Few things that helped me:
- SSRI - I couldn't recover from the mental pain I had constantly until I visited a doctor and got put on those medications; it didn't solve my problem, but it lowers the pain to manageable levels
- removing distractions - I unsubscribed from every newsletter I could that I didn't absolutely care about, I uninstalled or muted most of the non-urgent push notifications, etc. Not being pinged every 5 minutes lowered my stress levels and made it a bit easier to focus.
- writing - when I find it hard to go forward, I'll dump my thoughts into a text file, and then I'll keep "talking to myself" in the editor; at some point this turns into a list of "next steps" I need to take, and as I'm starting to go through them, things move forward and I feel better
- acceptance - accepting I have those issues and working with them, rather than obsessing over how broken I am, reduced my stress and makes it easier to focus
- calendar - preallocating time for various tasks I want to do, and committing to doing them without distractions (phone set to silent, mail program closed, etc.) for that period of time, regardless of the end output, again makes it easier to focus, and seeing thing moving forward makes me feel better; I stole that one from the "Deep Work" book
But yeah, I still struggle. There are days when I only honestly say I haven't done anything but read HN and respond to e-mails. But more and more, there are days when I'm productive, and I'm beginning to trust my capacity for doing work again, and this improves my self-esteem as well.
#HNPsychology
