I think it's useful to try to always assume the best from others:
- If they aren't being friendly this will irritate them in a way they cannot object to too openly.
- If they are friendly it will avoid damage and even start an upward spiral.
When you're not feeling good enough it's sometimes helpful to remember that even people who create negative impacts often get into positions of power and stay there for one reason or another. i.e if they can do something very badly then why are you so worried about whether you are worthy?
Finally, remember that lots of people feel like you - so try to do little things that start them on an upward spiral. The more you do this for other people, the more they will be glad to see you.
I've found that handwritten letters, to my friends and to my colleagues, tends to go a very long way in making someone's day. Something that takes me ten minutes tends to make a difference for a month of more.
As a person with long experiences in trauma responses, I see this sort of behavior pattern everywhere. There’s so much “trust your gut!!” advice when the gut can be deeply wrong especially when it comes to identifying interpersonal threats. We don’t educate people in how to process their feelings in a healthy manner and to differentiate what they feel is happening and how they should behave. This results in anything like saying someone has “bad vibes” to be a reason to exclude them, to actively covering for someone with a known pattern of harming people simply because they are charming.
That's the in media res start to this reply. Let me go back to the beginning: our major societal vices seem to replicate in ways that we feel are benign, but that may feed the mindsets that allow major Bad Things to happen. For example, the polarized racial division that define(d/s) American life echoes in fights over which sports team, which SWE technology, which OS is "better" (or, rather, what is the default from which any deviation is anathema).
Back to Steve. A celebrated visionary who was noted for his "reality distortion field", wherein his perception took precedence over reality. A good thing, because it pushed Apple to innovate in ways most didn't think possible or practical. Right? Well, it should also sound familiar to anyone who has to deal with the headache of "fake news" (both disinformation and the people who proclaim any news they dislike to be so), propaganda, advertising. All of these are forms of putting the gut on a pedestal, and/or are targeted appeals to vibes rather than reason.
It's a bit "Broken Windows", but the apple doesn't fall far from the tree. We should be careful about the heuristics and patterns of thought that we allow to become so common that they fall from consciousness.
(The computer ate my original reply, so I had to do it over, and I had to do it quick so it wasn't as good.)
A key part of breaking cycles for me has been noticing when my default mode network (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Default_mode_network) or DMN is being activated, being able to stop, do a series of 4-2-6 breaths to activate the parasympathetic nervous system and focus on what I'm doing in the present. The DMN is the little chatterbox "daemon" always talking in the background. Learning to consistently notice it and handle it is liberating.
This is not easy, but I've found working on this every day is better than any form of traditional meditation or "mindfulness" work. It truly is work, like exercise, and the point is not how long you do it, but noticing more and more when my DMN engages and I can return to breathing and reactivating my parasympathetic nervous system.
I can't stress enough what a change occurs after two months of focusing on this.
Reminds me of the Buddhist term papañca - mental proliferation, thoughts bouncing off each other, going in different directions and building each other up - it's the opposite of the qualities of calm, collectedness and concentration that are cultivated in meditation.
The second half of the article was pretty underwhelming. It felt like "don't be a judgemental jerk and assume the worst in people"—unclear how that would help me "spiral upwards"?
I got the sense in the latter half, that he/it was trying to promote a work or book; I think there is a link to some follow up material or book he wants to you buy or access.
Wish I was taught things these in school. Psychology, CBT techniques, etc; I have always had a low EQ and learned a lot from basically messing things up, and from having a wife with super high EQ. Perception is reality for all practical purposes, despite the more mathematical wanting it to be not so, simply because the objective can literally not be perceived: each perceiver is subjective. Fixing this input layer would have saved me a lot of CPU churn, so to speak.
You shouldn't try to squash these thoughts, but don't believe you're going to predict much either.
If you're early in your career, do everything you can to set yourself up for financial stability. If you're already there, work on your confidence and your skills. The biggest positive changes in my career came from doing what felt right and not backing down. If there was ever an industry in need of more courage and wisdom, it's software.
Anyway, I also hate when articles try to popularize vocabulary that makes information less accessible. It's not "spiral", but "ruminate".
One thing that has “cured” these thoughts for me is having a child.
I don’t have time to ruminate like I did previously and I’ve also come to understand people better. It’s funny to see how often we all act like toddlers.
It’s also made working in corporate easier, as it turns out telling a toddler no it’s surprisingly good practice for the real world.
All this pattern recognition hypersensitivity in interpersonal relationships stems from the millions of years in which we killed each other (at a much higher rate compared to now) .
Somebody seems out of place in a group = killed or left starving or even sacrificed to the Gods in order to please them and get a good harvest.
Now we are in a different time not every moment is a do or die moment, we also only have a certain amount of "do or die cognition" built within us, when we run out of it , that's bad because we might need it in the future.
The problem is that we used to live very short and violent lives so the rational thing to do was to always be in "do or die" mode until you eventually ran out of luck and died around 30, or if you were lucky 35. And so it is the same happening right now.
At this point I think that people are justified when they load up on alcohol, weed and XanaX (America is one nation under XanaX). As the calming chemicals are used to fight the "do or die" tendencies that harass us daily.
Nietzsche spoke of life at its fullest as an overflow, a strength so abundant it spills into creation, joy, generosity. Christ, too, framed love as something that overflows measure: forgiveness seventy times seven, care that extends to strangers and enemies.
Even the smallest overflow — a kind word, a patient gesture — can ripple outward. One person softens, then another, and soon an entire current of interaction changes course.
In this way, what begins as overflow in one heart can become a tide that lifts many.
The impact of environment on mental spirals is underrated. I see it clearly in two pickup basketball groups I play with: one where people know your name, greet you warmly, and when you make a mistake they tell you how to improve in a way that makes you think "I can do better" not "I suck." The other is critical, lots of punching down and tense.
The key insight: when you're surrounded by people who genuinely create an atmosphere of belonging and want you to succeed, you know their feedback comes from good intentions. This creates a virtuous cycle. You want to take their advice, and once you improve you naturally want to give the same back to others.
Much as I criticize CBT, this is one of the few kinds of problems it seems suited for: there is so much data surrounding and so many inputs for a single negative event that it can be very easy to find a pattern breaker, re-frame, or alternate hypothesis without looking too hard. You just need to train it.
Those sequences of thoughts that makes us spiral down are not fixed, it's cultural thoughts that we learned as we grew up whether from our family, friends or from TV shows, movies, games, etc. We see situations and we learn how other people handle them, we match the thoughts to similar contexts
In LLM/agent lingo, those are prompts that we inject based on similarity search
My first thought when seeing links to studies adjacent to pop psychology is "what are the chances this will replicate?". The replication crisis raised the skepticism bar considerably.
I highly recommend The Intelligence Trap by David Robson, especially the section about our emotional compass. He cites some great research by Damasio and Feldman-Barrett. There's also a great book called The Nature of the Beast that shares evidence of altered neurobiological states (emotions) in other species -- useful to understand ourselves when we're playing on tilt.
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[ 2.7 ms ] story [ 44.6 ms ] threadFinally, remember that lots of people feel like you - so try to do little things that start them on an upward spiral. The more you do this for other people, the more they will be glad to see you.
I wonder if some of this could also be related to https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hostile_attribution_bias where some people simply see ambiguous or benign behavior they don't like and interpret it as hostile.
That's the in media res start to this reply. Let me go back to the beginning: our major societal vices seem to replicate in ways that we feel are benign, but that may feed the mindsets that allow major Bad Things to happen. For example, the polarized racial division that define(d/s) American life echoes in fights over which sports team, which SWE technology, which OS is "better" (or, rather, what is the default from which any deviation is anathema).
Back to Steve. A celebrated visionary who was noted for his "reality distortion field", wherein his perception took precedence over reality. A good thing, because it pushed Apple to innovate in ways most didn't think possible or practical. Right? Well, it should also sound familiar to anyone who has to deal with the headache of "fake news" (both disinformation and the people who proclaim any news they dislike to be so), propaganda, advertising. All of these are forms of putting the gut on a pedestal, and/or are targeted appeals to vibes rather than reason.
It's a bit "Broken Windows", but the apple doesn't fall far from the tree. We should be careful about the heuristics and patterns of thought that we allow to become so common that they fall from consciousness.
(The computer ate my original reply, so I had to do it over, and I had to do it quick so it wasn't as good.)
This is not easy, but I've found working on this every day is better than any form of traditional meditation or "mindfulness" work. It truly is work, like exercise, and the point is not how long you do it, but noticing more and more when my DMN engages and I can return to breathing and reactivating my parasympathetic nervous system.
I can't stress enough what a change occurs after two months of focusing on this.
If you're early in your career, do everything you can to set yourself up for financial stability. If you're already there, work on your confidence and your skills. The biggest positive changes in my career came from doing what felt right and not backing down. If there was ever an industry in need of more courage and wisdom, it's software.
Anyway, I also hate when articles try to popularize vocabulary that makes information less accessible. It's not "spiral", but "ruminate".
I don’t have time to ruminate like I did previously and I’ve also come to understand people better. It’s funny to see how often we all act like toddlers.
It’s also made working in corporate easier, as it turns out telling a toddler no it’s surprisingly good practice for the real world.
Somebody seems out of place in a group = killed or left starving or even sacrificed to the Gods in order to please them and get a good harvest.
Now we are in a different time not every moment is a do or die moment, we also only have a certain amount of "do or die cognition" built within us, when we run out of it , that's bad because we might need it in the future.
The problem is that we used to live very short and violent lives so the rational thing to do was to always be in "do or die" mode until you eventually ran out of luck and died around 30, or if you were lucky 35. And so it is the same happening right now.
At this point I think that people are justified when they load up on alcohol, weed and XanaX (America is one nation under XanaX). As the calming chemicals are used to fight the "do or die" tendencies that harass us daily.
Luckily I have found a spiral going the other way now to get out of it.
Even the smallest overflow — a kind word, a patient gesture — can ripple outward. One person softens, then another, and soon an entire current of interaction changes course.
In this way, what begins as overflow in one heart can become a tide that lifts many.
It is the way.
The key insight: when you're surrounded by people who genuinely create an atmosphere of belonging and want you to succeed, you know their feedback comes from good intentions. This creates a virtuous cycle. You want to take their advice, and once you improve you naturally want to give the same back to others.
Reminds me of this Simon Brodkin video perfectly capturing startup energy: https://www.youtube.com/shorts/q_FmhWARJ7Q
In LLM/agent lingo, those are prompts that we inject based on similarity search
My first thought when seeing links to studies adjacent to pop psychology is "what are the chances this will replicate?". The replication crisis raised the skepticism bar considerably.