When I accessed via https://news.ycombinator.com , I'd see the same stories repeatedly, just in different places, each time I visited that page. Via newsboat, I see each story at most once.
Also the HN frontpage scrolls on my laptop —if barely— but I have newsboat configured so that when there are too many new HN stories, I view them by subsets of alphabetical order (currently a-g, h-q, r-z but I should probably chop at e or f instead) so they will fit on a screen (~70 stories).
Some weeks I am involved enough with my personal projects that I forget to read HN for several days; in that case I have channels set up that show only 1, 2, 3, and 4 day old content — which can then be broken down by subsets, or manually even finer, so I'm only ever picking from less than a screenful.
(when I'm that far behind, I mostly mark entire screenfuls as seen, without clicking through at all: maybe the greatest value of this system is realising that one can very easily not click on attractive things and one's life is still full of more interesting things than one truly has time for?)
the tl;dr of it is that a lot (probably even the majority of chronic pain) is psychological, not structural. This isn't obvious because the pain is in fact entirely real. What causes it though is that if you think there's something wrong/sense minor pain in your back, brain thinks 'oh no somethings wrong' and sends more pain - this reinforces your sense of something being wrong and makes the pain worse and stay.
This normally doesn't happen that often but if you're stressed, you're much more sensitive to pain making it much easier to trigger.
My story with chronic pain: I had bad RSI for 2-3 weeks. Went away over a weekend after I read a story [0] of how someone treated their RSI. Your thinking about pain influences you're brains perception of it - you can halt the brain pain amplification cognitively.
Also, for those that think they have structural back issues based on MRI's, iirc some crazy number of people without pain also have weird MRIs - MRIs suggest the possibility of something structural but in no way guarantee that that's a strong explanation.
The Way Out by Alan Gordon talks about this in more depth - one anecdote he mentions was a football player with REALLY bad back pain, who you'd expect to have all kinds of injuries, was pretty much completely fine after pain reprocessing therapy. This isn't an isolated case - I think the majority of people he tested PRT on in the Boulder Back Pain Study ended up getting significantly better via PRT implying most people didn't actually have structural issues
(note, exercise does still help because it's theorized that the way the body creates pain is by lowering blood flow/oxygen - exercise counters this. When my RSI was fairly bad, I remember that working out or sprinting and getting blood flowing would make me feel more or less ok)
I'm super curious about this concept. I watched All The Rage about Dr Sarno, who treats back pain with the same mind-body approach. Its fascinating that the results are so drastic for people who've been healed by the mind-body approach - that they're not cured over months in the gym but over the course of the time they've read the material.
Should've added more detail to my post but the reason I want to do this is less to become more productive and more to become sane - I'm trying to create a robust system to make sure I meditate, exercise and work on health issues every day.
It probably isn't far off to describe my struggle to manage these as mental illness rather than a productivity hurdle
> It probably isn't far off to describe my struggle to manage these as mental illness rather than a productivity hurdle
You might try asking your healthcare provider for help finding a therapist or social worker. They can help you assess the issues you are facing in a way that's different from what you'd get from friends or family (for example such discussions are generally confidential), and they can check-in with you regularly if that's useful for managing your problems.
I've had a therapist before but they unfortunately didn't help as much as I'd hoped. I can often make systems that last a few weeks but single failure days cascade very easily. My hope is that with external accountability I can bootstrap these systems into working for months and become the kind of person that can reliably manage myself
You might have to try a couple therapists before you find the right one -- I'm on number three personally (with many years and much denial in between) -- but when you find one who you work well with it can be very helpful. Your desire for weekly analysis of your feelings and help debugging motivational issues is generally up their alley; I check-in with my therapist once a week via video call and our sessions often explore what's going on when I have low motivation. You might consider giving it another go, but up to you. Keeping a daily journal -- if you don't already -- may also be useful.
Regardless, I wish you the best of luck with your challenges and hope you find a solution that works for you.
Honestly, I can't comprehend or imagine the lack of self-control and discipline you describe. Most people get by with a calendar, alarm clock, to-do list, and internal motivation if they want to develop habits or just show up on time for things important to them.
I don't have the qualifications to actually diagnose mental health problems, but having suffered from OCD myself I suggest you seek professional help.
The OP asked for help hiring someone in Bangalore to wake them up, monitor, and babysit them. The link to the article that inspired their idea had more to do with optimizing productivity and dealing with procrastination than mental health problems.
To me the whole idea of an adult hiring someone to act as a parent or kindergarten teacher seems ridiculous. If an adult actually needs that level of supervision and prodding they should consider talking to a professional about possible ADHD or other issues. Hiring people to satisfy narcissistic tendencies just seems degrading to the person hired.
We can probably predict the results. Having someone tell you what to do and when to do it describes some environments we all probably have experience with: Parents, school, jobs.
A single person working from home has none of those factors. They are left to manage their own time and priorities. Some people handle that better than others, and some people get anxious, upset, overwhelmed when they can't manage themselves. Hiring someone to essentially babysit and keep you on track may work, but it works in the sense that paying someone to feed you means you don't have to shop, cook, and feed yourself. The anxiety and the underlying problems don't go away by outsourcing them.
People who have too many details to manage and too many things to do (not just things they imagine they should do or want to do) hire assistants to handle some of the tasks. They don't hire someone to stand behind them and tell them to get to work.
From experience, my rep load in SuperMemo was half of what it'd have been in Anki for Japanese. over time, gap would've exploded. Being the only people with 30 years of good data makes a pretty big difference
But is your retention the same? These algorithms can be tuned, and obviously the amount of repetition to retain 95% of info is higher than retaining 90%.
woah, do you have a link on that? I use plan [1] which is great for minute level planning but also annoying in various ways, if there's other software that can do similar, would love to try it
(i'm guessing that this was purely a joke and no such thing exists)
It was from a skit on the Colbert Report (can't remember the episode). He talks about how NASA added a leap second and then pulled out this comical "second-by-second" year planner and said his plans are ruined because he doesn't know what to do with the extra second. Wish I could remember it.
Based on how memory/forgetting curves work, there's nothing better than spaced repetition apps like SuperMemo. No matter how good your baseline recall is, you can't remember something forever without intermittent retrieval.
My impression is that there are lots in Russia but you'd have to know Russian to find them.