Treating anxiety as a bug in legacy code (engineering approach)

[bitkin_dev]

Hi HN,

I'm a software engineer. About a year ago I hit a severe burnout phase. Traditional advice ("just relax", "inner child", etc.) didn’t work for me because it felt non-operational and hard to test.

I started thinking about my cognition as an operating system running on legacy evolutionary drivers. These drivers were optimized for survival in unpredictable environments, not for modern high-load cognitive work.

Instead of asking “how do I feel?”, I reframed the problem in engineering terms:

what specific inputs reliably trigger failure states?

what minimal interventions consistently exit those loops?

I treated anxiety and procrastination as recurring system errors rather than emotional problems. Instead of relying on willpower, I experimented with small, mechanical actions that reliably altered attention or physiological state — similar to forcing an interrupt or resetting a stuck process.

Most experiments failed. The ones that worked were surprisingly boring, simple, and repeatable — which made them reliable.

Over time, I documented the working approaches into a technical manual for myself, structured as a set of protocols rather than advice.

I’m curious whether anyone here has approached burnout, anxiety, or habit loops using systems thinking or engineering-style models. What frameworks worked for you, and what didn’t?

[Jtsummers]

You're getting at the ideas behind cognitive behavioral therapy.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cognitive_behavioral_therapy

[markus_zhang]

Interesting. I started to do the same since last year, but then realized that my anxiety comes from two sources I couldn’t remove, so I started to look for a different route. Good luck!

[mackatsol]

Can you share some of these protocols? I’m curious as to how I should approach these same issues!

I like to think of it as “we didn’t fall out of the trees all that long ago, in evolutionary terms!”

[asukachikaru]

I tried many tricks (pomodoro, meditation, atom habit, you name it) to fight lack of discipline. TLDR: non really worked, to the point that I’ve accepted that it’s part of my character.

The one that kind of worked, at least for a while, was external reward. I set point for each task or habit I want to achieve, and the longer the streak goes the more point I earn. Point can be used as currency for rewards. I monitored my motivation against the tasks to iterate on the point distribution design. It worked great for six months in which I regularly slept and waked up early, did spanish vocabulary anki sessions, and no phone during remote work (“no phone for two hours” task,) etc., until I used all my point for a M2 IPad Pro which was the ultimate reward I set for myself from the very start.

[L0in]

Can you share your findings?