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.
I think a big part of maturing professionally is how I’ve gotten a better handle on not trusting my gut.
He’s here to take my job. The VP knows him and hired him directly. There’s so many signals each week that say I’m right. He’s trying to take credit for a decade of my hard work. He’s going to exploit me and everyone will believe him and not me.
The more likely reality: he’s new here and I’ve been here for a decade. He was hired to basically replicate my success for sibling teams. He’s feeling immense pressure. He’s probably terrified of failing. I probably make him feel threatened. My defensive posture makes this worse. I give him signals all the time that he probably reads as me wanting him to fail or not liking him.
> He’s here to take my job. The VP knows him and hired him directly. There’s so many signals each week that say I’m right. He’s trying to take credit for a decade of my hard work. He’s going to exploit me and everyone will believe him and not me.
I think this is where it’s important to know yourself.
If you’re having a constant stream of anxiety inducing thoughts and light paranoia, learning how to silence those and introduce a more objective view is helpful.
It can be taken too far, though. I had a friend whose company was showing all of the warning signs of financial problems, yet he was on a positivity kick and chose to substitute an “everything works out eventually” mentality. Instead, he rode the company right into their inevitable shutdown and missed some good opportunities to take other jobs along the way because he thought ignoring his gut was the right thing to do.
Yeah absolutely! That’s the challenge I’ve seen with anxiety (I’m painting with a broad brush here, and I’m no authority). You can’t outright disable the smoke alarms because sometimes they’re actually working.
The problem is my rate of correct anxiety guesses is too high. I'm right a lot. But the ridiculous stuff sneaks in as well. This leads to me being constantly anxious and just hating my professional life.
Keep an anxiety log for a few months. In my experience, this feeling of correctness is a retrospective impression that relies heavily on confirmation bias, and in reality is nowhere near that high. Either way, a concrete log will confirm or deny it.
If it's truly correct, then I'd say it's not anxiety and that you're probably more attuned to subtle cues. You can learn to pay conscious attention to these cues, evaluate them, and decide strategically if you want to act on them. The idea is to keep your advantage without the negative emotional reaction.
If it's not that accurate, having proof can help you internalize that you're just going through some particular emotional process, without according it any undue weight. Having let go of that, you can start picking up mechanical tricks for anxiety management, like breathing techniques.
You can respond positively here and still hedge your bet. The attitude of "The Show Must Go On" is perfectly reasonable, but you can still circulate your resume and take steps to avoid burnout. You can even ask a potential opportunity if they will be interested if you do your best to save the other company and join later. But you need to be grounded in reality.
Even then shutting down the anxiety and paranoia is a good idea. You're friend didn't know how to process reality without feeling negative, maybe. But it can be done and they should probably learn how to do that. A calm & confident person can still see if a problem is coming, the real world isn't determined by the feelings of the viewer but by actual evidence present and a very fine sliver of basic world modelling. The difference is a well grounded person will just note it and feel pretty good about the whole process as they brush dust of the resume and start job hunting. Did their best, had a good time, made some friends, exciting new opportunities, etcetera.
Nobody has to be a pessimist to make accurate forecasts. It doesn't even help. The more your emotions and personality influence the forecast the worse a forecast it is, the future does not rewarp itself because the viewer feels positive or negative.
I've lost count of the amount of times I've been driving to work thinking "oh shit I suck at my job I'm defo getting fired" to then be told " You're doing a good job keep it up"
Other time I think I'm doing a good job when everyone is actually very pissed off at me
This is my every day. "I suck and am worthless; I have no idea why I haven't been terminated yet." And this regularly builds to, "I've never achieved anything in life and, based on my past performance, likely never will. I probably should just kill myself now to save the trouble of doing it later."
I have two young kids though, so my wife thinks that's a bad idea.
>He’s here to take my job. The VP knows him and hired him directly. There’s so many signals each week that say I’m right.
In one situation for me, this was exactly the case. It became more clear as each week went by. It was a "bro" situation between the C-level and the new hire, and the C-level was a "30 under 30" so there was a high school mentality about it.
You can almost never win this situation, I have seen funded startups literally go under because of friendships and incorrect attribution of who did what.
Ah, the true sign of a "team" - credit being apportioned...
The problem isn't one person being over looked, it's that one person is being praised.
We all make contributions that we feel are noteworthy, but when someone else's noteworthy contributions are highlighted we then have to ask, why theirs and not ours.
I’ve also never worked at a company that had enough long term thinking to train up replacements. Several would only cut entire departments and/or only do layoffs.
So there isn’t really any point about worrying about being replaced (:>
But you also get disasters when people ignore their gut/"vibes" and try to do the "rational" thing based on more easily nameable evidence. The gut is not reliable, but it is a model that's trained on a lot of data and shouldn't be ignored. As usual there are no easy answers.
Frankly being able to point to specific behaviors that trigger vibes is something that comes easily to me as someone who, again, had to work through identifying trauma responses and reacting accordingly. It’s just a skill I think more people would benefit from picking up. I respond really poorly when I don’t feel understood, but I also have a tendency to be vague on details so it is normal for me to get misunderstood. Recognizing this is useful because I can use my gut frustration as an indicator, not that whoever I’m talking to is a moron or are intentionally bad faith misinterpreting me, but that I may be lacking clarity.
Some people are indeed very good at picking up on specific behaviours. The problem is that requires maturity and self reflection, so it's not something you learn in a day.
The lesson here should be that trusting one's gut might be good, but acting out on it is bad. Don't spiral. Don't confront the possible charlatan. Don't react on your gut the second after the other guy stole your credit.
Strong agree that more people should have that skill. I've tried to get better at it but I'm probably still pretty meh.
I think good emotional regulation stuff like this would ideally be taught starting in kindergarten along with "don't hit your classmates". Maybe in a better time.
The problem with "trust your gut" is that intuition is a skill which needs to be honed. Everyone has different levels of blockage to being genuinely in touch with their "gut". I think some people are more naturally synthetic thinkers and already live in a more body-guided way. For the walking heads like most of us here on HN we would need to spend time re-learning how to calibrate the body to give precise readings. So the advice needs some caveats.
> There’s so much “trust your gut!!” advice when the gut can be deeply wrong especially when it comes to identifying interpersonal threats
This actually happened to me professionally.
A while back I was in a spot where for lots of good reasons, I decided I needed a 'reboot' of things; I had spent a lot of time listening to 'bad advice' and getting screwed over by bad people, and tried to have a bit of a clean slate.
I wound up finding a new job and a new girlfriend. Both felt weirdly stressful but I foolishly assumed it was just because they were both new things to me and I was 'out of my comfort zone'.
What I later discovered, was the 'boss' at my new job had actually tried to boast to certain people that he was trying to get me to quit, because he never wanted me on the team (He was sick for my first interview, and the person above him told him to hire me.)
He'd pull stunts like 'Oh I'm just gonna pull you into this meeting about our Crystal reports' (I was still new there and only knew that 'they existed in our legacy system') and then at the start of the meeting just a couple hours later, tried to claim that I was the subject matter expert on our Crystal reports! (Thankfully, I did use what little down-time I had, to do some basic digging and was able to at least speak to a potential solution to the problem they wanted to solve...)
Any time I wanted to get moved off the 'Support team' I would be given some seemingly impossible task to 'prove myself'; at one point I created a modular UI Frontend where different modules as ASP.NET MVC sites had backend logic to 'register' themselves with the main presentation service; thus delivering the ask, but he never even looked at a line of code.
And yeah they were a 'charmer'. He hoodwinked the whole board with empty promises and when he was finally found out (toxic behavior and all, the whole dev team had a 'group therapy' session or two b/c most folks were mistreated by him on some level) none of the code he produced ever really saw the light of day...
Couple that with partner that wasn't real, just using me to not feel lonely while her actual partner was busy in premed...
I suppose the irony being, that 'fake' partner is now a technical writer, working at the same company where the director who got me hired at the job with the shitty boss... (No that 'partner' didn't work at the place I worked at, but it's still just crazy as far as coincidences...)
I had opposite issue, again and again. "My gut" was actually correct again and again. I ignored it because if trying to be rational and objective. The gut was a lot more correct at identifying interpersonal threats and bad actors.
The problem is identifying what is your gut vs what your brain was wired for over years and decades. It echoes, and this is an abstraction, consumption and how consumption made those crowds and individuals feel, that appeared as having the most fun.
a) you don't see the doses of amphetamines and other drugs these people have consumed or are consuming regularly
but more importantly:
b) your gut is disturbed by what you eat and your brain by what you perceive, which is filtered by your personality and current/past state of mind. just a little of x and it's hard to trust a feeling that comes from a place of mixed feelings, some of which are more obviously bad than others, some of the time.
c) your peripheral gets your subconscious goat all the time.
people are bad at trusting their gut. highly intelligent and or educated people have especially grand issues with that because intuitive heuristics and intuitive cognitive logic get such a bad reputation while nobody ever (I'm exaggerating) speaks or writes about exceptions to common fallacies and bias, which are usually only presented to justify gears of economic rationales that tend to completely ignore side-effects (because "long-termisms", even before the term was coined), often enough due to irrationally high thresholds of relativity aka p-values.
And you start of with
> There’s so much “trust your gut!!” advice when the gut can be deeply wrong
and end on
> 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.
on purpose. Please, at least try to sound non-manipulative.
> 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
In recent years the workplaces I’ve been involved with have actually had significant efforts to educate people to make overcome bias and override their feelings in decision making, but to be honest the outcomes haven’t been great.
When you forbid people from trusting their judgment and demand they use a shared, objective criteria instead, the grifters take notice. They become better at emulating the objective criteria than anyone else, because gaming that system is their goal and you just laid out a perfect roadmap for them to do it.
Of the few very bad hires I’ve had to work with in the past decade, all of them came with “bad vibes” during the interview process. They all had the right credentials and knew how to say the right things, though. I wouldn’t be surprised if they had taken classes or paid for coaching for how to act during interviews because what we got once they were hired didn’t match anything on their resume or that they claimed during interviews.
There is no spot on the committee-approved hiring rubric to indicate that the candidate was rude in their communication and left everyone feeling drained and in a bad mood after every interaction, though. But hey, they aced those LeetCode problems and they have FAANG on their resume, so we must focus on that.
I clearly remember people being scolded for raising concerns about the person that didn’t fit into the rigid hiring criteria that were supposed to eliminate our biases.
In most cases in my adult life where I’ve been instructed to ignore my gut feeling and substitute some alternate metric as my decision making guidance, I’ve regretted it later.
Interesting. My criteria for hiring is the opposite of this, and I wouldn't have it any other way. If someone is technically great but combative in an interview, they get a "strong no" from me.
It's nothing big: especially in a startup environment there will be situations where the product manager or another engineer will ask for changes, and I expect people to adapt, or at least to argue the merits of the change. Make no mistake, a lot of those people WERE able to adapt code-wise, and I was even praising them, but they did the changes while voicing concerns and complaining that my task "was badly defined, since I didn't tell them about possible future changes". One got very annoyed verbally at a small requisite change, even though we still had only used half the scheduled time, but we were almost finished with everything.
And this HAS paid off! This happened rarely, but more than half of those people got incredibly triggered by their rejections, and a couple even demanded talking directly with the team. In one case, we had someone coming to the company. It wasn't a lot, I must have interviewed over 200-300 people there, but it was significant.
> Interesting. My criteria for hiring is the opposite of this, and I wouldn't have it any other way. If someone is technically great but combative in an interview, they get a "strong no" from me.
Well exactly, but that’s “vibes” in the view of an extremely objective hiring criteria that tries to eliminate anyone’s subjective feelings about the candidate.
I actually never prescribed a specific solution on how to accomplish the education at all. This is kinda what I mean when I say folks don’t really process their feelings they act like what they feel is happening is true.
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.)
Here is a yardstick that I've found works really well when trusting your gut: if and only if your general mood is peaceful and calm can you trust your gut.
Otherwise it doesn't work, that knowledge is blocked off by anxiety, fear, anger etc.
I agree, but this does not work for people who are unable to get into a peaceful and calm mood ever, and they aren't even "trusting" their gut, their view of the world is completely distorted by it.
Again, not disagreeing. But if you're suffering from (C)PTSD, that advice might backfire by packing on even more feelings of shame onto your shoulders.
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.
Anyone who has a restless dog in the evenings can see DMN create anxiety.
Like many dogs, my dog gets bored and looks for something to bark at. He scans out the window like I scan social media. He’s got extra energy that seems to need to go somewhere, and that somewhere seems to be looking out the window scanning for threats, barking, sounding meaner than he actually is.
It’s like he manufactures anxiety out of nothing else to do.
Great analogy with your dog. I noticed that when I’m doing the washing up, my DMN, for some reason, takes me to ruminate negatively about my relationships, and I constantly have to return my attention to something else. No wonder I’ve come to loathe it and let my dishes pile up.
I find it can be a great tool for creativity, but needs to be directed or at least given some task to chew on; then I can close my eyes in a half nap and all kinds of interesting associations and ideas bubble up.
EDIT: that said, the default mode network should not be unjustly demonized. Its purpose is crucial for reprioritising our goals based on what is important to us at any given time, and the problem with modern living is that we never have enough idle time to ourselves, always distracted by our smartphones, and in the long run it is easy to lose sight over what drives us forward. A simple exercise, harder than it should be for most, is to be idle yet undistracted for 30 minutes. You’ll soon get into a “big picture” view of your life, what is missing, what you wish for yourself; into a kind of goal-oriented view that only kicks in in this mode.
To add to OP: It helps to pay attention to physical symptoms of stress as well. If you find yourself constantly tensing your jaw or your shoulders, take a moment to focus on relaxing your muscles and breathing. Overcoming negative automatic responses just takes consistent practice.
To further add: being able to acknowledge an emotional response to a situation and then divert to objective thinking is a superpower. Sustained anger, sadness, or fear will quickly drain your energy and leave you unable to act with intent.
To add to this further, I've had great success following The Body Keeps Score; seeing it as a repository of past stress and trauma.
As part of this, I've been able to locate and work through stress and trauma activations in my body, where normally they'd cluster around my head and never actually get resolved.
Every time I go to work out, I pay attention to what areas of my body arent responding, are activating oddly; and I'll work to strengthen the foot-to-neck paths. It started with a back injury and has resulted in me finding I needed wide foot shoes and changing my entire stance, posture, complex movements, etc.
Some times I find it odd that I don't have that daemon running around yelling, because hes now activated in my body, and all I have to do is stretch.
> The 4-2-6 breathing technique is a calming exercise. First, inhale slowly for four seconds. Then, hold your breath for two seconds. Finally, exhale slowly and steadily for six seconds. This technique helps by making your exhale longer than your inhale, which is a signal to your body to relax. It's particularly useful when you need to settle your mind before sleep or if you're feeling anxious and need to steady your nerves.
And there's nothing magical about that set of numbers. I learned it as 5-5-5-2, but in the end it's about using a pattern to regulate your breathing, and - I believe - to force your attention to counting breaths, an anxiety-free exercise, allowing it to lower its hyper-vigilant awake state.
In addition, being able to see when dopamine is rising, feel it, label it, engage your parasympathetic nervous system and know that a dopamine spike is temporary, the craving for TV, news, sweets, social media, or other will pass... that is liberation.
We live in a culture where everything is gunning for our attention, trying to engage a dopamine loop and "relieve" us from dealing with often important but difficult emotions just below the surface. We have to train ourselves to deal with this environment.
It's not mindfulness training, it's how to operate our brains in the modern world.
Do you have any resources that helped you come to that realization or helped make habitual the process of noticing your DMN is being activated?
I've had varying success with other "mindfulness" work and meditation like you have mentioned that I employ to help with spinning/stewing/looping thought cycles. The process you are describing seems like it may be more helpful so I'm curious to learn more and try something new.
I read it as just being context dependent. The "Tripoli" vs "Triple E" bit in the article was to me another anecdote on how we resolve ambiguity based on what we have in our mind's stack at the moment:
> A friend once told me of an ingenious class demonstration that helped her begin to understand this process. A professor split the class in two and then spoke to the first half alone, telling them of his love for travel and a recent trip to Libya. Next, he spoke to the second half about shopping and how hard it was to find the right size shoe. Last, he brought the class together and said a single word. He asked the students to write it down. Students in the first group wrote, “Tripoli.” Those in the second wrote, “Triple E.”
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.
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.
Agreed. I don’t really have an inner monologue, so articles like this do not resonate with me. I occasionally think these sorts of thoughts, like “hmmm- should I have perceived that interaction differently than I did in the moment”.
But unlike my partner, there is no little voice that keeps following that thought. The thought comes, is considered, then moved onto something else.
Honestly, having a negative inner voice sounds miserable. But I agree, by not really considering these sorts of things, I do think I wound up with a low EQ. Working on addressing it, but it takes time and experience
90% of the time it works and you don’t notice the system because you only see the good result. This is the rare event when it breaks and you do notice.
It remains as “Why”. Same for “Why not?”. Maybe it needs at least three words. Though “Why why why“ also isn’t changed. Apologies to anyone who came across my experiments.
I think the shortened title is actually better; the essay doesn't go deep into "why", it's more a set of observations illustrating that we do in fact spiral.
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.
Yes, this is important. Learning that other people are not objectively rational or perfect in any way, but in fact emotional and many times just as misguided as my own shortsighted, anxiety-inducing thoughts. So many things about people (others _and_ myself) become reasonable when you look at them in this light.
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.
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.
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.
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.
> The more you do this for other people, the more they will be glad to see you.
That's not a given. That's the rational response on their end, but not only is no one perfectly rational, but some people are very, very irrational.
It can sometimes[1][2] be the case that the best option is to be among those who don't attract any attention at all.
Separately:
The spiraling described in this post is worth consideration, but equally worthy are the odd disparities in professional life (or life in general) and the negative consequences that aren't the result of internal forces like paralyzing self-doubt.
Consider an article that starts just like this one, except it focuses on the different consequences experienced by Dawn who is regularly forgiven for things like tardiness and mistakes in her work in contrast to more severe outcomes for Hila, who after arriving late—perhaps for the first time, even—is perceived to be fucking up because that's in her irresponsible nature[3]—even if a sober, objective analysis would reveal that Hila is actually exceeding the expectations one would have for any employee (and her transgressions are well behind the line of courtesy that is extended to Dawn)—for no other reason than Hila being younger or newer to the company.
This can result in a similar spiral of defeat, but it's a kind of defeat by external forces rather than self-defeat.
1. Depending on your environment/experience, you could even say "very often"
It was a bit glib but what I notice is that small things cheer me up. Good interactions with other people in quite trivial matters send me on a good trajectory.
I also notice that whatever negativity I output to someone, it tends to come back to me multiplied by 1.5. So e.g. with my wife, I find myself in some argument but I can trace it back to some smaller negative thing I said earlier. ie. we get into arguments and the arguments spiral. So IMO it is important to remember to be just slightly more upbeat and neutralise things at the point where they are small if possible.
This doesn't work with people who see you as a threat in some way. They are not appeased, but not everyone is like that and you can at least try to make life reasonable for some being - even if it's just your dog.
Yes. Questions like, "Should I work to 'do little things' intended to put a given coworker 'on an upward spiral'?" versus, "Should I insulate myself from or minimize blowback where any action is going to be received poorly because my incompetence is considered a foregone conclusion?" and, "How long should I remain at an organization where such things occur?" are all things that relate to decisions that are in your control—or at least might be, with enough of a forward-looking defense early on (if you fall into the group of those unlucky enough to need to ponder them).
Really, though, my comment was rather more intended to prompt introspective questions like, "Even if I'm personally on safe footing at my company, is it afflicted by this sort of thing in a way that impacts people who aren't me? And what can I do to either neutralize or minimize the negative consequences those people might experience?" (Readers who are paying attention will notice that this is a form of creating spirals of success for others, as the person I responded to recommended, but an emphasis on the fact that the targets of those actions can be people who have a lesser standing, rather that aiming laterally or upwards.)
I generally agree but in my experience it becomes more complex when you cognitively decide on one thing (to assume the best), but don’t feel it. How you feel influences how it’s going to happen in major and in subtle ways. Your return friendliness may be received as snarky or sarcasm, or at least detected as insincere, to give one example.
In my experience you can only moderate your response. So you cannot pretend to be very pleased when you're 90% certain that someone has been very rude to you but you can avoid an immediate angry response and give yourself time to think. I sometimes feel that I'm being put upon at the moment and then later think perhaps not - I'm always glad when I manage to restrain my initial reaction.
The main point I wanted to make is that if you only assume the best but don’t actually believe it, you might think their reaction to your (pretended) niceness “confirms“ your assumption, where what it actually confirms is your belief and not their original intent.
Yes, knowing anything for certain is difficult so it's worth always harbouring a little doubt about both positive and negative conclusions.
Dzerzhinsky liked to say "Trust but verify", and I think that sums it up - if you look at the world entirely from his point of view, head of the Soviet secret police, then you will suspect everyone and if you act on that you'll end up hurting lots of innocents in amongst the people who would really do you harm. If you're in a situation where this is a good survival strategy it seems to me that one should try to leave rather than play the game.
In general it seems like you should assume the outcome you want, so you behave in a way that's conducive to that outcome manifesting itself. If you always assume the worst, then you might protect yourself from rejection but you end up pushing people away.
So assuming someone is friendly even if they aren't is a better strategy than assuming everyone dislikes you.
For people trying to sit more in the middle, forcing a neutral balance is another way to do it: don't burn bridges and don't over assume people's feelings.
That means not one-upping snark, but also keeping a healthy default distance with people you deal with professionaly.
One might miss some genuinely heartful exchanges, but it also makes the worst times way easier to deal with. Compensating for keeping too much distance is usually easy, repairing problematic exchanges is way way harder.
Indeed, the default should be to assume the best intentions of people. Also, people can have a bad day and be snarky. Next meeting they might as well be friendly.
Staying positive and not letting (potential) negative feedback derail you, works like magic in the long run.
If someone is really picking on you, or they genuinely disapprove of your work, you will find out in due time.
> 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?
How does this help? For all you know they’re a snarky something to people beneath them but not to the right people. Or they are snarky to everyone but they’re the kind of pointy-elbow go-getter that got to where they are inspite or even because of that. Are any of these alternatives good?
And now they get to be snarky to people beneath them and only get a tiny sliver of pushback because the mind of the underling has all the time to ruminate but no incentive to push back with anything.
If all you care about is success then it's not a help is it? If you have some standards though, then you can tell yourself that the price of standards is that you cannot rise in a corrupt hierarchy and you probably wouldn't enjoy it if you did.
I think this is the kind of reason people emigrate from countries where they feel dominated by whatever group was in power to various newer countries where it is still possible to make their fortune.
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".
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
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.
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.
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.
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.
I think it should be said that abusive, toxic work environments can creep up until you're in one, and hearing things like people should just have a tough skin. What would be a more specific way of putting that?
I don't know what point you are trying to make. One person's "abusive and toxic work environment" is another's "results driven organization". If you find yourself in a role that doesn't fit you, or you have serious doubts about, my best advice would be to leave. You are unlikely to meaningfully change the culture. In fact it will probably achieve the opposite of what you want, and people will dislike you for trying.
Places that use the phrase "results driven" as a rationalisation for toxicity are never about results.
If a place is really "results driven", then people should be expected at EVERY level, to communicate like adults, to be matter-of-fact and to have clear expectations. All this is the opposite of a "toxic environment".
Without exception, places that require employees to have "thick skins" are actually "ego driven" with results be damned, because they are led by bosses with the emotional maturity of a preteen. Results 100% take a backseat to ego here.
Just for the record, no young person should see this mindset as correct. This is how patterns of abuse are perpetuated. I agree with the sentiments of just leave, but the rest of this is a machismo fantasy. The results driven teams you are describing are still abuse.
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.
I think a big part of maturing professionally is how I’ve gotten a better handle on not trusting my gut.
He’s here to take my job. The VP knows him and hired him directly. There’s so many signals each week that say I’m right. He’s trying to take credit for a decade of my hard work. He’s going to exploit me and everyone will believe him and not me.
The more likely reality: he’s new here and I’ve been here for a decade. He was hired to basically replicate my success for sibling teams. He’s feeling immense pressure. He’s probably terrified of failing. I probably make him feel threatened. My defensive posture makes this worse. I give him signals all the time that he probably reads as me wanting him to fail or not liking him.
> He’s here to take my job. The VP knows him and hired him directly. There’s so many signals each week that say I’m right. He’s trying to take credit for a decade of my hard work. He’s going to exploit me and everyone will believe him and not me.
I think this is where it’s important to know yourself.
If you’re having a constant stream of anxiety inducing thoughts and light paranoia, learning how to silence those and introduce a more objective view is helpful.
It can be taken too far, though. I had a friend whose company was showing all of the warning signs of financial problems, yet he was on a positivity kick and chose to substitute an “everything works out eventually” mentality. Instead, he rode the company right into their inevitable shutdown and missed some good opportunities to take other jobs along the way because he thought ignoring his gut was the right thing to do.
Yeah absolutely! That’s the challenge I’ve seen with anxiety (I’m painting with a broad brush here, and I’m no authority). You can’t outright disable the smoke alarms because sometimes they’re actually working.
That's the difference between functional and disfunctional anxaety. The trick is to figure out which is which.
I am incapable of knowing which is which.
The problem is my rate of correct anxiety guesses is too high. I'm right a lot. But the ridiculous stuff sneaks in as well. This leads to me being constantly anxious and just hating my professional life.
How to fix? Sweet Lord in heaven. How to fix?
Keep an anxiety log for a few months. In my experience, this feeling of correctness is a retrospective impression that relies heavily on confirmation bias, and in reality is nowhere near that high. Either way, a concrete log will confirm or deny it.
If it's truly correct, then I'd say it's not anxiety and that you're probably more attuned to subtle cues. You can learn to pay conscious attention to these cues, evaluate them, and decide strategically if you want to act on them. The idea is to keep your advantage without the negative emotional reaction.
If it's not that accurate, having proof can help you internalize that you're just going through some particular emotional process, without according it any undue weight. Having let go of that, you can start picking up mechanical tricks for anxiety management, like breathing techniques.
^^^ This ^^^
Also, a CBT (Cognitive behavioral therapy) with a professional helps a lot.
You can respond positively here and still hedge your bet. The attitude of "The Show Must Go On" is perfectly reasonable, but you can still circulate your resume and take steps to avoid burnout. You can even ask a potential opportunity if they will be interested if you do your best to save the other company and join later. But you need to be grounded in reality.
Exactly right, but denying that gut feeling and ignoring the signs is not the right choice.
Even then shutting down the anxiety and paranoia is a good idea. You're friend didn't know how to process reality without feeling negative, maybe. But it can be done and they should probably learn how to do that. A calm & confident person can still see if a problem is coming, the real world isn't determined by the feelings of the viewer but by actual evidence present and a very fine sliver of basic world modelling. The difference is a well grounded person will just note it and feel pretty good about the whole process as they brush dust of the resume and start job hunting. Did their best, had a good time, made some friends, exciting new opportunities, etcetera.
Nobody has to be a pessimist to make accurate forecasts. It doesn't even help. The more your emotions and personality influence the forecast the worse a forecast it is, the future does not rewarp itself because the viewer feels positive or negative.
> Even then shutting down the anxiety and paranoia is a good idea. You're friend didn't know how to process reality without feeling negative, maybe.
No, the way to “process” it was to start looking for new jobs, which would have avoided the completely avoidable employment and income gap.
If the friend was ignoring his gut feeling, what objective instruments did he use instead?
If none, wasn't it was just choosing one gut feeling over another gut feeling?
My "gut" is regularly way off.
I've lost count of the amount of times I've been driving to work thinking "oh shit I suck at my job I'm defo getting fired" to then be told " You're doing a good job keep it up"
Other time I think I'm doing a good job when everyone is actually very pissed off at me
This is my every day. "I suck and am worthless; I have no idea why I haven't been terminated yet." And this regularly builds to, "I've never achieved anything in life and, based on my past performance, likely never will. I probably should just kill myself now to save the trouble of doing it later."
I have two young kids though, so my wife thinks that's a bad idea.
>He’s here to take my job. The VP knows him and hired him directly. There’s so many signals each week that say I’m right.
In one situation for me, this was exactly the case. It became more clear as each week went by. It was a "bro" situation between the C-level and the new hire, and the C-level was a "30 under 30" so there was a high school mentality about it.
You can almost never win this situation, I have seen funded startups literally go under because of friendships and incorrect attribution of who did what.
Ah, the true sign of a "team" - credit being apportioned...
The problem isn't one person being over looked, it's that one person is being praised.
We all make contributions that we feel are noteworthy, but when someone else's noteworthy contributions are highlighted we then have to ask, why theirs and not ours.
Good points.
I’ve also never worked at a company that had enough long term thinking to train up replacements. Several would only cut entire departments and/or only do layoffs.
So there isn’t really any point about worrying about being replaced (:>
But you also get disasters when people ignore their gut/"vibes" and try to do the "rational" thing based on more easily nameable evidence. The gut is not reliable, but it is a model that's trained on a lot of data and shouldn't be ignored. As usual there are no easy answers.
Frankly being able to point to specific behaviors that trigger vibes is something that comes easily to me as someone who, again, had to work through identifying trauma responses and reacting accordingly. It’s just a skill I think more people would benefit from picking up. I respond really poorly when I don’t feel understood, but I also have a tendency to be vague on details so it is normal for me to get misunderstood. Recognizing this is useful because I can use my gut frustration as an indicator, not that whoever I’m talking to is a moron or are intentionally bad faith misinterpreting me, but that I may be lacking clarity.
100% this.
Some people are indeed very good at picking up on specific behaviours. The problem is that requires maturity and self reflection, so it's not something you learn in a day.
The lesson here should be that trusting one's gut might be good, but acting out on it is bad. Don't spiral. Don't confront the possible charlatan. Don't react on your gut the second after the other guy stole your credit.
Strong agree that more people should have that skill. I've tried to get better at it but I'm probably still pretty meh.
I think good emotional regulation stuff like this would ideally be taught starting in kindergarten along with "don't hit your classmates". Maybe in a better time.
The problem with "trust your gut" is that intuition is a skill which needs to be honed. Everyone has different levels of blockage to being genuinely in touch with their "gut". I think some people are more naturally synthetic thinkers and already live in a more body-guided way. For the walking heads like most of us here on HN we would need to spend time re-learning how to calibrate the body to give precise readings. So the advice needs some caveats.
> There’s so much “trust your gut!!” advice when the gut can be deeply wrong especially when it comes to identifying interpersonal threats
This actually happened to me professionally.
A while back I was in a spot where for lots of good reasons, I decided I needed a 'reboot' of things; I had spent a lot of time listening to 'bad advice' and getting screwed over by bad people, and tried to have a bit of a clean slate.
I wound up finding a new job and a new girlfriend. Both felt weirdly stressful but I foolishly assumed it was just because they were both new things to me and I was 'out of my comfort zone'.
What I later discovered, was the 'boss' at my new job had actually tried to boast to certain people that he was trying to get me to quit, because he never wanted me on the team (He was sick for my first interview, and the person above him told him to hire me.)
He'd pull stunts like 'Oh I'm just gonna pull you into this meeting about our Crystal reports' (I was still new there and only knew that 'they existed in our legacy system') and then at the start of the meeting just a couple hours later, tried to claim that I was the subject matter expert on our Crystal reports! (Thankfully, I did use what little down-time I had, to do some basic digging and was able to at least speak to a potential solution to the problem they wanted to solve...)
Any time I wanted to get moved off the 'Support team' I would be given some seemingly impossible task to 'prove myself'; at one point I created a modular UI Frontend where different modules as ASP.NET MVC sites had backend logic to 'register' themselves with the main presentation service; thus delivering the ask, but he never even looked at a line of code.
And yeah they were a 'charmer'. He hoodwinked the whole board with empty promises and when he was finally found out (toxic behavior and all, the whole dev team had a 'group therapy' session or two b/c most folks were mistreated by him on some level) none of the code he produced ever really saw the light of day...
Couple that with partner that wasn't real, just using me to not feel lonely while her actual partner was busy in premed...
I suppose the irony being, that 'fake' partner is now a technical writer, working at the same company where the director who got me hired at the job with the shitty boss... (No that 'partner' didn't work at the place I worked at, but it's still just crazy as far as coincidences...)
I had opposite issue, again and again. "My gut" was actually correct again and again. I ignored it because if trying to be rational and objective. The gut was a lot more correct at identifying interpersonal threats and bad actors.
The problem is identifying what is your gut vs what your brain was wired for over years and decades. It echoes, and this is an abstraction, consumption and how consumption made those crowds and individuals feel, that appeared as having the most fun.
a) you don't see the doses of amphetamines and other drugs these people have consumed or are consuming regularly
but more importantly:
b) your gut is disturbed by what you eat and your brain by what you perceive, which is filtered by your personality and current/past state of mind. just a little of x and it's hard to trust a feeling that comes from a place of mixed feelings, some of which are more obviously bad than others, some of the time.
c) your peripheral gets your subconscious goat all the time.
people are bad at trusting their gut. highly intelligent and or educated people have especially grand issues with that because intuitive heuristics and intuitive cognitive logic get such a bad reputation while nobody ever (I'm exaggerating) speaks or writes about exceptions to common fallacies and bias, which are usually only presented to justify gears of economic rationales that tend to completely ignore side-effects (because "long-termisms", even before the term was coined), often enough due to irrationally high thresholds of relativity aka p-values.
And you start of with
> There’s so much “trust your gut!!” advice when the gut can be deeply wrong
and end on
> 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.
on purpose. Please, at least try to sound non-manipulative.
PS: clattering teeth
> 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
In recent years the workplaces I’ve been involved with have actually had significant efforts to educate people to make overcome bias and override their feelings in decision making, but to be honest the outcomes haven’t been great.
When you forbid people from trusting their judgment and demand they use a shared, objective criteria instead, the grifters take notice. They become better at emulating the objective criteria than anyone else, because gaming that system is their goal and you just laid out a perfect roadmap for them to do it.
Of the few very bad hires I’ve had to work with in the past decade, all of them came with “bad vibes” during the interview process. They all had the right credentials and knew how to say the right things, though. I wouldn’t be surprised if they had taken classes or paid for coaching for how to act during interviews because what we got once they were hired didn’t match anything on their resume or that they claimed during interviews.
There is no spot on the committee-approved hiring rubric to indicate that the candidate was rude in their communication and left everyone feeling drained and in a bad mood after every interaction, though. But hey, they aced those LeetCode problems and they have FAANG on their resume, so we must focus on that.
I clearly remember people being scolded for raising concerns about the person that didn’t fit into the rigid hiring criteria that were supposed to eliminate our biases.
In most cases in my adult life where I’ve been instructed to ignore my gut feeling and substitute some alternate metric as my decision making guidance, I’ve regretted it later.
Interesting. My criteria for hiring is the opposite of this, and I wouldn't have it any other way. If someone is technically great but combative in an interview, they get a "strong no" from me.
It's nothing big: especially in a startup environment there will be situations where the product manager or another engineer will ask for changes, and I expect people to adapt, or at least to argue the merits of the change. Make no mistake, a lot of those people WERE able to adapt code-wise, and I was even praising them, but they did the changes while voicing concerns and complaining that my task "was badly defined, since I didn't tell them about possible future changes". One got very annoyed verbally at a small requisite change, even though we still had only used half the scheduled time, but we were almost finished with everything.
And this HAS paid off! This happened rarely, but more than half of those people got incredibly triggered by their rejections, and a couple even demanded talking directly with the team. In one case, we had someone coming to the company. It wasn't a lot, I must have interviewed over 200-300 people there, but it was significant.
> Interesting. My criteria for hiring is the opposite of this, and I wouldn't have it any other way. If someone is technically great but combative in an interview, they get a "strong no" from me.
Well exactly, but that’s “vibes” in the view of an extremely objective hiring criteria that tries to eliminate anyone’s subjective feelings about the candidate.
I actually never prescribed a specific solution on how to accomplish the education at all. This is kinda what I mean when I say folks don’t really process their feelings they act like what they feel is happening is true.
I know you didn’t prescribe anything, but I provided a real-world example from experience to demonstrate what happens in the real world.
Ideas always sound better in the abstract when you avoid talking about what happens when they’re implemented.
Steve Jobs.
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.)
Here is a yardstick that I've found works really well when trusting your gut: if and only if your general mood is peaceful and calm can you trust your gut.
Otherwise it doesn't work, that knowledge is blocked off by anxiety, fear, anger etc.
Never once has this failed me
I agree, but this does not work for people who are unable to get into a peaceful and calm mood ever, and they aren't even "trusting" their gut, their view of the world is completely distorted by it.
Again, not disagreeing. But if you're suffering from (C)PTSD, that advice might backfire by packing on even more feelings of shame onto your shoulders.
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.
Anyone who has a restless dog in the evenings can see DMN create anxiety.
Like many dogs, my dog gets bored and looks for something to bark at. He scans out the window like I scan social media. He’s got extra energy that seems to need to go somewhere, and that somewhere seems to be looking out the window scanning for threats, barking, sounding meaner than he actually is.
It’s like he manufactures anxiety out of nothing else to do.
> Like many dogs, my dog gets bored and looks for something to bark at.
This is the best analogy I've heard about social media, hope to remember it to use when needed.
Great analogy with your dog. I noticed that when I’m doing the washing up, my DMN, for some reason, takes me to ruminate negatively about my relationships, and I constantly have to return my attention to something else. No wonder I’ve come to loathe it and let my dishes pile up.
I find it can be a great tool for creativity, but needs to be directed or at least given some task to chew on; then I can close my eyes in a half nap and all kinds of interesting associations and ideas bubble up.
EDIT: that said, the default mode network should not be unjustly demonized. Its purpose is crucial for reprioritising our goals based on what is important to us at any given time, and the problem with modern living is that we never have enough idle time to ourselves, always distracted by our smartphones, and in the long run it is easy to lose sight over what drives us forward. A simple exercise, harder than it should be for most, is to be idle yet undistracted for 30 minutes. You’ll soon get into a “big picture” view of your life, what is missing, what you wish for yourself; into a kind of goal-oriented view that only kicks in in this mode.
> that said, the default mode network should not be unjustly demonized.
Yeah, scrolling tiktok is pretty good at silencing the DMN. This practice does not seem to be particularly beneficial.
This comment actually made me read it slower as it progressed, because I felt a feeling of awe welling up of how insightful it is.
Holy shit.
You’ve just changed my perspective on my life (and my spaniel’s).
Thank you Doug.
To add to OP: It helps to pay attention to physical symptoms of stress as well. If you find yourself constantly tensing your jaw or your shoulders, take a moment to focus on relaxing your muscles and breathing. Overcoming negative automatic responses just takes consistent practice.
To further add: being able to acknowledge an emotional response to a situation and then divert to objective thinking is a superpower. Sustained anger, sadness, or fear will quickly drain your energy and leave you unable to act with intent.
To add to this further, I've had great success following The Body Keeps Score; seeing it as a repository of past stress and trauma.
As part of this, I've been able to locate and work through stress and trauma activations in my body, where normally they'd cluster around my head and never actually get resolved.
Every time I go to work out, I pay attention to what areas of my body arent responding, are activating oddly; and I'll work to strengthen the foot-to-neck paths. It started with a back injury and has resulted in me finding I needed wide foot shoes and changing my entire stance, posture, complex movements, etc.
Some times I find it odd that I don't have that daemon running around yelling, because hes now activated in my body, and all I have to do is stretch.
> but I've found working on this every day is better than any form of traditional meditation or "mindfulness" work
This is mindfulness work, what you just described.
For anyone wondering like me:
> What is the 4-2-6 breathing technique?
> The 4-2-6 breathing technique is a calming exercise. First, inhale slowly for four seconds. Then, hold your breath for two seconds. Finally, exhale slowly and steadily for six seconds. This technique helps by making your exhale longer than your inhale, which is a signal to your body to relax. It's particularly useful when you need to settle your mind before sleep or if you're feeling anxious and need to steady your nerves.
Source: https://www.calm.com/blog/breathing-exercises-for-anxiety
And there's nothing magical about that set of numbers. I learned it as 5-5-5-2, but in the end it's about using a pattern to regulate your breathing, and - I believe - to force your attention to counting breaths, an anxiety-free exercise, allowing it to lower its hyper-vigilant awake state.
In addition, being able to see when dopamine is rising, feel it, label it, engage your parasympathetic nervous system and know that a dopamine spike is temporary, the craving for TV, news, sweets, social media, or other will pass... that is liberation.
We live in a culture where everything is gunning for our attention, trying to engage a dopamine loop and "relieve" us from dealing with often important but difficult emotions just below the surface. We have to train ourselves to deal with this environment.
It's not mindfulness training, it's how to operate our brains in the modern world.
Do you have any resources that helped you come to that realization or helped make habitual the process of noticing your DMN is being activated?
I've had varying success with other "mindfulness" work and meditation like you have mentioned that I employ to help with spinning/stewing/looping thought cycles. The process you are describing seems like it may be more helpful so I'm curious to learn more and try something new.
Your mind doesn’t, though. It’s still ruminating. Was that snark in my boss’s voice? Were they talking about me before I logged on?
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.
I read it as just being context dependent. The "Tripoli" vs "Triple E" bit in the article was to me another anecdote on how we resolve ambiguity based on what we have in our mind's stack at the moment:
> A friend once told me of an ingenious class demonstration that helped her begin to understand this process. A professor split the class in two and then spoke to the first half alone, telling them of his love for travel and a recent trip to Libya. Next, he spoke to the second half about shopping and how hard it was to find the right size shoe. Last, he brought the class together and said a single word. He asked the students to write it down. Students in the first group wrote, “Tripoli.” Those in the second wrote, “Triple E.”
I'm intrigued where this story originated. What country measures shoes in bra sizes?
Anyone who does crosswords in the US knows that "triple e" is a shoe width.
EEE is is a shoe size modifier in the U.S. - triple wide.
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.
Reminds me of this Simon Brodkin video perfectly capturing startup energy: https://www.youtube.com/shorts/q_FmhWARJ7Q
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.
Agreed. I don’t really have an inner monologue, so articles like this do not resonate with me. I occasionally think these sorts of thoughts, like “hmmm- should I have perceived that interaction differently than I did in the moment”.
But unlike my partner, there is no little voice that keeps following that thought. The thought comes, is considered, then moved onto something else.
Honestly, having a negative inner voice sounds miserable. But I agree, by not really considering these sorts of things, I do think I wound up with a low EQ. Working on addressing it, but it takes time and experience
I also have an inner monologue more like how you describe it. I always thought it was related to afantasia, but not sure.
Original title: “Why We Spiral”; mangled by HN to the incomprehensible “We Spiral”.
FYI HN does edit out the "Why", but OP can go in and modify the title after submitting.
Maybe HN needs an "if num_words > 3" before the "delete leading Why". Or maybe an "if char_count > CHAR_LIMIT" before the "delete leading Why".
Or just don't. What a near guaranteed way to mangle the meaning of a title.
90% of the time it works and you don’t notice the system because you only see the good result. This is the rare event when it breaks and you do notice.
That makes one wonder what happens if one was to submit a story titled "Why"
It remains as “Why”. Same for “Why not?”. Maybe it needs at least three words. Though “Why why why“ also isn’t changed. Apologies to anyone who came across my experiments.
I found the shortened one accurate and also thought provoking
I think the shortened title is actually better; the essay doesn't go deep into "why", it's more a set of observations illustrating that we do in fact spiral.
I figured it was going to be about WeWork circling the drain. Thankfully it wasn't.
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.
Wait to you get a teenager. I measured my skin. A good 100 microns thicker.
This made me laugh, I can’t wait.
Yes, this is important. Learning that other people are not objectively rational or perfect in any way, but in fact emotional and many times just as misguided as my own shortsighted, anxiety-inducing thoughts. So many things about people (others _and_ myself) become reasonable when you look at them in this light.
Note: Having a child in order to cure your depression or anxiety is a terrible idea.
Do you have any children?
No because having a child in order to cure your depression or anxiety is a terrible idea.
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.
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.
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.
[dead]
I think it's useful to try to always assume the best from others:
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.
> The more you do this for other people, the more they will be glad to see you.
That's not a given. That's the rational response on their end, but not only is no one perfectly rational, but some people are very, very irrational.
It can sometimes[1][2] be the case that the best option is to be among those who don't attract any attention at all.
Separately:
The spiraling described in this post is worth consideration, but equally worthy are the odd disparities in professional life (or life in general) and the negative consequences that aren't the result of internal forces like paralyzing self-doubt.
Consider an article that starts just like this one, except it focuses on the different consequences experienced by Dawn who is regularly forgiven for things like tardiness and mistakes in her work in contrast to more severe outcomes for Hila, who after arriving late—perhaps for the first time, even—is perceived to be fucking up because that's in her irresponsible nature[3]—even if a sober, objective analysis would reveal that Hila is actually exceeding the expectations one would have for any employee (and her transgressions are well behind the line of courtesy that is extended to Dawn)—for no other reason than Hila being younger or newer to the company.
This can result in a similar spiral of defeat, but it's a kind of defeat by external forces rather than self-defeat.
1. Depending on your environment/experience, you could even say "very often"
2. See also <https://hn.algolia.com/?query=copenhagen%20strikes%20again&t...>
3. See also <https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ultimate_attribution_error>
It was a bit glib but what I notice is that small things cheer me up. Good interactions with other people in quite trivial matters send me on a good trajectory.
I also notice that whatever negativity I output to someone, it tends to come back to me multiplied by 1.5. So e.g. with my wife, I find myself in some argument but I can trace it back to some smaller negative thing I said earlier. ie. we get into arguments and the arguments spiral. So IMO it is important to remember to be just slightly more upbeat and neutralise things at the point where they are small if possible.
This doesn't work with people who see you as a threat in some way. They are not appeased, but not everyone is like that and you can at least try to make life reasonable for some being - even if it's just your dog.
Of course it’s not a given as to any particular person, but regardless, it’s the right presumption.
And yes, of course there are things outside your control. Is that really “equally worthy” of your consideration and energy?
Yes. Questions like, "Should I work to 'do little things' intended to put a given coworker 'on an upward spiral'?" versus, "Should I insulate myself from or minimize blowback where any action is going to be received poorly because my incompetence is considered a foregone conclusion?" and, "How long should I remain at an organization where such things occur?" are all things that relate to decisions that are in your control—or at least might be, with enough of a forward-looking defense early on (if you fall into the group of those unlucky enough to need to ponder them).
Really, though, my comment was rather more intended to prompt introspective questions like, "Even if I'm personally on safe footing at my company, is it afflicted by this sort of thing in a way that impacts people who aren't me? And what can I do to either neutralize or minimize the negative consequences those people might experience?" (Readers who are paying attention will notice that this is a form of creating spirals of success for others, as the person I responded to recommended, but an emphasis on the fact that the targets of those actions can be people who have a lesser standing, rather that aiming laterally or upwards.)
I generally agree but in my experience it becomes more complex when you cognitively decide on one thing (to assume the best), but don’t feel it. How you feel influences how it’s going to happen in major and in subtle ways. Your return friendliness may be received as snarky or sarcasm, or at least detected as insincere, to give one example.
In my experience you can only moderate your response. So you cannot pretend to be very pleased when you're 90% certain that someone has been very rude to you but you can avoid an immediate angry response and give yourself time to think. I sometimes feel that I'm being put upon at the moment and then later think perhaps not - I'm always glad when I manage to restrain my initial reaction.
The main point I wanted to make is that if you only assume the best but don’t actually believe it, you might think their reaction to your (pretended) niceness “confirms“ your assumption, where what it actually confirms is your belief and not their original intent.
Yes, knowing anything for certain is difficult so it's worth always harbouring a little doubt about both positive and negative conclusions.
Dzerzhinsky liked to say "Trust but verify", and I think that sums it up - if you look at the world entirely from his point of view, head of the Soviet secret police, then you will suspect everyone and if you act on that you'll end up hurting lots of innocents in amongst the people who would really do you harm. If you're in a situation where this is a good survival strategy it seems to me that one should try to leave rather than play the game.
In general it seems like you should assume the outcome you want, so you behave in a way that's conducive to that outcome manifesting itself. If you always assume the worst, then you might protect yourself from rejection but you end up pushing people away.
So assuming someone is friendly even if they aren't is a better strategy than assuming everyone dislikes you.
For people trying to sit more in the middle, forcing a neutral balance is another way to do it: don't burn bridges and don't over assume people's feelings.
That means not one-upping snark, but also keeping a healthy default distance with people you deal with professionaly.
One might miss some genuinely heartful exchanges, but it also makes the worst times way easier to deal with. Compensating for keeping too much distance is usually easy, repairing problematic exchanges is way way harder.
Except this is self sabotaging, because you have no deep connection you stay alone and feel alone, ultimately spiralling.
You can be more open outside of work than in the professional space and not be alone!
Indeed, the default should be to assume the best intentions of people. Also, people can have a bad day and be snarky. Next meeting they might as well be friendly.
Staying positive and not letting (potential) negative feedback derail you, works like magic in the long run.
If someone is really picking on you, or they genuinely disapprove of your work, you will find out in due time.
> 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?
How does this help? For all you know they’re a snarky something to people beneath them but not to the right people. Or they are snarky to everyone but they’re the kind of pointy-elbow go-getter that got to where they are inspite or even because of that. Are any of these alternatives good?
And now they get to be snarky to people beneath them and only get a tiny sliver of pushback because the mind of the underling has all the time to ruminate but no incentive to push back with anything.
Just more Polyanna HN job advice.
If all you care about is success then it's not a help is it? If you have some standards though, then you can tell yourself that the price of standards is that you cannot rise in a corrupt hierarchy and you probably wouldn't enjoy it if you did.
I think this is the kind of reason people emigrate from countries where they feel dominated by whatever group was in power to various newer countries where it is still possible to make their fortune.
Okay that’s fine.
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".
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
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.
> It sure can seem like magic that...
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.
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.
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.
It is the way.
A spiral of thinking about a spiral of thinking.
There is another spiral I have experienced where I felt fine, dandy, crushing it but perceptions of me were spirialing!
Luckily I have found a spiral going the other way now to get out of it.
[dead]
[flagged]
I think it should be said that abusive, toxic work environments can creep up until you're in one, and hearing things like people should just have a tough skin. What would be a more specific way of putting that?
I don't know what point you are trying to make. One person's "abusive and toxic work environment" is another's "results driven organization". If you find yourself in a role that doesn't fit you, or you have serious doubts about, my best advice would be to leave. You are unlikely to meaningfully change the culture. In fact it will probably achieve the opposite of what you want, and people will dislike you for trying.
This is a false dichotomy.
Places that use the phrase "results driven" as a rationalisation for toxicity are never about results.
If a place is really "results driven", then people should be expected at EVERY level, to communicate like adults, to be matter-of-fact and to have clear expectations. All this is the opposite of a "toxic environment".
Without exception, places that require employees to have "thick skins" are actually "ego driven" with results be damned, because they are led by bosses with the emotional maturity of a preteen. Results 100% take a backseat to ego here.
Just for the record, no young person should see this mindset as correct. This is how patterns of abuse are perpetuated. I agree with the sentiments of just leave, but the rest of this is a machismo fantasy. The results driven teams you are describing are still abuse.