Ask HN: How did you get yourself out of a rut?

Forcing myself out of the house, even if I'm still just scrolling HN and youtube, not doing it at home encouraged me to get back into networking, getting into networking helped me connect with people, connecting with people made me feel more hopeful. As cliche as it is, getting moving really helps, go for a super long walk, really really breath deeply right into your belly and just walk with purpose (the purpose of just walking), I also just do some weird silly dancing around my kitchen to music (I'd kinda forgotten that can be quite fun). However for me, the most helpful by a mile was psilocybin. That whole "this too shall pass" thing is a real thing. Sending you good luck!

I figured out which industry I wanted to work in (data analytics at first) and just took action. Studied what I needed to for the jobs I wanted, and took classes to advance my skills. The confidence I gained from this was great. I also prioritize outside time and going in long walks when it’s nice out. That’s huge for me.

In-person yoga classes have turned out to be dramatically therapeutic for me, which surprised me because I was already seeing a therapist, and I thought I didn't enjoy exercise at all.

(If ClassPass is in your area, they have a free trial that makes it easy to try out many different studios.)

I have felt a a sort of fog/rut for years now. Figured it was just age. Doc checked my testosterone level and it was super low. About 10% of what you would want.

Started taking T via a gel/lotion and after about two weeks I noticed a significant change in my productivity. The rut/fog was gone, I was working like I did 15 years ago.

Prescription ran out, was out of town, basically missed 10 days. Fog was back, a week on it again and it is gone.

Moral of the story, don't try to "will" your way out - see a doc, make sure everything is working right.

It's always a eucatastrophe[1] for me. Some random event occurs and it gives me something to focus on. Maybe a person shows up in my life, or an event, or an idea. Contrary to common belief, trying to pull myself out through sheer will and habits never worked.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Eucatastrophe

For me I had a little phase of not understanding the despair and hatred I received for forking Audacity at the time. I didn't understand why people would do that, and neither why they decide to have "fun" being a bully online and lying about things that never happened. When /pol/ and kiwifarms came at me, I wasn't sure how to deal with that, especially because most rumors supposedly happened when I was asleep, not even reacting to what was happening at the time.

So it kind of resulted in a phase that you are describing, where I kind of gave up on open source and gave up on doing the things that I loved to do before.

What I can recommend, heavily: shut off your phone, go outside for a couple weeks, no tech, no internet, nobody nagging or forcing you to do anything. And listen. To nature, to the environment, to what you think. Take with you a notebook and a pen, and write down your thoughts. Persist on not going online, and fight the addiction.

Social detox and meditation is much more efficient than one might think, if you have no predefined goal on what you want to do. If your goals are set by external influences, you won't be happy with it.

Best wishes, I understand how hard it can be sometimes. Don't lose your head in things you don't want to do.

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A good psychotherapist could of course provide the environment, support, guidance and relationship to help you find your way through this stuff

This is how I found my way.

Back in 1992 I, ran my own business, my first child was 2 years old, had a wonderful partner and was financially secure.

Just after my child was born I suddenly has access to my childhood years which had been out of my awareness (dissociation). Vivid dreams and memories terrorised me through every waking and sleeping hour of the trauma I experienced as a child.

My friends had always talked about their childhoods, holidays, school friends, memories but for me it was like I did not remember anything of my childhood.

The pressures of life took their toll and overcame me. I became clinically depressed and abandoned my life, partner and child and moved into a squat. I spent the next year just wasting away.

I then found my way into psychotherapy for the first time and over the next 3 years changed my life.

After 3 years of Transactional Analysis I told my therapist that I wanted to do what she was doing. I began my training a therapist and have never looked back.

There is nothing that is written that says life is easy, its just that we need a new set of tools at different times and different developmental stages throughout life.

Beware of toxic definitions of squandering your life.

Even successful people let failures define them and get depressed. Set acheivable goals and celebrate those, trying to do hard things is a constant struggle and is mostly failures for me, you need to see progress. Even if you do not think small things are worth being thankful for it actually helps to train yourself to see positive things.

Sure, I've bottomed out pretty badly twice.

First time was late teen years and early 20s. I experienced some sort of mental illness issue that hasn't recurred since and I never even attempted to get treated or diagnosed. I saw something similar watching the Temple Grandin biopic years later, but it involved shaking fits and banging my head against furniture in my dorm room. I dropped out of college in my first semester and did not immediately try to go back, only registering for classes at community college to keep my dad's health insurance coverage, then dropping them, until the school suspended me and I moved onto another one, being lucky I suppose to live in LA County with a car and having access to endless community college systems.

Within two years, I was working at Disneyland as a show performer when the enterainment division at parks had layoffs. At the very same time, I'd gone so off the rails in personal life that I'd married a woman I met in a writing class on our first date, and she proved to be unpredictable and unstable and destroyed our apartment, so I got evicted at the same time. I was too ashamed to even talk to my parents and lived on the street for a few weeks.

Getting out of that one was just a long, slow climb. I divorced and met a woman on the Internet and moved across the country to be with her. We only stayed together a year, but it was a very positive experience. I lived with her mother, a gracious, lovely person who otherwise lived alone, an Italian immigrant who is still the best cook I've ever lived with and instilled in me in a love of food and cooking that endures to this day. Her father was great to me as well, taking me through rotations of meeting different friends of his in various career fields to get an idea of what they all did, to think of what I might want to do with my own life. I eventually moved back home and just got serious. Went to yet another community college, but this time actually took the classes, spending nearly every minute not in class studying in the library, then worked a graveyard shift job detailing restrooms at Knott's Berry Farm, another amusement park. It wasn't a great life and I still slept in my car pretty frequently, but I was young enough to endure this and I did until I could transfer and eventually graduate and have a real adult life.

The second time was in my late 30s. I experienced severe spinal degeneration and years of treatment made it no better. I herniated discs all the time doing mundane everyday tasks, things like standing up to get out of a car, putting dishes in a dishwasher, attempting to put pants on. Eventually, one day I was getting dressed after showering in the morning and started spasming. This was not like any other spasm I've ever had and I've had them since I was 16. I fell onto the floor, and then every 30 seconds or so, felt like someone had attached jumper cables to my lumbar spine. My entire body seized up each time like every muscle cramped simultaneously. This went on for nearly three days. I've never wanted to shoot myself so badly and even owned a handgun, but I couldn't move to get to it. I didn't go to the ER because I would not have been able to get into a car and didn't want to spend on an ambulance.

Finally, when it subsided, I got a steroid shot that let me move somewhat normally. I'd been working remotely for a boutique hedge fund building machine learning models, but as a contractor, so had no disability or PTO or anything and simply couldn't work. Once I was able to move again, I got a referral from one of my wife's contacts at her job and found a reasonable job pretty quickly, and serendipitously, it required a security clearance but they were willing to sponsor it. This was lucky because that takes a while and I was going to need spine surgery and would be missing some time right off the bat, but they didn't care and started me anyway, granting the leave even though FMLA doesn't require it until you've be...

This could help: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Oblique_Strategies

Doing sport 2 times a week helps me a lot. I also enjoy spending time with my friends on weekends and with my family during work days. All this helps a bit but still sometimes I feel exactly like you do.

You must have something going on to feel better - be it work or studying, well, at least it'll make it easier. You can combine that with psychotherapy, physical activity or SSRIs if needed, and most importantly, keep a good balance with fun activities. You must get rid of your "learned helplessness", by achieving something from your effort, if you feel like you have it.

At one point I had a bookshelf full of books on depression, fear, lack of confidence, etc., so it's impossible to answer such a broad question in a comment, but let me comment on the "high potential" sub-question.

Personally I no longer think that "high potential" is a real thing--I think of it more as of a mental trap that can play part in depression (it definitely played a big part in mine..).

What I mean by that (and it's not my own concept, I'm sure I read about it in one of the aforementioned books), is that the only reality that exists is the one we're living in right now. There are no other realities--unless you're dr Strange of course, I'm assuming you're not :)--where you're better off.

As a consequence, your place in this reality is exactly where you're supposed to be at this very moment.

Note that if you're in a bad situation, I'm not saying you should be happy about it, not at all!! I'm saying that given there's only this one reality that we have, if you are in a given situation then you are in the given situation and no amount of "what ifs" will change the present moment. It will only make you more depressed.

So this is basically acceptance. But the term "acceptance" can mean two different things to different people--I don't mean acceptance as in resignation or passivity ("it is like it is so it's all hopeless"), I mean something like "as of this moment the state of the world is XYZ and there are no other worlds in which I'm in a better place, so there's no point in beating myself that I could have done ABC. If I could have done it back then, I would have done it. If I didn't do it then that was the only possibility back then because as of now we're at the point XYZ, which is a result of me not doing ABC before (and of bazillion other events, so me doing ABC might still not end up the way I would think).").

Tongue in a cheek--I'm sure I could have written it more clearly :))

EDIT: I think I lost the "high potential" thread along the way. So: IMO "high potential" is a mental construct that can easily depress us. "I have/had such a high potential and I haven't used it. I'm a failure". No, stop!! This is a fantasy land!

You might have the highest IQ in the world (or the most flexible muscles, or whatever other advantage there can be). And you've definitely been using your IQ in your decision making, almost by definition. And you made the decisions you made yourself, correct? (I'm ignoring all the external interferences, as we're talking about "high potential".) Which means that you used your potential.

The fact that you can easily generate 100-digit prime numbers out of the top of your head doesn't mean that you can be top scientist just like that, because the scientist also need a reliable schedule, curiosity and tons of other things. And so the "high potential" fantasy is basically focusing on the prime numbers and skipping the other factors.

Now you can beat yourself that you lost you high potential because you didn't get up at 6 day by day to do some research. But that's exactly my point--you didn't because you didn't think it was advantageous to you, or maybe you did think that but you've had undiagnosed ADHD and that made it an order of magnitude harder. So what I'm saying is that your actual potential has been exactly what you observed!

And if you're not convinced, or if you disagree with me, then I have one final question: let's say you really had a high potential and you really failed at it, and you're really a failure (all BS, but let's assume otherwise). Given that the past is gone and you cannot do anything about it, how does beating yourself help you?

    expectedAndMandatoryAchievement(person) = perceivedHighPotential(person) /* - adversity(person) */

It’s probably a bad idea, but having a child seems to have made things significantly better in some ways. I’m still prone to anxiety, but existential fears have been greatly reduced.

I attribute this mostly to lack of time to think too much, so you can probably find different ways to achieve the same effect.

I think somewhere along the way I’ve also become adult enough to realize that there will be days I accomplish absolutely nothing and that that is fine.

I stop comparing myself to the best people in the world, and start comparing myself to the best people in my immediate environment, and I feel a great deal better about myself.

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Drugs (methylphenidate, better known as "ritalin" in the US)

Getting back with friends helped me a lot. I have been living in another country for a while without close friends. Once I have moved to my _real_ friends for a few months, my symptoms have improved a lot.

Forgive yourself.

You're just a person like anyone else. Let go of the idea that you're special. Also forgive yourself like you'd forgive someone else telling you the same story. Don't hold yourself to a standard you wouldn't hold someone else to.

for me i feel totally detached from my work, it's just a means to an end, a salary

as such i find it very difficult to care beyond doing the minimum not to get fired

yet the work gets ever more complex and layered with technical bureaucracy and ever changing landscape of idiots to deal with

i am planning to quit by eoy. thats my solution. life is too short to waste it.

Maybe you need to reframe or challenge your beliefs.

Research emotional biases. A combination of believing in your own specialness, loss aversion and retrospectiveness can be a toxic combination.

The best advice I been given: “when your problems seem overwhelming, get busy solving other people’s problems. Not only will you feel good about helping others and get that feeling of productivity, seeing what others are dealing with will also give you perspective on your own problems and a renewed sense of hope and energy”. Volunteer somewhere. Help a friend out. But try to do it in person where you can get more of that human connection.

one small success at a time. Its a very deep mantra once you start applying in life.

> I'm certain there are many on here who had high potential and feel they've squandered it.

I had the same feeling, I still do to some extent. But genuinely, I also have noticed that society isn't equipped to deal with my high potential. My issue is: I want to stay authentic, I find it (morally/ethically) hard to put on a mask or role. Therefore, I bring my whole self to a job interview.

The problem with that is that: suppose you'd order a coffee at your local coffee chain and you see the barista, and they would bring their whole self while making you that coffee. How would you feel about that? You'd think "I only wanted a coffee, but now I also have to deal with all this extra stuff." That extra stuff may be good or bad, but it's still overhead. Well, that's the problem I'm running into when applying for jobs. No one in my family could've told me that this would happen. It wasn't part of my upbringing. No one at uni told me this. I had to painfully piece this together myself.

A large part of society doesn't fully get integrated into work culture. Some people fix this by being okay with lying or bending the truth. I wasn't. However, the workplace is not the welcoming environment that university is. At university all one has to do is to show that they're ambitious and work their asses off. That's not the case in the workplace. The mechanics are much more tribal, and also culturally different.

I wasn't prepared for it and I wasn't willing to sacrifice my integrity over it. So yea, my high potential simply could not have been utilized.

Also, it shows that markets are inefficient. The market incentives for me to find a job aren't strong enough and the market incentives for companies to find me and use my talents aren't strong enough either. I'm convinced there are companies out there that I'd be able to transform due to a personality/culture/skill fit. However, both me and those companies are having an incredibly hard time finding each other. To be fair, it's not an easy task. And market dynamics sure aren't fully solving it with the "invisible hand" that it offers.

It is what it is. I choose to stay as optimistic as possible.