[mlangenberg]

As a software developer I have been doing this exact thing for the past twelve years: think of all the possible reasons why something can fail.

The downside is that I have trained my mind in such a way that it is difficult to turn it off outside of work and it is influencing my personal live negatively.

(or maybe I'm just wired to be a doom thinker and that is what makes me a good software engineer)

[munificent]

God, yes, this. I have twenty years's of failure-mode engineer mindset training, and my wife has generalized anxiety. Between the two of us, we are constantly in this state of trying to prevent bad things from happening.

And, in many ways we have. And that's good. We're in a pretty stable, safe, comfortable state, which not something everyone can say in 2020.

But as an unintended side effect, we have also prevented good things from happening. Because we are so focused on controlling outcomes, we have eliminated almost all serendipity from our lives. The only surprises left are unpredictable, unpreventable bad ones: health issues, political disasters, stuff breaking in the house, etc.

It is a recipe for slow-burning misery. Even before COVID-19, we found ourselves going out less and less, trying fewer new things, and just... sort of winding our way into an introverted, over-thinking, ball of anxiety.

I'm now trying to re-train myself to consider the inverse of that mindset: what's the best that could happen? If we knew for certain that activity X was going to work out, would we give it a try? Do we need to keep thinking about and analyzing this, or is our anxiety just using "you need to think about it more" as a rationalization to keep us inside our comfort zone?

It's a hard habit to break. And, obviously, 2020 is like the worst possible fucking year to be dealing with this. (Though, conversely, we entered the lockdown pretty well-prepared to handle being stuck at home since we're so used to it...)

[gridspy]

I think being stuck at home in a ball of anxiety is a fair response to the current pandemic and general situation. Be kind to yourself - this is a rational response.

I'm sure the two of you can come up with new adventurous things to do and the will to do so now you've identified the problem.

[munificent]

> I think being stuck at home in a ball of anxiety is a fair response to the current pandemic and general situation.

Yes, true. Would have been nice if we hadn't been like that before the pandemic, though. :)

[toast0]

Look on the bright side. Everyone else has to deal with a drastically different way of living, but you're prepared!

[munificent]

Yes, we have definitely made that joke amongst ourselves several times. :)

[mleonhard]

How about asking yourself a new question. "How can we make sure that we never try anything new or experience happy surprises?" and try to avoid doing that?

[phogster]

How about asking yourself where does the inversion principle apply? and avoid applying it where you shouldn't?

[keithnz]

surely going by the OPs inversion, you'd ask 'What is preventing us trying something new this weekend?'

[tells]

Thank you for sharing this. I'm in a similar situation and asking myself "what's the best that could happen" makes me feel surprisingly uncomfortable.

[kkotak]

Sounds like paranoia to me. I'd suggest therapy.

[teekert]

I wanted to contribute the same to this discussing.

At work, I'm really good at thinking things through and avoiding unnecessary work. Outside of work, I worry that when we restructure our roof, we will negatively impact the neighbors solar panel output. I constantly grind about how I'm going to discuss this with them. Even though we may not even restructure the roof.

Or I wonder how I'm going to handle it the next time my neighbor turns on an outdoor speaker. Even though he may not, for months to come, and when he does, I might just be on my way out.

Now the wife and kids want chickens, and I'm sitting here discussing (in my head) how our neighbor is wrong about all the downsides she may bring up. Even though she may even like that we have chickens.

It's tiring and impacts my life negatively.

At work I do manage to keep a "do-ers" attitude, I mean I will start many things, take in criticism, change my approach. I think I'm generally pretty good at my job and radiate a positive attitude. I wish I was the same at home.

[travisjungroth]

It seems like you get caught in a worry loop. The solution I’ve found is I have to fully answer the questions in my head. Worry loops happen when things get almost resolved, then you move on. For example:

> Or I wonder how I'm going to handle it the next time my neighbor turns on an outdoor speaker. Even though he may not, for months to come, and when he does, I might just be on my way out.

Really answer the question. Something like “at 10pm I’ll go over and ask them to have it off by 11pm. If it’s not off by midnight, I’ll make a noise complaint”. Or “If it’s too loud, I’ll ask them to turn it down a bit.” Or “I’ll trust myself to make the right decision if that happens.” Then consider it resolved. Write it down if that helps.

[teekert]

I'll try that, thanks! I did do something similar once when I could not stop fussing about what job to take (current one or a new one). I wrote and printed 2 a4-papers full of text and it was pretty clear I liked my current job more but was afraid I was just taking the easy route (and that I would feel weak because of it later). I was able to let it go and feel better after that indeed.

[throwaway7uA4]

May I chime in with some more practical experience WRT writing down worries:

- I tried something similar to this Negative Thinking Analysis Form [1]

- In my experience this takes a lot of time, when you try to do it right. You really have to let a thought sink in for a long time to actually find out where it is distorted. And it sometimes even takes longer to find the underlying thought behind a series of thougts and worries.

- But once done the thinking is usually over and sometimes I learned something about the beliefs that underpin my thinking.

[1] http://discoveryoursolutions.com/toolkit/negative_thinking.h...

[throwaway7uA4]

Yes, I am exactly the same. While at work I feel very productive eliminating future risk by being very conspicuous towards all design decisions, but the same attitude in "real life" is very troublesome.

For example, a very small random sample of thoughts that routinely pop up:

- Lent somebody your bike? Oh my god he/she may die, because it's badly maintained (and thinking about the details about different kinds of breakage vs. harm caused).

- Opening plastic containers or cans for food: oh my god, sharp edges may fall into the food (how to keep parts of packaging from falling into food while opening is surprisingly complex topic, think about knifes vs. scissors vs. tearing it open, all have very different hehaviour wrt. creating debris :)

- doing mistakes when filing taxes vs. the risk and penalties that may ensue

- furniture / cupboards being insufficiently bolted to the wall and coming down (and thinking about how it would move, where it would hit and the likelhood of bad injuries)

- risk of injuries due to electricity after fixing electric installation at home (am I sure I didn't damage some insulator, is the ground wire really properly attached, is the strain-relief properly done etc.)

For me this is pretty much modulated by stress level. Doing a lot of sports, less coffee, and sleeping enough usually leaves me much less inclined of doing these not so helpful analysis for stuff outside work. And I'm always amazed how other people can just "wipe away" such thoughts as unnecessary without any analysis at all. Maybe that's the difference between employing proper intuition vs. striving for "mathematical proof" kind of certainty in all areas of life.

[edit] adding another perspective that is sometimes helpful in stopping overthinking: trying to analyse the full tree of possibilities is the chess computer kind of reasoning (alpha-beta search). It is pretty limited in what domains it can be applied to (e.g. it does not work for Poker or the Game of Go). On the other hand try to learn some Go and feel the difference: after gaining some experience you will give up on exhaustive analysis in many situations and just start relying on intuition, because it's the only thing that actually works for complex, unclear situations. Now sometimes I try to remember how playing Go feels when faced with real-world problems where I'm tempted to do an exhaustive analysis. See also [1].

[1] https://xkcd.com/761/

[teekert]

Yeah sounds familiar. I feel it's related to stress and to not taking time to stop thinking or make myself stop thinking (and indeed do sports or play with the kids, while first clearing my head).

I have had moments where I felt I was almost loosing it because I was just constantly thinking about some (in hindsight minor) issue. And I then start to meditate just to stop the thinking. I don't know if that helps or if there is a natural cadence to it but I do get better after doing that for some days usually (10-15 min here and there, I used the free tier of HeadSpace during 1 period as well). I should just also meditate regularly to see if my general mood improves. From everything I read, it should.

I am about to go camping, that will help, although I'm already getting pissed (and finding nice ways to express said emotion) at that fictitious family with the bluetooth speaker on all day in the spot next to me. What a waste of thought. Just stop brain.

[pacoverdi]

+1 for reducing caffeine intake. Some years ago I used to wake up in the middle of the night with extreme anxiety about ridiculously small problems. Cutting caffeine can definitely help (although it may also have an adverse effect on work efficiency :)

[andi999]

I can relate to this. Let me ask you a thing: when you ship things (release a product), do you feel lifted/happy like ppl here tell you, or does your worries increase (like it happens for me, I hate shipping)

[freehunter]

Personally when I finish a project I feel great. When I release a project to the world, that’s when the worry kicks in.

[andi999]

Can you elaborate what exactly you mean by 'finish'

[freehunter]

When the code works the way I want it to for the version I’m about to release.

Like if I’ve finished the code for v1.6 and am ready to ship it to customers, I feel great. When I actually send it to customers my anxiety kicks in thinking of all the support requests and criticism I’m about to get.

[trilinearnz]

I can relate to this a lot. A technique you might wish to entertain is the "beginners mindset". The idea is to approach a situation or problem as if you were tackling it for the first time, or had absolutely no prior context to work from.

The thinking being that some (all?) of the side assumptions your brain is fixating upon developing responses to, could in fact be erroneous. By experimenting with adopting a "noob" mindset, you create the opportunity for new experiences to emerge which may well be more successful.

[perfmode]

Try inversion:

"How can I guarantee that I will spend absolutely all of my time grinding on projections of the future?"

[HumblyTossed]

Best advice I've ever been given: Wait to worry. If you can't do something (anything) about it immediately, don't worry about it.

Using your example, you haven't decided to restructure your roof, so there is nothing actionable you can do right now WRT your neighbor, so don't worry about that.

[teekert]

Funnily enough I'm really good at this at work and always tell my colleagues this. They often find me ridiculously relaxed in difficult situations. But at work, if I can't change something I don't worry (when a boss asks me 10 min before an important meeting to present it, I just wing it because the thought "They can't expect it to be perfect with only 10 min prep time", makes me very relaxed. But the thing is, with the small things I do worry about at home I often can change something. I can prevent the neighbor to be bothered by my new roof or at least I could talks with them about it. Of course, that only makes sense when we actually change the roof... But then again if they know we may change the roof they can also keep that in mind... At this point just tell the neighbor, but what if we never change the roof and he changes his plans based on my remark? I'd better move somewhere else quickly...

[jimbokun]

> The downside is that I have trained my mind in such a way that it is difficult to turn it off outside of work and it is influencing my personal live negatively.

I think it's important to remember taking on too little risk can be dangerous and lead to negative outcomes.

Maybe you need to invert and ask questions like "What is keeping me from spending more time with family?" or "What is keeping me from going to more parties?" or "What is keeping me from asking that person out?" or whatever the situation is in your personal life.

[maps7]

For me, it has made driving difficult. I think of everything I can do incorrectly and everything others can do incorrectly. I think of all possible events happening on the route. On the plus side, I am a careful driver. On the negative side, I _really_ hate driving.

[binsh]

I think this is healthy and actually comports with reality. Driving _is_ dangerous, and a lot of people do it really badly. I see way too many people on their phones on the highway to ever feel safe driving.

[cutemonster]

I agree. Now recently after having spent days reading and thinking about a legal agreement with another company, I'm wondering, why am I so careful with that, but at the same time accept being a passenger in other people's cars -- when I know some of those drivers text-and-drive, making them as dangerous as drunk drivers.

Or they don't keep the distance to the car in front, or try to overtake two large trucks at once, limited sight. Should I be fine with that, saving me a few hours,

Whilst spending days reading an agreement?

[fendy3002]

So it's not just me being paranoid. If my luck is any worse and the worse possibility happened, I've already hit 5+ people and crashed my cars 5+ more times.

Driving is very very dangerous but not many realized it.

[james_s_tayler]

Apparently everyone experiences an accident once per every 17.9 years of driving.

My wife just got hit by a truck on the freeway yesterday. Amazingly there was not a scratch on her. It made us re-evaluate what we drive though as when we checked our car had only a 2 star safety rating and apparently where we live 2/3 of fatal crashes are from 1 and 2 star safety rated cars. Today we're car shopping for a 5 star safety rated car.

So, yeah it carries an inherent risk and it's important we do what we can in terms of driving safely, driving the safest car you can afford and upgrading to a safer car when you can afford in order to minimize those risks.

[jyriand]

Sometimes while driving I wonder how come I’m always crashing cases in video games, but in real life i can survive for hours.

[yetanta]

There is a secondary issue on this sort of thinking too. Sometimes you can doom out anything worth doing. I see it on the internet quite a bit. "look at the cool project I built". Then come out the doomsayers. How everything is wrong with it. The opposite happens too. But the negative ones stick out in my mind this morning :)

[pythonaut_16]

You can always answer those doomsayers with one of my new favorite quotes: "Anything worth doing is worth doing poorly"

[webmaven]

Back when blog syndication tech was being actively developed, Dave Winer called that sort of reactionary response "stop energy".

[solidr53]

Can be very difficult when you can only see the problems in other people's ideas. Knowing that it's not the purpose, but rather to actually help, people that don't know you will not appreciate it.

My advice is to stop doing it with people that don't know how you think. It's usually the people who have unexpected problems again and again in their life.

[arthurjj]

Something I've taken to doing is a pre-mortem with my team. A few months before launch I say "Let's fast forward and pretend the project failed. Why did it fail."

This usually catches a list of things to make sure you're keeping an eye on.

[cutemonster]

Sounds as if this has been working fine :-)

I very much like the idea

[eumenides1]

Try inverting your perspective outside of work.

The basis of the advice is I have a hard problem --invert problem statement--> new perspective/approach angles.

Your problem is just a little more meta.

[cutemonster]

> difficult to turn it off outside of work

May I ask what situations do you have in mind?

> influencing my personal live negatively.

What if everyone else is crazy not you

[liveoneggs]

this has been identified as a regular personality trait in operations teams where it is a benefit in work context.

[neal_jones]

The best coder I know is also the most paranoid coder that I know, I don’t think it is a coincidence.

[cutemonster]

Do you know if s/he is a bit paranoid also in the spare time?

[mtgp1000]

To all of the people who feel similarly, and have problems ruminating:

Try thinking in terms of probabilities - that's the real way out, to recognize that all of the negative scenarios you keep replaying in your head are very unlikely to happen at all.

Once you realize that much it might get easier to brush these thoughts aside sooner.