just like this. Ruminating is a defense, a response from one's nervous system to a perceived lack of safety. And mindfulness and therapies are very effective in treating the root cause of that nervous system response. Just a shout to say that there are some situations where cognitive-based therapy isn't the optimal answer, where more experiential forms of therapy like IFS or AEDP are far more effective. For example, people who grew up with caretakers who were not able to teach and model proper emotional regulation would likely respond better to experiential therapies vs. cognitive.
> Honestly, everybody should be practicing mindfulness meditation and cognitive-based therapy.
Im my mind, therapy is a remedy to a problem after its diagnosis. If you don't have a problem, you don't do/need therapy. If you do have a problem, start by getting it properly diagnosed by a professional in the area (mental health, physiology, ... any area in which people run to a therapist first thing). Anything else is upside down and potentially a huge waste of time and/or money or worse, possibly without even realizing it.
We're talking about the kind of individual who, for example, got a bad review from a manager years ago and can't let it go. This person thinks about it on the bus, on the toilet, at dinner, when they should sleeping. Hydration is not the issue.
Interesting. I have the propensity to be that person too even when I'm well hydrated and healthy. I agree with focusing on getting the basics like food, exercise, and sleep right first though. If you can't get that right then you got not hope of sorting anything else out - necessary but not sufficient.
For me, it frequently means I'm running a fever. Adequate hydration can help break a fever.
It also helps to consciously decide "Yesterday was a bad day. I'm feeling better today. I'm going to let all that nonsense go. The stuff I was thinking yesterday wasn't rational. It's not worth pursuing further."
Problem is such stuff does not work if your brain circuitry is impaired for those instructions to just work. Rumination is a tricky thing and we all do it now and then so for those folks its easy to control like you do and its only bad when you are low mentally or physically.
For others its really hard to get rid of and is a constant thing they can't just decided to switch off.
I'm very seriously medically handicapped. Managing the somatopsychic -- aka mental health -- side effects of my incurable, deadly condition is a very large part of my life.
I struggle with dark rumination a lot, and I think the parent commenter’s advice is helpful as a practice, not as a quick fix. My understanding is that brain circuitry is sorta like paths across and uneven field: it’s always easier to travel across the established path than it is to chart a new one, but if you forge a new path and make an effort to travel it every day eventually it will become smooth and easy to travel, and the old path will grow over.
> We're talking about the kind of individual who, for example, got a bad review from a manager years ago and can't let it go.
I’m not that person, but I have had something similar happen to me in an altogether different way. Instead of ruminating on an event like you describe, I will have very minor episodes of spontaneous, percolating memories—very old memories-that come out of nowhere like Proust’s madeleine moment, and it’s incredibly off-putting. Does anyone else experience these random memories popping up out of nowhere in the middle of their day?
That happens to me all the time. For me, it’s almost like deja vu, where small combinations of what I’m currently doing causes a memory to pop into my head. Sometimes it seems to happen with no external stimuli.
Honestly, what I’ve found helps is to embrace it and consciously focus on the memory. Try to stop thinking of it as off-putting and let your brain explore the memory and really think about it. I see it as a cool sort of gift where you can relive things to ponder them further, even when the memories aren’t the happiest.
Something I learned in therapy: if you push it off and try to ignore it, it will keep coming back. It’s like your brain has unfinished business, and when you push it away and say “don’t think about that”, your brain starts associating whatever that thing is with negativity. I’m no therapist, and you and I are different people, but it’s possible this is why you see it as off-putting and I don’t.
> 2. Overwhelm myself with positive true thoughts in the same area as negative thoughts so I gorget about the negative ones
I'll use computer analogy for why this is a bad idea (at least it was for me when I did it). That's pushing the problem down the stack and it builds up internal negative pressure. I've done this and it made me even more miserable at the time. You _shouldn't_ mix negative or positive feelings at the same time just like you can't have two distinct things at the same time in the same memory space. In my experience trying to push myself to be positive just made me even more apathetic, depressed and cynical. It just made my internal balance to go to super (-). Having mixed feelings (±) could as well be the definition of deadlock, race condition, halt and catch fire etc. type of thing that happens to us all. It's what leads us to procrastination, dopamine chasing and the effects of those things.
The fix for me was to stop pushing myself and try to find the root for some of my fears, insecurities, previous beliefs. It takes internal work and observation, _NOT RATIONAL ANALYSIS_ to try to reach the roots of your issues. We were emotional beings before we were intelligent. The emotional system is a lower-level system than the intelligent/rational system we employ as modern humans. You should observe your emotional state and when you get there, you'll see that your negative thoughts are really not that of a big deal and they're not you and that they don't define you. If your first point is true and you have understood that, then this step should be relatively easy for you. Once that "clicks" you really do feel a certain feeling of lightness and calmness. It means you've let go of those things that were pressuring you inside. It's not happiness (+), but I'd say it's a pleasant neutral (0) where you take things as they are and have the potential to go on about the things you want.
My personal technique: find a difficult problem/puzzle I can grind on when my mind can’t be put to rest.
IMO all the self awareness / meditation advice are moot. What works is to find brain hacks. Ways to either break the loop or move the loop to a different task.
- I listen to an unpoliticized radio show of 2hrs. It’s irrelevant for life, but funny, it’s not cut by ads (Les Grosses Tètes in France), and it keeps my mind off my annoyances (like, failing at life),
- I listen to Youtube videos about plane crashes to get to sleep. Not too good for sleep, but better than ruminating, and it stops at the end of the video (10-20 minutes). I think it smoothes me to hear about people’s death, after a youth being harassed that I can’t let go. Plus aviation shows are always about engineering, it tickles my rational mind, everything is logical, as opposed to humans.
- Obviously, get a psychologist, to output your overwhelming thoughts, criticize your reasonings, and make plans for the future.
Alternatively, people standing against bullying earlier in my life would have been a good way to prevent me from doing all I’ve done, but I’ve learnt you can only expect so much from humans lol, there is an expected level of violence in society, and the only way to prevent bullying is to be a bully yourself. Or that’s what everyone taught me, don’t be a victim, standup for yourself, it’s ok to do x or y, and blah blah blah, i.e. be as savage as the average of society, which is, a lot. A lot savage.
God I wish things were different. Make it change. It’s Easter, let’s hope for a change ;)
I remember that I’m on a muddy splot in a galaxy of 100b stars in a universe of 100b galaxies. And that 10^100 is a bigger number than all the atoms in the universe.
Ironically, there is a school of thought on meditation which says that it's perfectly valid to meditate by picking a task or chore, then performing that task so that it engrosses the entire mind. According to this line of thought, this working meditation is even better than normal meditation, because it gets shit done.
Two Approaches: Grinding and Flow
One approach is to do the task with perfect awareness and focus. We dismiss extraneous thoughts when they arise. We and focus on doing the task perfectly and without unnecessary pain or suffering.
We could call this Grinding, since we still feel effort.
Another approach is to enter a stateless flow. In this state, your awareness and focus and identity are no longer present as you do the task. You neither feel effort nor make errors as you do the task.
Ruminating on occasion is normal. I knew this was going to be some "executive coach" blog before clicking on it. Unless your rumination interferes with your life to the point where it seems pathological or without any good reason, don't fret it, that's the only advice. Humans aren't machines, we're concerned about things all the time, on some nights we don't sleep well.
Especially advice like "paying attention to triggers" seems completely out of place for ordinary people and probably is going to make the average person more neurotic, not less.
It's not just you. ChatGPT prompt "Write a short article about How to Stop Ruminating" gives about the same ...:
"Ruminating, or repeatedly thinking about a problem or situation, can be mentally exhausting and can lead to negative emotions such as anxiety and depression. However, breaking the cycle of rumination is possible with the right strategies. Here are some tips on how to stop ruminating:
Identify triggers: The first step is to identify what triggers your ruminating thoughts. Is it a particular situation, person or stressor? Once you know what triggers your thoughts, you can start to work on avoiding or managing them.
Practice mindfulness: Mindfulness is a technique that involves focusing your attention on the present moment without judgment. By practicing mindfulness, you can train your mind to let go of negative thoughts and stay in the present.
Engage in physical activity: Engaging in physical activity such as walking, running or yoga can help clear your mind and reduce stress. Exercise releases endorphins, which are natural mood boosters, and can help you feel more positive.
Distract yourself: When you find yourself ruminating, distract yourself with an activity that you enjoy. This could be anything from reading a book to watching a movie or spending time with friends.
Challenge your thoughts: Challenge negative thoughts by asking yourself if they are really true or if there is another way to look at the situation. This can help you gain perspective and reduce the intensity of your emotions.
Seek support: If you find that your ruminating thoughts are persistent and affecting your daily life, it may be helpful to seek support from a mental health professional. They can help you develop coping strategies and work through any underlying issues that may be contributing to your rumination.
Breaking the cycle of rumination takes time and effort, but with the right strategies and support, it is possible to overcome this pattern of thinking and move forward with a more positive outlook on life."
The content seems like a good summary of what you’d read elsewhere in pop-psychology blogs. It stimulates comments here which are themselves very interesting. And the internet isn’t going to run out of space just because articles like this are published.
On the other hand, while the internet may have infinite space, HN is limited to 30 articles on the homepage and I have limited time to look at them. A stale autogenerated summary like this is pushing something more interesting out.
Yes it does. I am getting honestly tired at defending this position on here, I shouldn't have to explain why it is problematic that a comment or submission is AI generated on a forum that tries to maintain a high standard for discussion.
I didn't say it didn't matter. I asked whether it mattered. Sorry!
My thinking was even if it is generated I find the comments interesting and engaging more than the article itself - same as with a lot of clearly non ChatGPT HN posts. But I can understand you point, and actually I agree.
I appreciate you changed your mind, but more and more often I read someone, playing the devil's advocate, asking whether it is a big deal if one posts content straight from ChatGPT.
To me it is absurd to even ask, and it is mind-numbingly tiring to have to explain why I would rather talk to humans. The fact that an increasing number of posters don't seem to have a problem with that makes me think this platform's quality of discourse will not last long (and the rest of the internet at large, but today I'll tone down my usual dead-internet doomsday predictions)
What makes you sure that the quality of AI generated content (that has potentially been the result of prompting and editing by a human) is and will be inherently worse than purely human generated content.
Where do you draw the line? Is using translate as a foreigner a problem?
> What makes you sure that the quality of AI generated content (that has potentially been the result of prompting and editing by a human) is and will be inherently worse than purely human generated content.
For the time being, I don't think you can trust AI generated content; quite often, when I asked chatGPT something I had to be sure of, it made mistakes. Take erroneous citations and references: do you think humans fake them the way chatGPT hallucinates them?
> do you think humans fake them the way chatGPT hallucinates them?
They don't need to 'fake' them; they can just be inadvertently wrong.
I have good, human, friends who tell me erroneous things all the time. I don't take them at face value, I check them. I do this for pretty much nearly every piece of information I get where it's going to inform a decision or point-of-view I'm going to take. Why should we be any less vigilant with a technology like ChatGPT?
What I implied is that we should be more vigilant with chatGPT. I don't think it is common for an article to completely invent a reference that does not exist, but it is common in chatGPT.
How did I not notice this analogy?! It is in fact true that a JPEG artifact upscaled with fabricated details is the same thing as a totally forged reference of a paper describing when to diagnose appendicitis in children. Thank you.
"High standard" implies more than just efficacy of the content.
Perhaps AI-generated content would be better than human-generated, but I just don't know if I'm ready to read a bunch of articles and perhaps interact with AI chat bots posting comments on hackernews without my knowledge. So hopefully you're human but if not, golden to what is ham semi-you heavily quality them implies of the article though you
At it looks like it might have been ChatGPT, I'm beginning to think that some people will (subconsciously or not) start using a slightly non-standard language and a non-standard way of writing things down, including small gramatical/syntactic mistakes, so that their writings could be more easily and surely identified as non-ChatGPT.
That would be a sort of creole language for the web (not that the web had lacked these types of languages in the past), a language that would be very rapidly modifying so that ChatGPT's training wouldn't be able to "catch up" with it.
Unnecessary. We already write in our own unique style, so if our post is longer than a sentence or so, stylometric tools can prove it was you and not ChatGPT.
I guess they will be the ultimate solution to StackOverflow's fight against ChatGPT too. Even Facebook, Mastodon, everyone'll have to use them.
Either chat GPT or someone generically reiterating what they've seen elsewhere. There wasn't really anything new here, no sources, just a summary of what other people have said.
In the book Getting Things Done the author explains that your brain is basically a really bad reminder system. So if it thinks there’s something you needs to do, it will basically keep reminding you of that thing at all times until you do it. So for each of these things, there’s what the author calls an “open loop”, and the brain keeps telling you about it until the loop is closed.
The way out, the author says, is to have a trusted system for storing information outside your brain. In that trusted system, you can write down what needs to be done for each open loop, and that basically closes the loop for your brain and it will stop reminding you of that thing all the time.
I still haven’t gone fully into doing it but my director at work swore by it, and the few times I tried it it was almost like magic. Even if you just pull out a todo app or notebook and for each of the things currently looping in your head, write down only the next step you need to take regarding that open loop (and maybe what the desired outcome is - I can’t remember if that’s in the book or not). For me the first time I tried it it was magical - it turned out there were only 4 or 5 things total looping on my mind at the time and after doing this exercise my mind was basically blank - the reminder system stopped telling me there was something I needed to do for these loops.
I think for it to be sustainable you probably have to really make sure you follow up on the things you write down so that your brain actually trusts you’ll do the things you wrote down, but at least for me it worked really well as a short term hack on a few occasions. I really need to finish reading the book!
I've been experimenting with using ChatGPT-4 for this. I tell it to take on a personal assistant persona and it helps me intelligently prioritise & track tasks, plus break them down into smaller steps. You can also have fun with it taking on different styles like your "personal assistant bro" or "Data from Star Trek".
It is pretty helpful, but after a while I've seen problems with it getting lost in the back an forth: it forgets tasks, or forgets that they are done. There are definitely issues with large context spaces. After a certain point, I can repeatedly tell it something is done or to remove an item from the list, and it'll apologise but keep the item as "Todo". This is probably one reason why they haven't released the 32k space yet.
I start my work day off with an Eisenhower matrix at the top of a new page in my business diary.
Leave the diary open and present on the desk. Ensure you're crossing out things as you work through them. Review previous days as often as you think is necessary.
Between that and having all my meetings in my osx calendar, I generally don't have open loops.
I _had_ a trusted system way back in high school: my daily planbooks. However, when I tried getting back into the habit, I routinely find the problem of brain dumping all the open loops, then setting the book aside and forgetting to look at it for two weeks.
Part of the problem, I believe, is the nature of deadlines I handle as an adult compared to as a student. As a student, the majority of my assignments were due within a week (if not due tomorrow), so it was easy to track that everything was finished. As an adult, everything is either due by EoD (and therefore has no need of being entered in the system) or due six weeks out (I never did develop the work ethic to beat procrastination, even as an A student).
>I routinely find the problem of brain dumping all the open loops
set a time limit, i create cards on a kanban board, write a subject and dump my task list for either a minute or until i notice myself shifting thoughts.
>setting the book aside and forgetting to look at it for two weeks
then you realize, dump a card reminding you to look at it again in less than 2 weeks. keep a metric on how often you look and reward yourself when you improve your metric. the real magic comes when you're sitting around not doing anything and you look at that todo list... and then work on it
I have found your git activity tracker is a good at-a-glance method of determining your procrastination levels
> I routinely find the problem of brain dumping all the open loops, then setting the book aside and forgetting to look at it for two weeks.
Even as a student I had this problem. My solution was to write on sticky notes and put them on the wall directly next to my desk. I could no longer forget about them, and could easily remove each one as I completed it.
Another part of Getting Things Done is to have a weekly review. Look at all the open projects in your trusted system and make sure you know the next thing you need to do for them. Look at your calendar and figure out what else you need to do. Think through the areas of your life and figure out what projects are in your head but not in your system.
There is a bit more to Getting Things Done than just to do lists.
> you can write down what needs to be done for each open loop, and that basically closes the loop for your brain and it will stop reminding you of that thing all the time
This plus just do the thing and it's like a super power. I realized I was letting simple things that take little time roll around in my head all day because of procrastination. So now, if I can do something right then - I do it.
This is part of the system actually - if something takes less than two minutes then just do it. But I think that’s sort of in a separate phase from the initial writing down of something… Like you can write something down briefly when you think of it to put it in your “inbox” but then you have a set time later to process your “inbox” and put everything in the right place, etc. and at that point if something takes less than two minutes then you just do it. Otherwise in contexts like work I think you could easily swamp yourself trying to do quick tasks like responding to messages and take a long time to get to anything important.
That said, I haven’t finished the book and truthfully part of the drawback of it is that it’s a bit of a complex system with a lot of moving parts, which has slowed down my desire to really finish it. But it still seems like if you could get past the parts that seem complicated and make it work for you it’d be great.
The 'pomodoro technique' starts dead simple but builds to quite a complex system. Might be worth a look.
I've used the first dead simple bit myself to get things I don't like doing much done. I've suggested just that first part (four or five bullet points) to older teenager students for exam revision with some success.
If someone finds the book helpful, it is helpful. No need to call it a meme if it does not cite studies. It is strictly a personal decision to read the book and use the system.
The natural state of the mind is quiet, but it takes a specific type of work to undo the bits that make it unquiet.
The bit that make it unquiet nearly always the same, or rather a variation on the same theme: during our infancy we learn at an emotional level that we must or must not be certain ways (e.g. must be pleasant, never confrontational). We then take these strongly formed patterns with us into the world. These patterns shape our behaviours and mean that, at an emotional level, many situations are not calm. That could be something obvious, like a tension in a relationship, or more subtle, that you overly worry relationships are going wrong when in fact they are in an okay state.
The more we can undo these musts and must nots, the more we can resolve situations to a level that leaves our minds quiet.
I am training to become a psychotherapist and have found that when analysing dreams in a particular structured way can point us to the areas we need to work on to improve the quietness.
It's not at all clear to me that ruminating is a bad thing. When I lie in bed ruminating and unable to sleep, I'm not unable to sleep because I'm ruminating, I'm ruminating because I'm unable to sleep. 100% always.
At least sometimes after a long rumination I'm able to figure things out. Maybe sometimes even useful things. Cerattnly things I wouldn't have been able to come up with off the top of my head.
Re: figuring things out, for me, it’s pretty rare that I’m able to resolve anything from _within_ the loop. It's only when I switch to another context and then switch back to it that I'm able to finally stop the looping. I can think of a few reasons why this works: there's evidence of brains doing "background processing" when asleep or occupied with something else, which I find especially fascinating. Sometimes I'm sure it's because there's something that would provide an "exit condition" if I could just see it, but there's some heuristic active in the present state that's causing that line of thinking to be skipped over and/or zapped of enough salience for the brain to consider it worth chewing on. Maybe in order to return to something the brain has to perform some sort of "bootstrapping" in order to "re-render" whatever ideational substance is involved, and somewhere in that bootstrapping process there's an exit condition that is absent from within the loop, I don't know.
I would also defend to the death that not all brain-loops are actually "resolvable" in any meaningful way. For example (stretching the meaning of “rumination” here), I have music going on in my head 24/7. Always. Most of the time they're in the form of short-ish loops, so they repeat a lot. This in and of itself isn’t so terrible - it can actually be really nice sometimes to "overhear" what's playing and join in, because I can help drive the musical procession forward, since the part of my thinking self that’s aware and has free will can focus on the music, innovate on what’s playing, lead the music around, change the song, etc. But unfortunately, the musical homunculus squatting in my head who's always awake is also never satisfied with a particular song coming to a close - try as I might to resolve a looping refrain by bringing the song to a close, the goddamn "Achy Breaky Heart" fanatic I never invited into my inner world in the first place just presses play again. Finishing the song does nothing! Here, there is no _resolution_; there is only _substitution_. At this point, if I don't just refuse to give up, I now find myself forced to trawl through my catalog of catchy songs to put on, so that the worst DJ ever, who has no ability to read the room, might hear what _I'm_ playing and decide to join _me_, before I can find any relief. It feels incredibly stupid when the current time is a very wide-awake 4am and it's at that point where you just have to say _fuck this, this isn't working, I'll never drift off to sleep with this asshole (yourself) playing this crap I didn't pick (well, actually, you did) on repeat_, so now you have to try to think of _other_ songs that get stuck in your head so that you can try playing them in your head to yourself until one of them "takes," in order to stop yourself from annoying the shit out of yourself and keeping yourself awake - all because you can't ask yourself to just stop (because you won't listen)! - but also (and this is my point here) because there's nothing that actually _resolves_ a musical "thought" in such a way that makes it "invalid," "irrelevant," "solved," etc. and thereby any less likely to just cue up again.
Oftentimes isn't not even a song - it's a jingle. A fucking jingle!!!
Similarly, I've had unresolvable brain-loops deriving from weed paranoia, where I _cannot_ reason with the lizard part of my brain in any way whatsoever. The only thing that works is distraction. This is main reason why weed is just not for me - I hate having to will myself to distraction because any sense of presence is too unsettling.
"Ruminating" is not all bad. The mind works on things and often the best solution to personal or professional problems come to me after I've let my mind work on it. Letting it run freely. Forcefully sulpressing it always seems counterproductive to me.
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[ 3.0 ms ] story [ 193 ms ] thread1: Anticipate rumination-triggering events and acknowledge rumination when it begins
2&3: Use logic and intuition rather than imagination to relate to reality
4&5: Be patient with yourself as you practice not ruminating and expect improvement if you persist
I guess that all makes sense, but it's sort of like telling someone how to ride a bicycle by explaining balance and pedaling. Distraction remains a more practical and attractive option in this light.
Being able to see that there are common patterns of such thoughts and identify them and deal with them is very helpful
Honestly, everybody should be practicing mindfulness meditation and cognitive-based therapy. It's a powerful combination. Also, see a therapist. A decent one is worth their weight in gold. Even though I was practicing these things, it was clear it wasn't a perfect fix and adding a third-party perspective was a huge help in learning how to regulate my thoughts and emotions. Some things we simply can't solve completely on our own.
- wear a small rubber band or something similar on your wrist. If you notice yourself ruminating, give yourself a little flick with it - the very slight pain signal pulls you into the here & now!
- designate a time and place to ruminate a bit when you feel the need, but have a timer running, and do something else afterwards. Controlled release in a way!
- generally, if you catch yourself ruminating, try to think of something indicating "STOP" or similar. Personally I imagine a big STOP road sign and also "shout" it in my internal voice.
It might sound silly, but after actively training for a few weeks you'll have much more freedom in your thoughts!
"Counting five breaths" is a tool I got from some mindfulness resource. Focus on the breath as much as you can and count the exhales. When you get to five, begin again from one. Repeat until settled. If I'm fairly out-of-it, it may take me 10 repeats of counting five breaths to center myself. Sometimes it doesn't work at all.
I will say that I have been practicing mindfulness meditation for 7 years in various traditions and have never come across this technique. It also goes against the definition of mindfulness (paying attention to the present moment without judgement) as it is applying judgement to your thoughts.
I have experienced very difficult and dark periods of meditation when I was hard on myself for thinking, and learning to be very kind to myself in meditation was a huge step forward in my practice. Rather than “stop”, I say “thinking” to myself in a kind way.
None of the techniques I described are meant to be judgemental. It's only about helping yourself passively recognize rumination. While it did them I never once felt I was being unkind to myself, since it's neither meant to hurt nor negatively judge. The "STOP" example is literally about picturing something, not about "screaming at yourself".
To get back to your initial points - you are definitely correct that you have to approach yourself with kindness, and if you feel that anything I described is unkind, you should find a way that works for you!
For some the "rubber band" method may just be a silly reminder, but for others it could be a mild form of self harm. The same person may be in a very different emotional space from hour to hour or month to month.
...is an incredibly common fallacy. I don't say that to dismiss your experience, as I'm sure the things helped you and you are genuinely trying to help others- and that these things can help lots of people. My issue is solely with the word 'everybody'
Here is why it is toxic: for people who those things don't work, or for whom the proposed solution is beyond their ability, it's a short step to blaming them for their problems and writing them off. Which is a very common reaction to mental health problems, even among mental health professionals.
I myself have never meditated much, but have had my dad who used to disappear in to the forest for a few weeks at a time (he has done that all his life, something he learned from his father etc, as part of the culture of a traditional medicinal healer). He meditates. To clarify, he meditates ALL the time. In a loud train. While my mom watches loud annoying soap operas. While lying down. Not on a schedule he puts in the calendar. To him that was the default state of mind. In some ways not very dissimilar to what Ron Swanson does in the clip. Maybe some day I’ll try that out, but it sure ain’t gonna be by popping headphones with an app playing white noise. It’s gotta be a fundamental change in what you do in every step of life.
Having said that, it looks like even forced meditation on a schedule still helps a bit. Just don’t expect to be a long term miracle cure. It’s safe to say anything Tim Ferris says works in helping him calm down is likely not a real solution lol.
1. https://youtu.be/7lHARAJFSgw
The problem isn't that you have to try it to see if it's works. The problem is that psych professionals a) have a poor grasp of decision theory and b) have an incentive to optimise their time and not the patients.
The time frame is not relevant as people differ in their abilities, as you have noted. Typically there would be some measurable change that helps determine how "you" are feeling overall in the process, not how other people felt at the indicated time frame. After all the goal is for "you" to feel better, which is subjective to everyone.
> The problem isn't that you have to try it to see if it's works.
I'm not sure I see how this would work any other way than trying it. A person is only trying the recommendation not perfecting it.
> The problem is that psych professionals a) have a poor grasp of decision theory and b) have an incentive to optimise their time and not the patients.
I'm not directly following how this relates to the original comment stating that recommending something for someone was toxic. Much like all professions some people are better at their job than others, sometimes you find the right fit, sometimes you have to keep going. We all have to walk our own path, no one can walk it for us.
*"you" is in the objective sense, not directed at you specifically.
>Here is why it is toxic: for people who those things don't work, or for whom the proposed solution is beyond their ability, it's a short step to blaming them for their problems and writing them off.
It seems very illogical to be on a recommendation engine of a site if its difficult for you to to reason with the recommendations posted and/or the direct feedback that people also post, relating to the topic at hand. I pointed out that this is what HN was based on. I disagree that it is toxic for someone else to make a recommendation, based on their perspectives, to try something on a site like HN.
If you had possible insight I would like to understand two things:
1. Why is someone one a site like HN if they aren't the intended audience?
2. What value would they derive from the site, presumably knowing their own mental health and that any recommendation they could read would be toxic to them because they may not be able to achieve the desired outcome?
I'm not saying meditation is bad per se. But claiming straiht away that it can't do harm before you try it is just too strong of a statement. It's easy to dismiss the effect of opportunity cost.
You don't. Just as equally you can't say a recommendation is harmful that you haven't actually evaluated or performed yourself. No one dismissed opportunity cost, in fact its was clearly stated above that everything has a cost, both doing and not doing something.
It's hard to do harm with taking a one hour walk every day.
It's hard to do harm doing yoga for an hour a day.
It's hard to do harm with cooking a really healthy meal every day.
It's hard to do harm watching a self-improvement video on youtube every day.
It's hard to do harm writing down self-reflective thoughts for half an hour before going to bed every night.
...
No, if you compare it with sitting on the sofa staring into the wall, then no, it's likely not going to harm. But that's the wrong comparison. You need to compare with what you instead do not do with your limited time. And then doing all those things can do a lot of (relative) harm.
It's easy to do harm with claiming a certain thing is hard to do harm with.
1. There are plenty of people who excel at items better than others. Athletes, researchers, hackers, plumbers, electricians, basically anyone. 2. Our entire human evolution has been taking chances on things that might not succeed. 3. This is literally what YC/Hacker News is and was formed from, i.e Things posted or commented on are not given with the intention that it will work for everyone. Its all an experiment.
To loosely quote Eleanor Roosevelt[1]: > "No one can make you feel inferior without your consent."
[1] https://quoteinvestigator.com/2011/03/30/not-inferior/
People who have mental health issues often have limited energy, so need to consider carefully the amount of time they should invest in each possible thing that might help them.
>People who have mental health issues often have limited energy, so need to consider carefully the amount of time they should invest in each possible thing that might help them.
This can apply to everyone not just people with mental health issues. The onus is placed on the reader here since we have established that HN is just an recommendation engine. Everyone is has a responsibility to do their own due diligence, especially from comments made on the Internet.
“everyone can benefit from this therefore everyone should do it”
To
“People who are X and Y can benefit from this and should try it”
Kind of like the sanity checks/boundary checks we put in the beginning of a function before we start processing data.
Why would the onus for this not be on the reader to place within their own bounds of understanding and abilities?
Being judged for recommending meditation is weird. I bounced off of meditation too. I don't actively practice it nowadays. I think at a certain point in my life, it wasn't helpful at all because of where I was psychologically and emotionally. It was way too painful. However, I learned from that experience, and I do think it was a valuable experience that led me to CBT, and tried different things.
I find your comment far more toxic and encouraging of doing nothing. How about you not blame people? I don't. Everybody is on their own journey and that's okay. If somebody feels meditation doesn't work for them, that's fine. Maybe something else will. However, I do feel that it's a universal skill that can benefit everybody. If somebody is unwilling or unable to train it, that's totally fine. I won't force anything on anybody or judge them for it. As an individual, it's up to you to make your own choices and decide what's best for you. All I can do is share my experience and my advice.
This has been a very controversial comment, but a lot of people who disagree are reading things into it that I did not say. All I'm saying is, people are different, and something working for you doesn't mean it will work for everyone. You don't need to let your enthusiasm for something lead you into making categorical statements which gaslight those for whom it doesn't work.
I guess there is something badly worded about my comment which appears to insult you, which was not my intention, so I apologise for that.
I think that if you are getting the feeling that responders are coming across as adversarial or misinterpreting what you are presenting, which happens with text, its a good time to reflect on things. Hopefully this helps.
[1] https://www.dictionary.com/browse/gaslighting
Im my mind, therapy is a remedy to a problem after its diagnosis. If you don't have a problem, you don't do/need therapy. If you do have a problem, start by getting it properly diagnosed by a professional in the area (mental health, physiology, ... any area in which people run to a therapist first thing). Anything else is upside down and potentially a huge waste of time and/or money or worse, possibly without even realizing it.
Another thing to consider is “preventative” vs “diagnostic” therapy.
Hydrate, have a bite to eat, rest or nap and tend to any known health issues.
Health stuff is almost always the issue.
It also helps to consciously decide "Yesterday was a bad day. I'm feeling better today. I'm going to let all that nonsense go. The stuff I was thinking yesterday wasn't rational. It's not worth pursuing further."
I'm very seriously medically handicapped. Managing the somatopsychic -- aka mental health -- side effects of my incurable, deadly condition is a very large part of my life.
I’m not that person, but I have had something similar happen to me in an altogether different way. Instead of ruminating on an event like you describe, I will have very minor episodes of spontaneous, percolating memories—very old memories-that come out of nowhere like Proust’s madeleine moment, and it’s incredibly off-putting. Does anyone else experience these random memories popping up out of nowhere in the middle of their day?
Honestly, what I’ve found helps is to embrace it and consciously focus on the memory. Try to stop thinking of it as off-putting and let your brain explore the memory and really think about it. I see it as a cool sort of gift where you can relive things to ponder them further, even when the memories aren’t the happiest.
Something I learned in therapy: if you push it off and try to ignore it, it will keep coming back. It’s like your brain has unfinished business, and when you push it away and say “don’t think about that”, your brain starts associating whatever that thing is with negativity. I’m no therapist, and you and I are different people, but it’s possible this is why you see it as off-putting and I don’t.
These have worked for me
1. I have thoughts and I can choose to accept them or not. My thoughts are not my mind
2. Overwhelm myself with positive true thoughts in the same area as negative thoughts so I gorget about the negative ones
I'll use computer analogy for why this is a bad idea (at least it was for me when I did it). That's pushing the problem down the stack and it builds up internal negative pressure. I've done this and it made me even more miserable at the time. You _shouldn't_ mix negative or positive feelings at the same time just like you can't have two distinct things at the same time in the same memory space. In my experience trying to push myself to be positive just made me even more apathetic, depressed and cynical. It just made my internal balance to go to super (-). Having mixed feelings (±) could as well be the definition of deadlock, race condition, halt and catch fire etc. type of thing that happens to us all. It's what leads us to procrastination, dopamine chasing and the effects of those things.
The fix for me was to stop pushing myself and try to find the root for some of my fears, insecurities, previous beliefs. It takes internal work and observation, _NOT RATIONAL ANALYSIS_ to try to reach the roots of your issues. We were emotional beings before we were intelligent. The emotional system is a lower-level system than the intelligent/rational system we employ as modern humans. You should observe your emotional state and when you get there, you'll see that your negative thoughts are really not that of a big deal and they're not you and that they don't define you. If your first point is true and you have understood that, then this step should be relatively easy for you. Once that "clicks" you really do feel a certain feeling of lightness and calmness. It means you've let go of those things that were pressuring you inside. It's not happiness (+), but I'd say it's a pleasant neutral (0) where you take things as they are and have the potential to go on about the things you want.
We react to thoughts because we identify with them. It's the secondary emotions that arise from our reactions to thoughts that cause the problems.
Observing without reaction causes recurring thoughts to go away on their own.
IMO all the self awareness / meditation advice are moot. What works is to find brain hacks. Ways to either break the loop or move the loop to a different task.
- I listen to Youtube videos about plane crashes to get to sleep. Not too good for sleep, but better than ruminating, and it stops at the end of the video (10-20 minutes). I think it smoothes me to hear about people’s death, after a youth being harassed that I can’t let go. Plus aviation shows are always about engineering, it tickles my rational mind, everything is logical, as opposed to humans.
- Obviously, get a psychologist, to output your overwhelming thoughts, criticize your reasonings, and make plans for the future.
Alternatively, people standing against bullying earlier in my life would have been a good way to prevent me from doing all I’ve done, but I’ve learnt you can only expect so much from humans lol, there is an expected level of violence in society, and the only way to prevent bullying is to be a bully yourself. Or that’s what everyone taught me, don’t be a victim, standup for yourself, it’s ok to do x or y, and blah blah blah, i.e. be as savage as the average of society, which is, a lot. A lot savage.
God I wish things were different. Make it change. It’s Easter, let’s hope for a change ;)
In Our Time from the BBC is great for this.
Humans! Ha.
Two Approaches: Grinding and Flow
One approach is to do the task with perfect awareness and focus. We dismiss extraneous thoughts when they arise. We and focus on doing the task perfectly and without unnecessary pain or suffering.
We could call this Grinding, since we still feel effort.
Another approach is to enter a stateless flow. In this state, your awareness and focus and identity are no longer present as you do the task. You neither feel effort nor make errors as you do the task.
We could call this Effortless Effort, or Flow.
Ruminating on occasion is normal. I knew this was going to be some "executive coach" blog before clicking on it. Unless your rumination interferes with your life to the point where it seems pathological or without any good reason, don't fret it, that's the only advice. Humans aren't machines, we're concerned about things all the time, on some nights we don't sleep well.
Especially advice like "paying attention to triggers" seems completely out of place for ordinary people and probably is going to make the average person more neurotic, not less.
An expert in the field would have added to ChatGPT.
I’m torn.
The content seems like a good summary of what you’d read elsewhere in pop-psychology blogs. It stimulates comments here which are themselves very interesting. And the internet isn’t going to run out of space just because articles like this are published.
On the other hand, while the internet may have infinite space, HN is limited to 30 articles on the homepage and I have limited time to look at them. A stale autogenerated summary like this is pushing something more interesting out.
On balance I’d say I don’t want it.
Yes it does. I am getting honestly tired at defending this position on here, I shouldn't have to explain why it is problematic that a comment or submission is AI generated on a forum that tries to maintain a high standard for discussion.
My thinking was even if it is generated I find the comments interesting and engaging more than the article itself - same as with a lot of clearly non ChatGPT HN posts. But I can understand you point, and actually I agree.
To me it is absurd to even ask, and it is mind-numbingly tiring to have to explain why I would rather talk to humans. The fact that an increasing number of posters don't seem to have a problem with that makes me think this platform's quality of discourse will not last long (and the rest of the internet at large, but today I'll tone down my usual dead-internet doomsday predictions)
Where do you draw the line? Is using translate as a foreigner a problem?
For the time being, I don't think you can trust AI generated content; quite often, when I asked chatGPT something I had to be sure of, it made mistakes. Take erroneous citations and references: do you think humans fake them the way chatGPT hallucinates them?
They don't need to 'fake' them; they can just be inadvertently wrong.
I have good, human, friends who tell me erroneous things all the time. I don't take them at face value, I check them. I do this for pretty much nearly every piece of information I get where it's going to inform a decision or point-of-view I'm going to take. Why should we be any less vigilant with a technology like ChatGPT?
2. You know people can just follow up on references in papers, right?
3. You know things don't have to be exactly the same in severity to be comparable anyway, right?
4. I was going to delete my comment because it didn't say anything useful, but by then two hours had passed, so HN didn't let me.
Thanks for being a dick, pal.
Good point, I haven't thought about that. I thought your comment was sarcastic, it isn't apparently. Mea culpa.
Perhaps AI-generated content would be better than human-generated, but I just don't know if I'm ready to read a bunch of articles and perhaps interact with AI chat bots posting comments on hackernews without my knowledge. So hopefully you're human but if not, golden to what is ham semi-you heavily quality them implies of the article though you
I want to keep human and bot generated content separate for now.
That would be a sort of creole language for the web (not that the web had lacked these types of languages in the past), a language that would be very rapidly modifying so that ChatGPT's training wouldn't be able to "catch up" with it.
I guess they will be the ultimate solution to StackOverflow's fight against ChatGPT too. Even Facebook, Mastodon, everyone'll have to use them.
The way out, the author says, is to have a trusted system for storing information outside your brain. In that trusted system, you can write down what needs to be done for each open loop, and that basically closes the loop for your brain and it will stop reminding you of that thing all the time.
I still haven’t gone fully into doing it but my director at work swore by it, and the few times I tried it it was almost like magic. Even if you just pull out a todo app or notebook and for each of the things currently looping in your head, write down only the next step you need to take regarding that open loop (and maybe what the desired outcome is - I can’t remember if that’s in the book or not). For me the first time I tried it it was magical - it turned out there were only 4 or 5 things total looping on my mind at the time and after doing this exercise my mind was basically blank - the reminder system stopped telling me there was something I needed to do for these loops.
I think for it to be sustainable you probably have to really make sure you follow up on the things you write down so that your brain actually trusts you’ll do the things you wrote down, but at least for me it worked really well as a short term hack on a few occasions. I really need to finish reading the book!
It is pretty helpful, but after a while I've seen problems with it getting lost in the back an forth: it forgets tasks, or forgets that they are done. There are definitely issues with large context spaces. After a certain point, I can repeatedly tell it something is done or to remove an item from the list, and it'll apologise but keep the item as "Todo". This is probably one reason why they haven't released the 32k space yet.
Leave the diary open and present on the desk. Ensure you're crossing out things as you work through them. Review previous days as often as you think is necessary.
Between that and having all my meetings in my osx calendar, I generally don't have open loops.
Better write that down!
Part of the problem, I believe, is the nature of deadlines I handle as an adult compared to as a student. As a student, the majority of my assignments were due within a week (if not due tomorrow), so it was easy to track that everything was finished. As an adult, everything is either due by EoD (and therefore has no need of being entered in the system) or due six weeks out (I never did develop the work ethic to beat procrastination, even as an A student).
set a time limit, i create cards on a kanban board, write a subject and dump my task list for either a minute or until i notice myself shifting thoughts.
>setting the book aside and forgetting to look at it for two weeks
then you realize, dump a card reminding you to look at it again in less than 2 weeks. keep a metric on how often you look and reward yourself when you improve your metric. the real magic comes when you're sitting around not doing anything and you look at that todo list... and then work on it
I have found your git activity tracker is a good at-a-glance method of determining your procrastination levels
Even as a student I had this problem. My solution was to write on sticky notes and put them on the wall directly next to my desk. I could no longer forget about them, and could easily remove each one as I completed it.
Like getting my last wisdom tooth removed. I know I have to do it but now for last 4 years I am “getting myself to do it”.
It is open loop but to close it I have to go through the procedure. Downside is - there is never really good time for it.
https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC1963310/
There is a bit more to Getting Things Done than just to do lists.
This plus just do the thing and it's like a super power. I realized I was letting simple things that take little time roll around in my head all day because of procrastination. So now, if I can do something right then - I do it.
Free up your brain power for the next task by completing open tasks.
That said, I haven’t finished the book and truthfully part of the drawback of it is that it’s a bit of a complex system with a lot of moving parts, which has slowed down my desire to really finish it. But it still seems like if you could get past the parts that seem complicated and make it work for you it’d be great.
I've used the first dead simple bit myself to get things I don't like doing much done. I've suggested just that first part (four or five bullet points) to older teenager students for exam revision with some success.
The natural state of the mind is quiet, but it takes a specific type of work to undo the bits that make it unquiet.
The bit that make it unquiet nearly always the same, or rather a variation on the same theme: during our infancy we learn at an emotional level that we must or must not be certain ways (e.g. must be pleasant, never confrontational). We then take these strongly formed patterns with us into the world. These patterns shape our behaviours and mean that, at an emotional level, many situations are not calm. That could be something obvious, like a tension in a relationship, or more subtle, that you overly worry relationships are going wrong when in fact they are in an okay state.
The more we can undo these musts and must nots, the more we can resolve situations to a level that leaves our minds quiet.
I am training to become a psychotherapist and have found that when analysing dreams in a particular structured way can point us to the areas we need to work on to improve the quietness.
I wrote a paper on this method: https://psyarxiv.com/k6trz
It was discussed on HN here: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=19143590
I would also defend to the death that not all brain-loops are actually "resolvable" in any meaningful way. For example (stretching the meaning of “rumination” here), I have music going on in my head 24/7. Always. Most of the time they're in the form of short-ish loops, so they repeat a lot. This in and of itself isn’t so terrible - it can actually be really nice sometimes to "overhear" what's playing and join in, because I can help drive the musical procession forward, since the part of my thinking self that’s aware and has free will can focus on the music, innovate on what’s playing, lead the music around, change the song, etc. But unfortunately, the musical homunculus squatting in my head who's always awake is also never satisfied with a particular song coming to a close - try as I might to resolve a looping refrain by bringing the song to a close, the goddamn "Achy Breaky Heart" fanatic I never invited into my inner world in the first place just presses play again. Finishing the song does nothing! Here, there is no _resolution_; there is only _substitution_. At this point, if I don't just refuse to give up, I now find myself forced to trawl through my catalog of catchy songs to put on, so that the worst DJ ever, who has no ability to read the room, might hear what _I'm_ playing and decide to join _me_, before I can find any relief. It feels incredibly stupid when the current time is a very wide-awake 4am and it's at that point where you just have to say _fuck this, this isn't working, I'll never drift off to sleep with this asshole (yourself) playing this crap I didn't pick (well, actually, you did) on repeat_, so now you have to try to think of _other_ songs that get stuck in your head so that you can try playing them in your head to yourself until one of them "takes," in order to stop yourself from annoying the shit out of yourself and keeping yourself awake - all because you can't ask yourself to just stop (because you won't listen)! - but also (and this is my point here) because there's nothing that actually _resolves_ a musical "thought" in such a way that makes it "invalid," "irrelevant," "solved," etc. and thereby any less likely to just cue up again.
Oftentimes isn't not even a song - it's a jingle. A fucking jingle!!!
Similarly, I've had unresolvable brain-loops deriving from weed paranoia, where I _cannot_ reason with the lizard part of my brain in any way whatsoever. The only thing that works is distraction. This is main reason why weed is just not for me - I hate having to will myself to distraction because any sense of presence is too unsettling.