oyvindeh

I'd say that for practical matters, there are degrees to this. Example: Health. There's a difference between referring to a doctor versus a Hollywood celebrity.

That sounds familiar. I had the same problem, and I know several others who have that problem too. None of them are losers, they just listen too much to their thoughts: "Every day, 95% of us have thoughts with depressive, anxious or obsessive content. So why isn't 95% of us mental patients? The explanation is simple: Everybody has crazy thoughts, but not everybody believes in them."[1] When fully realizing that, things change dramatically.

ACT has been very good to me. Let me recommend a book: http://www.amazon.co.uk/Happiness-Trap-Based-revolutionary-m...

[1] "Tankevirus" by Hanne H. Brorson (unfortunately only available in Norwegian.)

Another thing: Our brains did not evolve to solve abstract problems for 8+ hours a day. They evolved to solve small, practical problems in everyday life. We learn from early childhood to work hard, to concentrate, to get good grades. Less focus is on the importance of listening to the signals that the body sends us, e.g. about taking breaks. It is perfectly fine to feel tired, to feel like not doing anything. It's important to rest.

I've always had a strong connection between my ego and my achievements. When I got employed by a company with extremely talented people, I developed chronic stress. It's been a serious problem for me for a few years. Lots of procrastination, my health has suffered, and my general life quality has suffered.

What has made a tremendous difference for me, is to develop metacognition. If you are aware of what's going on in your head, you can aim your focus where you want it to be. Over time, old habits will fade.

Most of us think thoughts and feelings are reality. But they're not. They are just events inside us. They're not dangerous. Yet, we often believe they are life threatening. So we react. Strongly.

The first step is to understand that thoughts, the voice in your head, is just that: A voice in your head. It doesn't tell the truth: it tells scary stories, to keep you safe from sable tooth tigers (or the modern equivalents). Since you want to stay alive, it's best to be on the safe side, so this radio broadcasts 80% bad news all day long.

That radio used to take most of my focus. It was very loud. By learning to treat it as background noise(1), I can now better focus on other things. As a result, many problems in my life have just started to fade away, without me actively working on them. Including procrastination.

Also, learning to be aware of feelings (detectable by bodily sensations), and letting them stay without fueling them with thoughts (e.g. "I don't want to feel like this", "this is bad", or "why me!?"), or conciously (or unconsiously) trying to get rid of them, reduces stress levels a lot. Feelings left alone often disappear by themselves within a minute or so. In contrast, if you fuel them with thoughts, or try to get rid of them, they tend to get stronger and may stick around for a long time.

I would recommend looking into ACT. E.g. check out this video by Russ Harris: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mQTvFdbjlxw . Also, his book, "The Happiness Trap"[1], is well worth reading. This may be all you need.

Before discovering Russ Harris, I developed my awareness of thoughts, as well as my mental flexibility, by doing attention training[2]. For more on this, I would recommend "Metacognitive Therapy for Anxiety and Depression"[3] by Adrain Wells. (Beware, it is quite heavy, written for psychologists. Don't mind the "Anxiety and Depression" part of the title.)

Furthermore, mindfulness and meditation is good. Just be aware that these are very fashionable nowdays, and there are lots of misunderstandings out there. For example, many mistake them to be about relaxing. Also, getting into meditation and mindfulness may be extremely hard if you're not ready for it, so starting with ACT may be a good idea. To understand (vipassana) meditation, I like this description: http://lesswrong.com/lw/2rd/understanding_vipassana_meditati...

Another good book that covers a lot of the above material, but from a Buddhist perspective, is "Living Beautifully: with Uncertainty and Change"[4] by Pema Chodron. I find it helpful to get different perspectives on these things.

Beware: If you suffer from serious mental illness, or have had traumas, you should be very careful experimenting with this by yourself. I would recommend seeing a psychologist first, preferrably one who is up-to-date on Metacognitive theraphy, ACT and/or mindfulness. Be aware though, that many have an academic interest in these topics, but do not have personal experience, so the concepts are not well integrated in them, making it harder for them to teach it.

[1] http://www.amazon.co.uk/Happiness-Trap-Based-revolutionary-m...

[2] http://www.mct-institute.com/attention-training-technique.ht...

[3] http://www.amazon.co.uk/Metacognitive-Therapy-Anxiety-Depres...

[4] http://www.amazon.com/Living-Beautifully-Uncertainty-Pema-Ch...

(1) Trying to silence the inner radio, or to make a soundclash by adding another radio (e.g. "positive thinking"), does not work very well.

[1] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Segmented_sleep

[2] http://www.supermemo.com/articles/sleep.htm#Myths_and_facts

I have no problems falling asleep, but I keep waking up after five and a half hours. For periods, I can easily go back to sleep, but when I worry about waking up, I often can not got back to sleep.

I've just started reading "The Happiness Trap"[1]. It's about accepting the ups and downs of life as normal, but at the same time it tells how to handle negative thoughts and feelings better (without getting rid of them). A former Buddhist monk recommended it to me, and my girlfriend (who is a psychologist) also liked it. The title kinda sucks though. Let's see if it helps.

[1] http://www.amazon.com/The-Happiness-Trap-Struggling-Living/d...

http://www.ted.com/talks/ben_goldacre_what_doctors_don_t_kno...

http://www.ted.com/talks/ben_goldacre_battling_bad_science.h...

Journalists suffer from the same problems, as well as the need to write something eye catching. But they already write about diet fads and other non-scientific health claims (and people believe in it), so I don't see how it could get any worse by having more trial data public.

"Overall, about half of all clinical trials have never been published, and we know that trials with negative results about a treatment are much more likely to be brushed under the carpet."

Bonus: By having all trials public, researchers won't waste time researching something that has already been researched (replication aside).

It also supports lists of HTML and CSS files to search through. It can perform login, find duplicates, list used rules as well as unused rules, as well as count how many times each rule is matched in the markup.

Requires Node, can be installed with npm.

https://github.com/operasoftware/ucss