From learning new topics & skills, to learning how to network, to learning the dynamics of how an organization and how to navigate various relationships, to making well-reasoned and effective decisions, my mind often feels like mush, totally blinded to the realities of the world. I feel I've been stuck both cognitively and emotionally at a late-teen stage. Poor emotional regulation, difficulties with thinking in nuanced details, constantly flying at 1000 feet.
The older I get with no improvement, the more it feels my goals keep drifting farther away. I want to get fit, I want to read more, I want to develop skills, I want to build relationships, I want to be an entrepreneur. These are things many of my colleagues have been working towards for years. It feels like I just wasn't given the playbook, and worse, am incapable of piecing one together.
Have any of you dealt with this? Any advice? Are there coaches that can help?
On a high level, what's going on in your life may not be considered the best by some "social standards", but it's not necessarily "bad".
You can start by checking if your desires are in line with the standards, or if you would rather have a more "unconventional" way of being, accept it, and try to find ways to work and relate to people from there.
The next part is that a lot of what you see as the problems are skills and you can learn them.
* Emotional regulation is a skill, it has to be learned and practiced.
* Concentration is a skill; some meditation practices are a way to develop it.
* Thinking is a skill; "real" thinking can be difficult and uncomfortable, especially at first.
* Building coherent models of reality is an advanced skill and requires thinking, modeling, verification, self-reflection, and other skills.
* Being a successful entrepreneur is a very advanced skill, requiring all of the above and much more.
Next, you can define your skill learning priorities and decide for which skills you can use some help from professionals and which skills you can train yourself.
If you do your work and come back to the same topic in a year, you will have more experience and better understanding. Identify what you're missing and keep going. Eventually you will be in the much better state.
Good luck!
There might be some combination of drugs and therapies that could help some or all of those conditions. It doesn't work for everyone, but if you have never tried the mainstream approach, it might be worth a shot.
If you can start to see small improvements in some of those areas, then you can build other practices on top of them and keep improving those skills.
There are also many alternative modalities (doctors of naturopathic medicine, for example) with different approaches, if you prefer. You can try multiple providers/modalities until you find one that works for you, if you can afford it.
Best of luck to you! 40 here, and my life's also a mess, but I have no neurological/biological excuses lol, just my own personal failures. Hopefully you'll find some helpful approaches once you start looking.
Trauma disorders, not to put too fine a point on it, fuck up your memory something fierce. CPTSD in particular can cause emotional flashbacks, where you're not audiovisually experiencing the prior trauma, but your brain is playing back the emotions. Thus, the emotional dysregulation.
I would strongly echo other people's comments here about therapy, a big benefit to me. I've always seen it as something with no stigma - you are just adding tools to your mental toolbelt. There is a good book by Pete Walker on complex PTSD; it may be worth a buy to see if it sounds familiar to you.
I also would suggest to you this: one of the best slogans I've ever heard is that we don't see other people's films, we see their highlight reels. You may have 100 different places you want to go. You may think everyone is going to each of their 100 different places.
But be kind to yourself. Believe it or not, it's not just an emotionally kind idea, it's a good one from a productivity viewpoint. If you're attacking yourself, you're putting yourself into fight-flight mode, and that redirects a lot of blood flow towards the more reactionary, less cognitive parts of your brain. Higher-order thinking is actually easier when you are not attacking yourself.
Hope this is helpful.
Beyond that, though, three things that have been Big in helping me build my mental capacity (and they’re all deeply stereotypical, but):
1. Sleep - more than anything else, consistently getting 8+hrs of sleep improves my cognition and consequently my productivity and my mood. I spend a lot of effort on sleep hygiene (dim red light and no screens at night, bright light or sun in the morning), but a couple days of good sleep are irreplaceable.
2. Related to 1, cut booze. Mostly because it ruins effective sleep, but also because it’s a depressant and a stand-in for all the other stuff I’m trying to improve for myself. Less booze, better sleep, better mood, better health, repeat.
3. Exercise - I can’t do cardio for shit, but I started doing strength training a while back and love it. It’s a great mood booster - physiologically, you’re basically doing a nervous system reset when picking up a sufficiently heavy thing. It also helps me sleep better, reduces a bunch of weird aches and pains, and makes me feel like a badass.
Again, go see a professional - my therapist’s how I learned all the above - but in the meantime, those three things have been enormous to improving my mood, capacity, and productivity.
Externalize your memory and put it on other people. Here’s what I mean.
My wife calls and asks me to stop at the store and starts telling me a list of a few things she needs me to pickup. I say “Sure I’m happy to help. Can you txt me the list so I don’t forget? I’ll leave it unread to remember to look at it.”
I then read it and mark it unread. Over the next hours before I go to the store the little notification icon will bug me and I’ll go to read it only to realize it’s the grocery list. And then mark it unread. When I leave I’ll go to the store and look at the list while I get things. Then I double check the list and my cart before I checkout. Same with people I work with. “Sure I can send you that report and you shoot me an email so I don’t forget?” I’ll leave that unread or pinned till I do it.
When someone asks me to remind them of something I say “I’d love to but there’s no way I’ll remember to do that.”
I use kanban / trello to organize my work tasks and make notes immediately because I just accept I won’t remember tomorrow.
Once I started doing these things I have way less anxiety about forgetting. I think people rely on remembering stuff way too much. It’s like keeping your money in a pocket with holes in the bottom.
Bonus: remember names by making a big deal about it. “What’s your name?” I then use it several times. And when I forget then I just ask them “What was your name again?” I say the name that comes to mind when I see them “Your name was John right?” If they say “No it’s Steve” then I say “Ah Steve. I was so close!” And we laugh. Honestly they probably don’t remember my name so this whole schtick helps them too.
I was diagnosed with ADHD in my early 30s and things started to turn around. I've kept up the same job for longer than I ever had before, I'm in a long term relationship and I am better able to handle the general ups and downs of life. Things definitely aren't perfect. I still have to handle forgetfulness, distraction, lack of focus and so on, but getting diagnosed helped me immensely.
Talking to medical professionals of all kinds can only help you. Maybe they find some simple, fixable cause. If they don't, you haven't really lost anything.
Basically, we struggle with holding stuff in RAM which corrupts writes to disk.
The effect is more prevalent with auditory inputs vs visual ones[3]; learning this helped explain why I find myself more likely to engage with a lecture or meeting while simultaneously doodling[4].
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[1] https://laconciergepsychologist.com/blog/what-is-working-mem...
[2] https://www.verywellhealth.com/can-adhd-cause-memory-issues-...
With the help of therapists and peers I have been able to figure out how I work and make progress on things I haven’t been able to for much of my life, after dealing with a spate of pretty extreme burnout. There’s no telling what your journey might hold, but I can say with experience that it is possible to figure out what underlies the hangups that have been hamstringing you.
I have experienced similar issues and received medication for [underlying condition], which has helped immensely.
A very powerful method for remembering facts long term is spaced repetition. There's a go-to app called Anki that makes it easy to get started. A good write up on how it works and why is here: https://gwern.net/spaced-repetition
If you want a neat way to help with more "absent minded" type stuff, just associate whatever you're trying to remember with something unusual in your environment. For example say you're driving home and you want to make sure you stop by the store to get milk on the way. If you wear a watch, flip the watch the other way around on your wrist. Now every time you notice your watch you'll immediately think, "oh yeah the milk." If you don't wear a watch just pick something else in your vicinity and arrange it in an unusual way. Every time you see that object you'll immediately recall the thing you don't want to forget.
But on a more practical level, I have found that using a calendar and a notes app (I use Obsidian) has been invaluable for my memory and organisational skills. Also having a daily routine and sticking to it.
Have you checked if you have adhd? In any case, it is always a good idea to get a professional help from both a psychologist and a psychiatrist if you can.
On the other hand, i recently start practicing tai-chi, it helps you to center and ground yourself, might not seem like a direct solution to those problems but definetely helps to have a centered and grounded psychological base to look around and yourself. (And i believe complex nature of the moves trains executive functioning)
https://scottjeffrey.com/center-yourself/ https://scottjeffrey.com/how-to-ground-yourself/
See a doctor: Rule out any underlying medical conditions. Seek professional help: Therapists or coaches specializing in executive function and memory can provide personalized strategies. Develop routines and systems: Use calendars, to-do lists, and reminders to stay organized. Break down tasks: Tackle big goals in smaller, manageable steps. Practice mindfulness: Meditation and other mindfulness techniques can improve focus and emotional regulation. Connect with others: Talking to friends, family, or support groups can be helpful. Remember, you're not alone and there's help available. Start with small changes and be patient with yourself.
But the real suggestion is pick a passion - paint, write, run, write, act.... anything that can motivate you to focus, develop new physical and mental skills, generate lots of dopamine. Mine has always been music, but working on art now. Give your mind and body a different place to go for that part of the day, your brain is learning constantly. Your executive system will thank you.
I discussed my own system here [0].
Personal Knowledge Management helps avoid having to rely on a weak system (your brain), and instead rely on a trusted system.
In it, you can track your goals, vision, plans, progress, lessons learned, and much more.
[0]: https://www.dsebastien.net/overview-of-my-personal-knowledge...
I play golf with this older Japanese guy, he has this super cool aura about him and is amazing at golf even though he is a cancer survivor in his late 70s and is getting a bit frail. He would always say to me "soft, soft". It's crazy how much this works.
The fact you're making this post tells me you're pretty ambitious, you want to achieve things...maybe you're just going too hard but not in the right directions?
I'm relatively successful in tackling my mental health issues and neurodivergence, have been on therapy, medication constantly for over a decade, but when I'm in a particularly bad shape from a depression or attention deficit, I'll actually drop the very things that have worked in the past, even when I'm perfectly aware they help. It's weird and absolutely irrational.
The only advice I can give you, really, based on this personal experience, is to get a third-party to "coach" you into doing the right stuff. Anybody. It can be family, a friend, anyone. If you already have a therapist, most will be likely happy to do it. All you need is someone to hold you accountable for the stuff you know you need to do. That person will keep tabs on you for a few weeks until you follow all the obvious advice here: find a therapist, a psychiatrist, a gym, quit booze, etc. In worst case scenarios, that person can go ahead and schedule appointments for you.
Once you're in therapy and|or medication and|or good habits for a couple months, you'll get traction to do everything else, and with some luck (finding the right professional, the right drug, the right methods is a trial-and-error) you'll build up some momentum quickly and won't need anyone keeping tabs anymore.
Apart from that, you must realize that building a company, or learning hard technical skills can be a huge mountain to climb and lead to all kinds of stresses. It's never as easy as it seems.
Maybe try something lighter, something less challenging? You seem like a good writer. Try writing a blog, LinkedIn articles and posts to grow your reach, curating content and stuff like that. Those are all very helpful and valid ways to engage with the developer community and might give you the confidence boost you need to take it to the next step. Who knows? You might grow the business or skills you want from there!
Allergens can absolutely cause the symptoms you’re describing, and so if you don’t feel better away from continental allergens, you can at least rule them out.
It can get worse with age, annd the coping mechanisms you’ve developed over the years become a you’ve developed over the years become less effective. It doesn’t often get evaluated.
If you weren’t hyperactive as a kid, you may not have been evaluated for ADHD. Your story sound like friends and loved ones who ended up with adult diagnoses. Explore it - worst case you get it ruled out.
You don't need a coach, you need to learn how to 'exercise', and I don't just mean that physically.
You want to run a marathon? You don't just go running as hard and as far as you can, puke, then feel like a failure, and stop trying.
You have to be realistic with yourself and make slow steady improvements in life and understand you're moving towards a goal.
You don't concentrate well? Fine, use pomodoro to force yourself to study for 15 minutes without distracitons and then take breaks.
You're not in shape? Start doing ten pushups in the morning and some air squats.
If you aren't able or willing to pursue a potential diagnosis, you can at least check out some of the channels that deal with A(u)DHD lifestyle challenges and coping/productivity methods. Even if you don't fit the bill for a diagnosis, there's enough crossover that you will probably find them very helpful, as you have evident ADHD traits.
2. Adderall
3. Write a journal/notes
4. Routine
For what it's worth I know how you feel. I had a bad motorcycle accident that left me in the ICU for a week and for which I had to get surgery to get fixed up. Since I had a history of concussions this one was particularly bad and I had trouble focusing for months. I used to have the kind of memory where I could recite sections of my VIN after entering it twice or thrice, and recite it in entirety if done a few more times. I have degrees in Mathematics and Physics with only one class where I took notes (the one I did the worst in). Now I don't have that memory, and it is comparatively debilitating.
I've compensated by using more to-do lists and notes and it has worked a lot better. The hardest part has been sticking to goals. I forget why I set goals which makes it hard to stick to procedures that achieve them. Fortunately for me, my wife is a substantial support, and because my cognitive skill hasn't declined as much as my memory I still get a lot of things done.
Good luck.
Having one or more good friends that will bust your balls when needed, eating right, keeping a journal of your successes as well as thoughts and failures, and much more besides will be needed.
It is too early for me to tell definitively whether it has helped, but I think it has.
Be prepared for this to be a long process.
Also, do everything you can to be healthy.
- Cut out carbs. Start with a month of full keto, then dial it in. The goal is a constant energy level, no feeling sleepy or hungry, no brain fog. Intermittent fasting can help, even just skipping breakfast a couple days a week. This is all achievable, and it’s easier than you think. The goal isn’t weight loss, but if you’re overweight, you will slim down.
- Cut out seed oils. The oils themselves are bad, but also they tend to be plentiful in the absolute worst trash foods.
- Get some kind of exercise every day, and not just aerobic. You need some type of upper body strength development.
- Attend to your posture. Get a stand up desk, and stand more than you sit. I’m a fan of Alexander Technique, which teaches good posture and how to avoid poor use of your body. You can find a coach in your area.
- Attend to your breathing. If you’re mouth breathing, train yourself to nose breath. There’s a good book out now called “Breath” by James Nestor.
These were huge for me.
If you haven't, there's no other drug or behavior that can boost your cognitive abilities without first optimizing those two things.
Seriously, it was a big help and minimal side-effects aside from a bit of aggression, but if you want assertive, you get assertive.
1) First, regulate your interactions with the environment i.e. limit exposure to everything/everybody which could trigger you, put you in a negative frame of mind etc. A good example is to do a "digital detox" in addition to limiting socialization with negative people. Clean up your room, change some decor etc. The idea is to break those cues in the environment which have been detrimental and replace them with something positive.
2) Next start with your Diet; stop all junk food and eat proper home cooked healthy food. Stop eating before you feel full i.e. satisfied but not completely full.
3) Regulate your Circadian Rhythm by following the six steps given by Dr. Satchin Panda in this talk - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fciGNBN0nKM and this talk https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qOXQgyjRm0I Note especially Intermittent Fasting, Sunlight Exposure in the Morning and Exercise in the Evening.
4) The "Gut" (aka The Second Brain) is now known to play a vital role in our Health both Physical/Mental. Massage all the organs in the gut area everyday by doing two special exercises from Hatha Yoga; "Uddiyana Bandha" (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bandha_(yoga)#Uddiyana_bandha) and "Nauli Kriya" (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nauli). Start slow and gentle with these exercises. See Youtube for some demo videos.
5) Your Breath links your Body and Mind (i.e. Psyche) together and hence you need to regulate your breathing. Do the following couple of simple breathing exercises (i.e. "Pranayama" from Hatha Yoga); 4.1) Normal inhalation followed by fast and forceful exhalation with abdomen pulled in, all through the nose; do ten reps 4.2) Do "Nadi Shodana" i.e inhale gently through the left nostril by closing the right nostril and exhale gently through the right nostril by closing the left nostril. Repeat the same but switching sides. This constitutes one set; do ten such sets.
6) Tackle Sleep as if it were a paying job i.e. with discipline and dedication. Satchin Panda's above video already mentions how but to drive the point home, listen to your body and sleep/nap when you feel sleepy/drowsy. Everything else is dispensable but not Sleep.
7) You don't have to go crazy with exercise but should at least be able to take a walk everyday. If you can't go outside walk within your home or building. For better results use a weight vest and/or ankle weights. Since we all spend so much time sitting and staring at a screen do 6.1) Special/extra exercises for Waist/Pelvis/Hamstring/Knee loosening 6.2) Massage your scalp/face/head to balance circulatory function. Everyday exercises should be light which energizes you but not tire you out.
8) The above together should have put your Body/Mind in a equilibrium state where you feel alert/calm and energetic. Now you work on your focus/concentration by reading/studying something from a book (no phone/music/videos and no other distractions). Pick anything you find interesting (trivial/simple/complex/whatever) be it fiction/non-fiction; you are training your mind to focus on one thing for an extended period of time (at least 1 hr). If you don't like to read then do some other activity (eg. crossword/puzzles/whatever) but again fully focused for at least an hour. The idea is to have the mind fully occupied (aka mindfulness) with no other thoughts/distractions.
Persist with the above discipline and you will definitely see some real benefits.
And as for 'coaches', I'd recommend therapy (CBT in particular is good for people with ADHD - speaking from experience.)
Edit: Oh, you do have ADHD, guess I can remove all the 'you should see if you have ADHD' bits.
don't try very hard because you'll probably fail. 0.01% percent improvement every day is enough. read one page, walk 100 meters, ... you get the idea.
never victimize yourself. it's a self fulfilling prophecy.
your problem is that you are unable to fix your problem. if the solution can not come from yourself why not seeking help from others?
> I want to read more Hit up a place of books
> I want to develop skills Choose books that skill you up
> I want to build relationships Consistently reach out to people
> I want to be an entrepreneur You're in good company.
> It feels like I just wasn't given the playbook, and worse, am incapable of piecing one together. Have any of you dealt with this? Any advice? Are there coaches that can help? You're capable. Don't tell yourself you're not. Go and form a plan for yourself, you know yourself best and you don't need anyone else. Be confident.
What you describe is very much how my life was for most of it. There were other complicating factors in my case, but what you describe was part of it. I have significant executive dysfunction by default, enough so that it nearly killed me in the distant past. And while those struggles are by no means gone or trivial (I am in fact writing this post partly to procrastinate on my work!), they are not things that constantly cripple me anymore.
I'm the founder of my own company that, while it may or may not succeed, at least exists under fairly challenging conditions. I don't feel constantly crippled and scared about my ability to handle basic personal growth. I've lost 135 pounds in the last two years. None of these things were possible in the very recent past. So I feel comfortable saying that I have at least somewhat figured out how to overcome some of my innate tendencies.
Everything that follows is just my own personal observations. They're the "view from the inside" of how I feel about it. I'm not an academic expert on mental health, but what experts can give you from the outside I can give you from the inside. I also strongly recommend considering medication if you've never tried it (it was life-changing for me despite the fact that it only worked for a short time), but I can't help you with that one.
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So, let's start with an observation:
> I feel I've been stuck both cognitively and emotionally at a late-teen stage...constantly flying at 1000 feet.
"Constantly flying at 1000 feet" sounds like inattentiveness. You mention elsewhere you have an ADHD diagnosis, and it's worth thinking about paying attention to your life in the same framing that you think about paying attention to anything else. If it's hard for you to focus on school or relationships or other things, why WOULDN'T it be hard to focus on your own life?
As I wrote that paragraph, I was eating my breakfast, and I realized I hadn't been paying attention to the food I was putting into my mouth. I was trying to do several things at once. I consciously stopped writing and took a slow, deliberate bite to try and refocus my attention on my current situation.
And when you struggle to pay attention to your experiences, of course you struggle to learn from them or recall them. It's no different from struggling in an English class because your eyes keep skipping over paragraphs without really digesting them, or struggling in a math class because you couldn't sit down to memorize a few formulae. (I didn't personally struggle with these things, but that's because they interest me. Anything that didn't was borderline impossible.) Or to use a more abstract analogy, it's like trying to read a blurry whiteboard from far away - your experiences are dulled, softened, greyed out, by the fact that you can't fully experience them in the first place. More precisely, that you don't fully experience them in the first place by default.
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> The older I get with no improvement, the more it feels my goals keep drifting farther away. I want to get fit, I want to read more, I want to develop skills, I want to build relationships, I want to be an entrepreneur.
I currently do three of these things: I'm maintaining a diet after massive weight loss (328 lbs -> 196 as of my last measurement), I've developed many, MANY skills in recent years and in recent months particularly, and I am the solo founder of an early-stage startup. I don't do the other two: rarely read and I have few relationships. But I have to often remind myself that getting even this far is actually a pretty extraordinary achievement. Most people could not do what I do, and even I couldn't have done it in the very recent past. (I'm not even sure I can do it NOW, but I can at least take a reasonable stab at it.)
So the first piece of advice I'd give you is to stop thinking of these things as easy in the abstract. Being an everyday functional human being is already very hard. Losing weight ALONE was a major challenge for me. Growing in my career ALONE was a major challenge for me. And that's normal.
Most people have vices they will never overcome. That's not a horrible failing on their part. It's just the nature of being a human being at all. If you've got a job, a few close friends, keep your home in order, and are basically happy with your daily life, you're doing better than the vast majority of people! EVERYONE has the equivalent of those leftovers in the back of the fridge that you'll totally get to any day now.
All that being said, there's nothing wrong with wanting to do better than the average and to be more than you are. So how can you do that?
Well, for one, your goals are (a) scattered, (b) big, (c) vague, and (d) have ill-defined success criteria. And that's a recipe for killing motivation, even in neurotypical people:
- Because they're scattered, your efforts to get started get distributed across all of them. Rather than roll one boulder up a hill, you're trying to roll five boulders up five hills simultaneously.
- Because they're big, they seem insurmountable and difficult. And the difficulty of a task tilts your motivation towards inaction. "Start a company" was a gigantic impossible task for me six months ago. But "figure out what I think we should sell and get a working website up" was more manageable.
- Because they're vague, it's even harder to connect with concrete actions. You already have trouble focusing on something. But right now you're trying to focus on something that shifts and changes and morphs every time you look at it.
- Because they have ill-defined success criteria, you can't connect with the potential rewards of the action. Note the way you phrase it: you want to "be an entrepreneur", not "found a company". You want to "get fit", not "BE fit". Your thoughts are focused on the task and the challenges of it, not on the rewards at the end. That's a key problem with executive function, which we'll get to more in a moment.
Note that I am not saying "you're doing it wrong" or "you're screwing up and it's your fault you're not acting". This advice is more akin to "you're trying to build muscle but there's no protein in your diet". Your motivation, which is weak by default, is not being fueled with the things that it needs to have in order to work.
That isn't a personal or moral failing on your part. It's a problem with your environment (which I will argue includes your existing thought patterns that you're not consciously enforcing), not with "you", and it's fixable as an environmental problem without you being any less you.
(continued in a comment, this post is too long for HN)
And if your memory problems do not have genetic or other physiological causes, do physical exercises and try diets. If a keto-like diet does not work, try a carbo rich one.
Practice meditation.
Stop striving to hit other people's targets. Find what makes you you.
B. Remove strong dopamine stimulants from your life (if any) at least for a little while. Dopamine is powerful, but desensitizing. Your brain likes a balance of ups and downs - extreme ups cause everything else to be perceptually lower. This perceived lower outlook often then increases the very need for the thing creating the high, causing a vicious cycle. Alcohol and Porn are the big ones where, anecdotally, you can notice significant changes in your outlook after a month of fully abstaining. Other people may need to cut back or remove Video Games and excess Food for a while. What is important though is that dopamine is dopamine, your brain can get it from many places, so be careful to remove and not replace.
C. Consider your spiritual life. I’m personally Catholic, and will always strongly recommend and beg that you begin investigating that (as I’m showing my bias here); but if you are not at peace with God (or even whatever you honor), it will mentally eat at you. Dante’s Inferno may have demons consuming humans in Hell - but the mental anguish from a guilty conscience will eat at you in this life.
D. When you know there’s nothing seriously wrong with you (therapy); have your mind mentally balanced (removing strong stimulants); and believe yourself to be in a spiritually good place (no nagging conscience); efforts to exert your will or follow guides to becoming more ordered and focused will, in my opinion, have a much higher likelihood of success as the serious boulders in the road will have been removed.