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>Most people experience this from time to time. If you're unlucky enough to be at the tail end of the distribution where basic tasks make you feel this way eve

>Most people experience this from time to time. If you're unlucky enough to be at the tail end of the distribution where basic tasks make you feel this way every day it's no longer called an 'Ugh Field' instead it's called the "Wall of Awful" https://youtu.be/Uo08uS904Rg https://youtu.be/Uo08uS904Rg One of the absolute best techniques I've found for breaking it is a trick I learned from DBT called "Improve the moment" where you simply think about what pleasant sensory experience could you introduce right now to make you feel better and then you do that quickly. I find if I put on a song or smell the lemon scented dishwashing liquid or run my hand under warm water it helps me to get moving on a task. It's not fool proof but it's a good tool to have in the toolbox.

ohazi 6y ago
That... that channel is amazing. Wow. Thanks!
- aidenn0 6y ago
  The first thing I noticed about that channel is it's one of the few that are mostly talking but I don't have to turn the speed up. I think that's called "knowing your audience"
  - WalterSear 6y ago
    By contrast, I couldn't sit through any of the episodes I've tried. IMHO, the series feels targeted at people who are only slightly on the spectrum.
    - aidenn0 6y ago
      I think there are lots of other issues that are comorbid with ADHD that would make those episodes inaccessible (e.g. APD), but I'm certainly not only slightly ADHD.
- systemvoltage 6y ago
  I feel like the opposite - they're popularizing ADHD and I just watched "What is ADHD?" episode and pretty much every human on this planet can relate to it. Who doesn't make careless mistakes? Who isn't ever late to anything? Who hasn't had a hard time to focus on something? It is doing a disservice because people who actually have severe ADHD are perhaps shunned and the weight of the word "ADHD" becomes less meaningful. It is similar to the urban popularization of "OCD". It is even used in regular conversation without people realizing that it is a serious condition that can't be lightly taken.
  - nullsense 6y ago
    It's not popularizing it. It's a channel by ADHDers for ADHDers. Everyone has _most_ of the same experiences, yes, but frequency, intensity, and duration are markedly different for those of us with ADHD. When it's such that all major facets of your life are negatively impacted by it you have a problem. I remember watching the ADHD Tax video and it was like lightbulbs going off in my head. That channel helped a lot when I was first figuring it out.
  - lima 6y ago
    > Who doesn't make careless mistakes? Who isn't ever late to anything? Who hasn't had a hard time to focus on something? Severe ADHD means having a hard time focusing on everything, making careless mistakes constantly and being late all of the time.
  - andrewjl 6y ago
    Why? Especially when it makes it easier to relate or empathize to those same severe symptoms. And why does the intensity of ADHD correspond to its meaningfulness as a condition or a concept?
nefitty 6y ago
Oh, I guess I must be trapped in a Cubicle of Awful. The Improve the Moment technique sounds perfect. One thing that I do when I need to wash dishes or other tedium is put on headphones and listen to music, otherwise the “ugh” is too overwhelming.
lioeters 6y ago
For me, washing my face with cold water does the trick. It somehow breaks me out of that "ugh" thought pattern, to start thinking afresh. Also taking a shower - interesting how these both involve water. Giving a name to this feeling, the "ugh field" and "wall of awful" (I hadn't heard of that one, thanks!) - it helps to recognize it as it happens. It takes practice to catch it as soon as it starts, because the longer you sit in it, the deeper hold it has on you. It's related to anxiety disorder, I think, in that there's a spectrum of how bad it gets, how much it affects your work and personal life. It's also a symptom (or a cause?) of the burn out syndrome. Having broken through countless walls of aweful, I've learned that patience and persistence are key. It's important to be patient with yourself, to lovingly steer the mind and body towards your goals, and forgive yourself for feeling how you do. If you feel so bad about doing a task, it's a sign that something is out of balance. Sometimes the best thing to do is let go, whether it's prioritizing your mental health over work demands, or searching for a better job situation.
- foolmeonce 6y ago
  The water thing (particularly cold to the face) is probably the mammalian diving reflex. Your heartbeat (and other factors relating to stress level) drop to maximize your time under water.
- uhhyeahdude 6y ago
  I do the cold water on face and the shower thing on an almost-daily basis. I mean, I shower daily in the morning because it feels good and I prefer not to alienate the people I interact with over the course of my day. Since my daily activities sometimes involve outside work in a tropical climate, I found myself needing the occasional evening shower. I also do a lot of work in the evening, working with computers instead of plants, and eventually I came to notice that I performed that work much better, with less resistance, on days when I had the evening shower. I added the shower to my evening routine, and it is helpful regardless of whether or not I did any labor-type work. The water-on-face thing is a habit I picked up this year, and I never connected it with the shower routine. But thinking about it now, it seems clear that it may well be. I do the cold water routine more frequently on days I feel overwhelmed, and it seems obvious in retrospect. I appreciate your insights; thank you.
xkcd-sucks 6y ago
> where you simply think about what pleasant sensory experience could you introduce right now to make you feel better and then you do that quickly Oh that does not play well with addiction logic haha
- Igelau 6y ago
  Or too well?
- dmurray 6y ago
  Not that unusual though for a functioning addict to say "I need a (coffee|cigarette) before I tackle this".
  - rirarobo 6y ago
    Also, not that unusual for an information addict to say "just one more (article|tweet|post|academic paper|etc) before I tackle this."
    - WalterSear 6y ago
      Those don't make the moment better: they take you away from the moment.
bobmaxup 6y ago
What a bunch of bullshit. There is a single source for this concept and it isn't backed by anything.
- nullsense 6y ago
  Resonates deeply with me and those like me and that's all we need. So, fuck you. You're a bunch of bullshit.
  - dang 6y ago
    Please don't break the site guidelines like this regardless of how badly you were provoked. https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html
- Robotbeat 6y ago
  You mean Executive Function Disorder and ADHD? Both are highly documented and you can use Wikipedia (and follow its citations, which includes DSM 5) as well as I can. The title of the YouTube channel includes “ADHD”.
- dang 6y ago
  Please don't break the site guidelines by calling names like this. https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html
throwitaway0 6y ago
> One of the absolute best techniques I've found for breaking it is a trick I learned from DBT called "Improve the moment" where you simply think about what pleasant sensory experience could you introduce right now to make you feel better and then you do that quickly. That'd probably be smoking a cigarette. But that's no good, either.
- centimeter 6y ago
  Nicotine is one of the safest and best known nootropics.
  - oooooooooooow 6y ago
    But cigarettes are so bad for your lungs. Likely the worst way of intaking nicotine.
  - analyte123 6y ago
    Nicotine is still extremely addictive by itself. So much so that if it weren’t “best known” you’d have to buy it in the same places you buy peptides with cryptocurrency. No other nootropic generates the level of irrational desire to consume it. If you read stuff like this comment and just dive right in, best case scenario is that you end up at 105% of baseline and higher blood pressure, as long as you’re constantly using nicotine, but 70% of baseline when you don’t use it, and weeks of brain fog when you try to quit. Harm reduction is to use only patches or nicotine replacement gum (not commercial nicotine patches), and to set strict windows and use cases.
    - TeMPOraL 6y ago
      > Harm reduction is to use only patches or nicotine replacement gum I'd assume when GP wrote "nicotine", they meant nicotine and not tobacco. So gums, not cigarettes. Based on Gwern's rather extensive summary, I believe nicotine alone is not dangerously addictive.
      - analyte123 6y ago
echelon 6y ago
If you're unlucky enough to have ADHD, literally everything except the task you have arbitrary hyper-focus on is an ugh field. Daily chores and maintenance like paying bills are ugh. Life is one big maze of ugh, and it's designed by people that don't get us. It feels inescapable and arbitrary. The only exit seems to be financial independence. I often really hate how we're expected to work in this framework. My hyperfocus is a super-power (https://vo.codes https://vo.codes, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=x034jVB1avs&t=15s https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=x034jVB1avs&t=15s, and a bunch of other awesome but non-monetizable projects). Too bad I can't get paid for it.
- conrs 6y ago
  I too find ADHD to be a super power. We've been forced to adapt to our inability to pay attention to uninteresting things. But a lot of the day-to-day life doesn't really help you in the long run. Props on vo.codes; I'm [refactoring my website](http://blog.con.rs/2020/09/11/mash-rehash.html http://blog.con.rs/2020/09/11/mash-rehash.html), one piece of which is a "say" command currently powered by online dictionary. Seems a super simple fit to power it using your tool instead :)
  - nullsense 6y ago
    I don't find it a super power. It's a trade-off. Very often education, health, finance and relationships get pretty damaged by it. The upside is I don't do shit I don't find incredibly interesting. I'm perfectly happy as long as everything is on my terms. The downsides have been my chronic inability to engage with anything not immediately interesting to me led me through a decade of very difficult unemployment, wrecking my health, being a terrible parent, and not being a great husband. Though it's been a benefit to my professional software career, that has been at the expense of my health.
- polishdude20 6y ago
  I think that's the fun of it though. The fact that we can make awesome projects without needing monetary incentives. I pity the people who need a monetary incentives to get up and do something interesting.
noodlenotes 6y ago
> "Improve the moment" where you simply think about what pleasant sensory experience could you introduce right now to make you feel better and then you do that quickly This is (un)surprisingly similar to a dog training technique called counterconditioning where you change your dog's emotional response to a scary bad thing. If your dog barks aggressively every time they see a person in a wheelchair, you give them a treat every time they notice a wheelchair. The more immediate the response the better, so you have to watch your dog's eyes to know exactly when they see it. You try to find their threshold (e.g. they get scared when the wheelchair is 20 ft away and not moving) and work right around that threshold. Once they're comfortable you push their threshold again (e.g. now the wheelchair is closer or moving or in a different environment). Eventually they have a neutral or positive reaction to a person in a wheelchair because they know that 1) nothing bad will happen and 2) they'll get a treat! On the other hand, when untreated, this scared reaction can be self-reinforcing like the ugh field. Wheelchairs are a little scary. Then your dog saw another one and borked and it was a bad experience so your dog figures wheelchairs are even more scary. Anyway, it helps to realize that we're constantly training ourselves based on the stimuli we introduce into our lives. It's just easier to see with the simpler dog model. (I guess Pavlov had something to say about that.)

ohazi 6y ago

That... that channel is amazing. Wow. Thanks!

aidenn0 6y ago
The first thing I noticed about that channel is it's one of the few that are mostly talking but I don't have to turn the speed up. I think that's called "knowing your audience"
- WalterSear 6y ago
  By contrast, I couldn't sit through any of the episodes I've tried. IMHO, the series feels targeted at people who are only slightly on the spectrum.
  - aidenn0 6y ago
    I think there are lots of other issues that are comorbid with ADHD that would make those episodes inaccessible (e.g. APD), but I'm certainly not only slightly ADHD.
systemvoltage 6y ago
I feel like the opposite - they're popularizing ADHD and I just watched "What is ADHD?" episode and pretty much every human on this planet can relate to it. Who doesn't make careless mistakes? Who isn't ever late to anything? Who hasn't had a hard time to focus on something? It is doing a disservice because people who actually have severe ADHD are perhaps shunned and the weight of the word "ADHD" becomes less meaningful. It is similar to the urban popularization of "OCD". It is even used in regular conversation without people realizing that it is a serious condition that can't be lightly taken.
- nullsense 6y ago
  It's not popularizing it. It's a channel by ADHDers for ADHDers. Everyone has _most_ of the same experiences, yes, but frequency, intensity, and duration are markedly different for those of us with ADHD. When it's such that all major facets of your life are negatively impacted by it you have a problem. I remember watching the ADHD Tax video and it was like lightbulbs going off in my head. That channel helped a lot when I was first figuring it out.
- lima 6y ago
  > Who doesn't make careless mistakes? Who isn't ever late to anything? Who hasn't had a hard time to focus on something? Severe ADHD means having a hard time focusing on everything, making careless mistakes constantly and being late all of the time.
- andrewjl 6y ago
  Why? Especially when it makes it easier to relate or empathize to those same severe symptoms. And why does the intensity of ADHD correspond to its meaningfulness as a condition or a concept?

nefitty 6y ago

Oh, I guess I must be trapped in a Cubicle of Awful. The Improve the Moment technique sounds perfect. One thing that I do when I need to wash dishes or other tedium is put on headphones and listen to music, otherwise the “ugh” is too overwhelming.

lioeters 6y ago

For me, washing my face with cold water does the trick. It somehow breaks me out of that "ugh" thought pattern, to start thinking afresh. Also taking a shower - interesting how these both involve water. Giving a name to this feeling, the "ugh field" and "wall of awful" (I hadn't heard of that one, thanks!) - it helps to recognize it as it happens. It takes practice to catch it as soon as it starts, because the longer you sit in it, the deeper hold it has on you. It's related to anxiety disorder, I think, in that there's a spectrum of how bad it gets, how much it affects your work and personal life. It's also a symptom (or a cause?) of the burn out syndrome. Having broken through countless walls of aweful, I've learned that patience and persistence are key. It's important to be patient with yourself, to lovingly steer the mind and body towards your goals, and forgive yourself for feeling how you do. If you feel so bad about doing a task, it's a sign that something is out of balance. Sometimes the best thing to do is let go, whether it's prioritizing your mental health over work demands, or searching for a better job situation.

foolmeonce 6y ago
The water thing (particularly cold to the face) is probably the mammalian diving reflex. Your heartbeat (and other factors relating to stress level) drop to maximize your time under water.
uhhyeahdude 6y ago
I do the cold water on face and the shower thing on an almost-daily basis. I mean, I shower daily in the morning because it feels good and I prefer not to alienate the people I interact with over the course of my day. Since my daily activities sometimes involve outside work in a tropical climate, I found myself needing the occasional evening shower. I also do a lot of work in the evening, working with computers instead of plants, and eventually I came to notice that I performed that work much better, with less resistance, on days when I had the evening shower. I added the shower to my evening routine, and it is helpful regardless of whether or not I did any labor-type work. The water-on-face thing is a habit I picked up this year, and I never connected it with the shower routine. But thinking about it now, it seems clear that it may well be. I do the cold water routine more frequently on days I feel overwhelmed, and it seems obvious in retrospect. I appreciate your insights; thank you.

xkcd-sucks 6y ago

> where you simply think about what pleasant sensory experience could you introduce right now to make you feel better and then you do that quickly Oh that does not play well with addiction logic haha

Igelau 6y ago
Or too well?
dmurray 6y ago
Not that unusual though for a functioning addict to say "I need a (coffee|cigarette) before I tackle this".
- rirarobo 6y ago
  Also, not that unusual for an information addict to say "just one more (article|tweet|post|academic paper|etc) before I tackle this."
  - WalterSear 6y ago
    Those don't make the moment better: they take you away from the moment.

bobmaxup 6y ago

What a bunch of bullshit. There is a single source for this concept and it isn't backed by anything.

nullsense 6y ago
Resonates deeply with me and those like me and that's all we need. So, fuck you. You're a bunch of bullshit.
- dang 6y ago
  Please don't break the site guidelines like this regardless of how badly you were provoked. https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html
Robotbeat 6y ago
You mean Executive Function Disorder and ADHD? Both are highly documented and you can use Wikipedia (and follow its citations, which includes DSM 5) as well as I can. The title of the YouTube channel includes “ADHD”.
dang 6y ago
Please don't break the site guidelines by calling names like this. https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html

throwitaway0 6y ago

> One of the absolute best techniques I've found for breaking it is a trick I learned from DBT called "Improve the moment" where you simply think about what pleasant sensory experience could you introduce right now to make you feel better and then you do that quickly. That'd probably be smoking a cigarette. But that's no good, either.

centimeter 6y ago
Nicotine is one of the safest and best known nootropics.
- oooooooooooow 6y ago
  But cigarettes are so bad for your lungs. Likely the worst way of intaking nicotine.
- analyte123 6y ago
  Nicotine is still extremely addictive by itself. So much so that if it weren’t “best known” you’d have to buy it in the same places you buy peptides with cryptocurrency. No other nootropic generates the level of irrational desire to consume it. If you read stuff like this comment and just dive right in, best case scenario is that you end up at 105% of baseline and higher blood pressure, as long as you’re constantly using nicotine, but 70% of baseline when you don’t use it, and weeks of brain fog when you try to quit. Harm reduction is to use only patches or nicotine replacement gum (not commercial nicotine patches), and to set strict windows and use cases.
  - TeMPOraL 6y ago
    > Harm reduction is to use only patches or nicotine replacement gum I'd assume when GP wrote "nicotine", they meant nicotine and not tobacco. So gums, not cigarettes. Based on Gwern's rather extensive summary, I believe nicotine alone is not dangerously addictive.
    - analyte123 6y ago

echelon 6y ago

If you're unlucky enough to have ADHD, literally everything except the task you have arbitrary hyper-focus on is an ugh field. Daily chores and maintenance like paying bills are ugh. Life is one big maze of ugh, and it's designed by people that don't get us. It feels inescapable and arbitrary. The only exit seems to be financial independence. I often really hate how we're expected to work in this framework. My hyperfocus is a super-power (https://vo.codes https://vo.codes, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=x034jVB1avs&t=15s https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=x034jVB1avs&t=15s, and a bunch of other awesome but non-monetizable projects). Too bad I can't get paid for it.

conrs 6y ago
I too find ADHD to be a super power. We've been forced to adapt to our inability to pay attention to uninteresting things. But a lot of the day-to-day life doesn't really help you in the long run. Props on vo.codes; I'm [refactoring my website](http://blog.con.rs/2020/09/11/mash-rehash.html http://blog.con.rs/2020/09/11/mash-rehash.html), one piece of which is a "say" command currently powered by online dictionary. Seems a super simple fit to power it using your tool instead :)
- nullsense 6y ago
  I don't find it a super power. It's a trade-off. Very often education, health, finance and relationships get pretty damaged by it. The upside is I don't do shit I don't find incredibly interesting. I'm perfectly happy as long as everything is on my terms. The downsides have been my chronic inability to engage with anything not immediately interesting to me led me through a decade of very difficult unemployment, wrecking my health, being a terrible parent, and not being a great husband. Though it's been a benefit to my professional software career, that has been at the expense of my health.
polishdude20 6y ago
I think that's the fun of it though. The fact that we can make awesome projects without needing monetary incentives. I pity the people who need a monetary incentives to get up and do something interesting.

noodlenotes 6y ago

> "Improve the moment" where you simply think about what pleasant sensory experience could you introduce right now to make you feel better and then you do that quickly This is (un)surprisingly similar to a dog training technique called counterconditioning where you change your dog's emotional response to a scary bad thing. If your dog barks aggressively every time they see a person in a wheelchair, you give them a treat every time they notice a wheelchair. The more immediate the response the better, so you have to watch your dog's eyes to know exactly when they see it. You try to find their threshold (e.g. they get scared when the wheelchair is 20 ft away and not moving) and work right around that threshold. Once they're comfortable you push their threshold again (e.g. now the wheelchair is closer or moving or in a different environment). Eventually they have a neutral or positive reaction to a person in a wheelchair because they know that 1) nothing bad will happen and 2) they'll get a treat! On the other hand, when untreated, this scared reaction can be self-reinforcing like the ugh field. Wheelchairs are a little scary. Then your dog saw another one and borked and it was a bad experience so your dog figures wheelchairs are even more scary. Anyway, it helps to realize that we're constantly training ourselves based on the stimuli we introduce into our lives. It's just easier to see with the simpler dog model. (I guess Pavlov had something to say about that.)