It sounds like me, except that catching myself isn’t really the problem. The problem is that I haven’t found a way to ask my internal Grinch to stop once I’ve noticed it at work. It doesn’t help that I have a tendency to be hard on myself and go meta. I’ll notice that I’m being negative, get annoyed about it, get annoyed about me unproductively getting annoyed and giving myself negative reinforcement for noticing, and then I will have built up enough bad affect that whatever other lines of thought I have will be poisoned too. I realize the self fulfilling prophecy and needless complication of this. I’m not happy about it. Bad mood+self awareness=recursive bad mood for me, it seems. Have you any advice on this particular failure mode?
It sounds like me, except that catching myself isn’t really the problem. The problem is that I haven’t found a way to ask my internal Grinch to stop once I’ve noticed it at work. It doesn’t help that I have a tendency to be hard on myself and go meta. I’ll notice that I’m being negative, get annoyed about it, get annoyed about me unproductively getting annoyed and giving myself negative reinforcement for noticing, and then I will have built up enough bad affect that whatever other lines of thought I have will be poisoned too. I realize the self fulfilling prophecy and needless complication of this. I’m not happy about it. Bad mood+self awareness=recursive bad mood for me, it seems. Have you any advice on this particular failure mode?