Refactoring emotions

Key Takeaways

my name is Judah I'm having a terrible time with focus right now which has made me somewhat dread coding if I'm waiting for an inform somebody or even if their main environment is taking a bit to spin up I'm completely onto another thought opening tab switching context on myself oh man like this is a bit of a thing where I that I am working on with my I have been but the first thing that I started working on with my therapist procrastination and like jumping into all the things and I'm not sure if it's gonna be the same for you but as i as i started working with eliminating these behaviors like the tabbing back and forth and going to looking at the YouTube videos or whenever like a task was boring stuff I realized that I had like this enormous sad of avoidance behaviors going or not yes dad but like smoking and coffee and a bunch of other things that I won't go into and all of them were there because I had trouble facing uncomfortable emotions well it let's let's talk about this a little bit let's talk about feelings a little bit and hiding hiding feelings with different different emotive different behaviors I was thinking about talking about this today so like if more than a year back I started reading this book called I don't want to talk about it which talks about hidden hidden depression especially in in men where the eighty percent of suicides or something like that is committed Mayan or 70 and a lot of men are depressed and his don't really know that they're depressed and just end up killing themselves or self-medicating with alcohol and he treats a lot of addiction especially cocaine and alcohol and also abuse in relationships with which he compares a lot to substance abuse because it's something that you get addicted to you you realize that you have this switch that you can turn on like violence or threatening someone with suicide which gives you absolute control or a reality which gives a huge dopamine rush and relief so it's it has a similar behavioral factors as alcohol or cocaine on your when it comes to habituation but anyway when when he starts treating these these addictions or these behaviors and starts removing them from from people's lives and you stop stop using cocaine or or alcohol or in my case cigarettes or procrastination a lot of things start bubbling up because these these behaviors that you have are there to protect you from feelings of boredom or stress or annually or like whatever like any kind of uncomfortable emotion and now suddenly you've you start feeling horrible because you don't have these behaviors to protect yourself and you you have to start dealing with all these things inside and it's these the brain dumps that who was it in chat that mentioned them was in chat I mentioned them sorry for for missing it oh yeah underscore func so yes it has been instrumental in allowing me to break my emotions up into a more sophisticated vocabulary I used to use this app called tracker on my phone I see as a mood tracker where you rank your mood your current mood or not like from awful to great and as I've been doing this removing my mood my avoidance behaviour of my therapist has taught me to call them I've realized that I can feel like it's not it's too a simplistic view of you my mood like because I can feel I can feel yes I can feel positive emotions and negative emotions in parallel so I can feel optimistic about life but I can at the same time feel anxiety or I can feel happy but I can also feel a sense of meaninglessness at the same time they can reside in my in my space because norm like P and I think it's because my I I've just gotten better at segmenting the emotions in my in myself it's not actually that I feel different emotions I have just gotten better at at seeing them and having words for them structured for them and well that hell allowed me to start I'm starting to might work on viewing emotions as not as good and bad or positive or negative or constructive and unconstructive when even in the term of uncomfortable or comfortable I am trying to I met this friend at a party the other day and he's he has since I met him and I got a new one about a year ago or something he has always been this super happy super positive beacon of light in every social context but swamps in like this he's like I don't know like he always walks in like I got a queen you know like it's just mmm life of the party no and I asked him is this a real thing and do you are always are you are you a happy person like and he said I guess I am I am like I generally am I like I I feel feel good generally all the time but I haven't always been that way I used didn't used to be that way and he said that this was a lot of work and a lot of therapy behind it to get to this point and he said this interesting thing that he I like all emotions I love all the motions I love I love anxiety I love I love depression I love I love sadness I love happiness I love anger and whenever some of these emotions come along ago it's now yo that's interesting hello emotion and then you maybe you want to talk with someone else about your emotion like processes and that's a good discussion point you know and he had such an interesting interesting view of emotions and positivity and like constructive space between himself and emotions that I found really interesting and I had this insight when I was going going to the gym a couple of yes before yes before going off for winter winter break and he has had best gym session ever where is like was managed to get completely engrossed in it and it wasn't more comfortable than it usually yes yesterday the feelings of being in the space the the exertion like a pain in the muscles I just embraced it I just embraced it said yes to it just found myself in this baseball yes I like this sort of like I felt that sort of feeling like that felt that when I've been engrossed in a personal project where I just sit up like late in the morning my brain is so fried and from sleep deprivation that I cannot almost think myself but it's there it's good you know like it's cool like we're overtired and we're working on the thing and we were like still super happy about it like it's it's so uncomfortable but it doesn't matter because it's a it's a not discomfort that we have chosen so yeah that's that's what I've been thinking that that emotions are I've been escaping a bunch of emotions especially especially the emotion that I of beginner's mind beginner's mind of facing new challenges I've been so with being a like a senior level programmer it's it's so rewarding in the sense that you don't really need to do anything else in your life ever like you you're now appreciated for this and you will there will be infinite demand for this and you can get infinite confirmation from this and that has made me so overly confident or comfortable that I have a hard time learning completely new things like vihari trying to get into dancing and climbing and both of them are give this sense of dread because I mean you and I not like it desire I want to be good at it immediately this this pressure and pushing myself past that like getting more excited about learning something new is is hard and I realized that I instead of facing emotions like that I have just been escaping them like either by avoiding them in the case well I can just go away from the climbing center or go away from them that's that's um not calmness son very easy way to avoid it or we'd work you know like if you don't wanna like push yourself to something because it's like change its boring and you should probably get rid of this task or like yeah I don't know you should do something about you mean change in your life or push through it or whatever but you don't read you don't want to do that so yes like oh go outside have a cigarette or go go have a cup of coffee because that might result in somebody standing by the coffee machine and then you can have a chat and then you can forget about your troubles yeah so yeah yeah yeah oh we called yeah also getting into dancing and climbing that's awesome yeah to Janna well it feels like at the moment there's a lot of developers having this kind of bad mood yeah yeah no I'm certainly not certainly not uh lonely alone in this I feel alone in this but I'm not I know I'm not actually my name is Jude um this is super relevant to meet you thank you for sharing I'm going to pick up that book - is it the one by Terence rial yes it is it is also I think this is relevant to a broader set of people than developers and maybe an interesting place to take the channel from time to time after all what is psychology and self-examination of not engineering it's like a refactoring it they had one self holy yes holy yes my like since I started the first thing that struck me after starting to see it seeing my my therapist it was like it was very much like that feeling like her fracturing your mind we started like drawing out my habit loops on a whiteboard and he started explaining like how loop's and anxiety parents work and cognitive behavioral therapy and acceptance a CT and how you how you build tooling to start breaking these loops this is not quite refactoring it's more like training in URL network here's like okay this didn't quite work now we have to like do these training runs but yeah it's it's certainly very similar to software development in a way like you have to reprogram your mind and you cannot because it's not like configuration you can't quite do it because you can't quite just tell it what you do you have to teach it over and over over again because the brain doesn't the brain doesn't trust one input it needs needs a lot so yeah yeah that's something that I've been strong feelings or breaking feelings impart in understanding understanding feeling sets and getting rid of my addiction so and avoidance behaviors and dealing with the emotions that come up which come up is like it's just some bad feeling and then breaking it apart into what is these what are these different feelings and what is like what do I need to do about them what is it that I need to do what is it that I need are the changes I need to do in my life or are there reframing of expectations that I need to do so yeah sure yeah so that's that's feelings let's move on to something else see what people have been writing