Hi friends, have gotten (and gathered 😬) some questions since I started the youtube channel so made a video answering some of those. Hope to make some videos like this in the future so if you have any questions just ask in the comments.
So today i figured i would answer some questions i’ve received since i’ve started the channel normally when i make a video i will write down a script and i will think a lot about what i’m saying and then when i’m recording it i will kind of try and say things over and over again until i have something i’m happy with but with this video i figured i would try something
A bit less like a presentation and something a bit more authentic so i’m going to try to just do this not in one take but one take per question and not do things over so far i’ve already done this as a second take so i failed one time but we will see here if i manage to get through the rest without correcting myself anymore first question is where are you from so
I am from norway i do have a us citizenship though but i’ve never lived there but i think i would like to live there at some point but right now i am living in the czech republic how would you deal with developer imposter syndrome so i’ll probably make a video about imposter syndrome just as a whole at some point but to tackle the specifics of developer imposter
Syndrome this is something i felt quite strongly when i first started out as a developer and i think a big part of why people feel this when it comes to being a developer is that there’s just so many there’s just such a broad array of things that feels like something everyone should know but there’s just so much of it that no developer has kind of plugged all
The holes in terms of basic knowledge so no matter how long you’ve worked and no matter how good you are as a developer there will be some things that you’re just not that comfortable with or you don’t know or that you’ve never worked with before that to some other developer is just the most obvious thing in the world and the way you kind of combat this or the
Way i came over this at least was just by working more and getting more experience and i think more than anything just building a faith in myself or building some trust in myself then i can kind of i’m good at i’m good at my job and then i’m good at solving problems and that even if i have some holes in my developer knowledge that doesn’t really matter because if
I don’t know it i can learn it and even if i don’t know it it’s not that important that i haven’t or have stumbled over it yet so maybe a bit of a lame answer but i mean the main thing is just that you need to build some confidence and as you build confidence you should be more comfortable with just not knowing things okay next question i’m sometimes ruled by my
Emotions i’m trying to learn stoicism but it’s hard to pretend that the actions of others doesn’t hurt me how do you feel with this and what would you recommend how do you deal with this and what would you recommend um i do think that there’s probably a bit of a luck of the draw there in terms of how predisposition different people are to be impacted negatively
By others and i think i’m pretty lucky there that i’ve always been pretty stable with my emotions and other people have somewhat of a limited power over making me feel bad but how you should deal with this generally i think meditation is the first and best thing you can do the main thing is just when you get caught in kind of a negative emotion spiral or you’re
Feeling bad because someone did some horrible thing then more often than not the reason why you’re kind of caught in this thing and the reason why you’re stuck in this mindset is because you’re not aware that you’re angry or you’re not aware that you’re sad or depressed or whatever you’re not you’re just kind of caught in the emotions and not thinking about
Thinking about it from like five yards away and that’s what meditation helps you to do because it just trains you to be aware of your emotions and as soon as you notice like oh i’m being mad right now then you can take a step away from that situation kind of internally and just that quickly at least for me quickly diffuses how mad i am about something like if
I’m ever really mad about something and i get caught up in it and i do something i regret i was never aware at the moment that i was mad like i was not actively thinking oh i’m really mad right now i’ll actually kind of watch what i’m saying or what i’m doing other than meditation i do think also just constantly not constantly but frequently checking in with
Your emotions is good especially in just emotional situations so if you are feeling sad or feeling mad or feeling jealous or anything just get used to checking in on that emotion and just kind of doing a self analysis of how you’re feeling just like telling yourself like okay i feel quite mad right now why is that what did that person say um and lastly this
Is something i have a video about it is about charitable interpretations because most of the time when we’re feeling negative about something someone said or did we are giving them some motive or some we’re giving them some interpretation that is not necessarily what they mean but we are like putting our emotions based on how we feel like they must have thought
When they did the thing they did since my by far most viewed video is about written and adhd there is naturally a bunch of questions surrounding that so i kind of grouped them together here and a couple of the most common things that came up the first question is do you drink caffeine with ritalin or so i’ll just answer kind of my yes i do but i don’t drink a lot
Of caffeine i have basically always limited myself to one cup of coffee a day and i don’t think there’s anything wrong with drinking more than one cup of cup of coffee a day it is more just that i feel like it would become a endless cycle of chasing the caffeine dragon if i was like okay i had one cup but i’m still feeling tired maybe i should have one more and
Then the main thing i want to avoid is having like a caffeine crash at the middle of the day so i just have one cup of coffee in the morning as part of my morning ritual and then no matter how i feel i don’t drink any caffeine after that and i do notice since the question was partially about caffeine and ritalin that is one of the things i noticed with ritalin
If i’m like really tired and i drink a lot of coffee and i take ritalin that kind of compounds on itself and makes me quite jittery or it can at least next question there was a bunch of different variations on this question i just kind of baked them into one do you still take ritalin what is your dosage and have you ever tried to stop ritalin so i do still take
Ritalin and my dosage is i basically take instant release 10 milligram ritalin zero to three times a day it lasts for about four hours so i’ll take it like every four hours up to three times a day normally i’ll take it two times a day but it depends on how much i’m trying to focus and if i’ve ever tried to stop taking ritalin i do only take it when i need to sit
Down and when i need to focus so if i’m like traveling or if i’m doing something non-work related i won’t take ritalin and i have gone stretches of like weeks or even months without taking ritalin in the past so i do know how it is not being on it and it doesn’t bother me like i never if i’m like traveling or i’m like doing something not focused i never feel or
Think to myself like oh i would like some ritalin right now it just never even occurs to me unless i’m trying to do some focused work and then i’ll notice i’m getting more distracted if i haven’t taken it and then i’ll take it another question i got a lot is why i don’t take adderall or modafinil or if i tried a bunch of other different adhd medications and i have
Tried modafilin mondaphenyl a tiny bit but not really comparably to how much i’ve taken ritalin and i’ve never tried admiral actually the main reason is just that when i got the diagnosis i got prescribed ritalin right away and that worked well enough for me that i’ve never felt the need to experiment with it or try the different compounds but i do still think it
Would be interesting because you never know kind of what like maybe just using adderall are you saying i don’t know how to say this or how it’s spelled dex dex dex dex and fatman i don’t know decks something is something i’ve seen a lot of people say it’s just better than written than or adderall so i would maybe like to try at some point in the future and see
How it compares to ritalin since i take that so often but for right now at least i’m taking ritalin and that works fine and i’m happy with that do you experience side effects with ritalin i have always had quite mild side effects compared to the actual effect i get one very common one very commonly reported side effect is getting lack of appetite but for me i’ve
Always had my appetite be quite independent like i never really get super hungry but i also don’t really get super full so if i’m trying to eat healthy it is not that easy for hard for me to go on a diet but also if i’m not on the diet or if i’m trying to eat a lot it’s not that hard to me for me to eat a lot either so i’ve never really noticed this appetite
Suppression i’m sure it’s there on some level because it is a very prominent side effect but it’s never like impacted how much i’m able to eat or prevented me from eating or anything like that other side effects i did mention that if i have a little sleep mix it with a lot of caffeine anti-ritalin i can get a bit jittery and in the first few months i did notice
Some elevated heart rate but that kind of went away as i built some tolerance um and i think that’s about it i don’t take it before sleeping obviously or that would mess with my sleeping how do you know if you have adhd this is also a question that came up a bunch in the comments and in all sorts of different forms and there is no easy answer here like you can’t
Just take your online quiz and then you know these symptoms are symptoms that especially for inattentive adhd are symptoms that most people struggle with to some degree and at that question it kind of just becomes a question of how much that degree is like how much it’s impacting your life and at the end of the day the only thing you can really do is just assess
How badly you feel like this is something impacting you or has impacted your life and if you feel like it’s been severely debilitating then it might be worth seeking out a professional or getting an assessment the one other thing i will say here about getting an assessment is that i do think it’s worth seeking out a psychiatrist who is a adhd specialist at least
From my experience when i first went to a psychiatrist i waited in line for or in line i waited whatever i waited for six months to get my appointment to the psychiatrist and then when i got the appointment he basically just said like i told him i’m here because i think i might have adhd and i would like to get an assessment and he just told me like oh i don’t know
Anything about that do you want to tell me about your parents and about your upbringing and you want to buy my book and that’s kind of what happened so after that i sought out a psychiatrist who specializes in adhd and he just set me up with a neuro neurologist neuropsychiatrist i don’t know who did some testing and then did an assessment when one small thing goes
Wrong it causes me to fall off track and it takes weeks for me to start being productive how do you prevent yourselves from letting a stumble turn into a fall that takes weeks to get back out of so i feel like there’s two different sides to this there is the recovery and then there is the prevention so for the prevention part of things the most important thing is
Just to take breaks i talk a lot about taking regular breaks throughout the day on the day on this channel and at least for me i think that is the most important part of it but then it’s also important to take regular-ish breaks like every couple of months where you just have a few days or even a lot of days where you have no responsibilities and nothing planned out
And you just kind of do whatever you feel like and it’s important to take these types of breaks before you feel like you need them you can’t just wait until you feel like you need a break and then take it then because there’s a decent chance when that happens that it’s already too light and you’ve already fallen off the wagon and the last variable for prevention i
Think is stress i don’t think it’s as important like how many hours you work you don’t want to work all day every day obviously but i think it is more important when it comes to kind of hitting a wall or falling of the wagon that you have been too stressed for too long so if you have too many things if you’re juggling too many things or you have too many deadlines
That you feel like you can’t meet them all or basically if you just feel overwhelmed a lot of the time then i think that is more likely to cause you to follow the wagon than just working a lot of hours so if there’s anything you can do to reduce the stress or manage your deadlines organizing them can help doing this but not always sometimes you just have too
Much and you need to figure out ways to get things off your plate but basically reducing that stress in that way can help prevent this from happening and when it comes to recovery like you’ve fallen off the wagon and you want to get back on it i think the it’s important to take it in baby steps so when i like fall off things it generally comes in like a chain
Where i’ll fall off diet and exercise and then i will that will cause me to care less about sleeping and then when i’m not eating healthy and i’m not sleeping well then it becomes harder to become be productive or do all my random things so then everything just falls apart so when i’m kind of building up again building up my positive habits again the first thing i
Basically have like one week where the first thing i’m just focusing on is to get my diet and my exercise in order and then sleep and then from there i kind of progressively build up more and more momentum another thing i do use quite a lot in this early period especially if i’ve like been eating unhealthy and now i’m certainly craving unhealthy food for like first
Week then i do like to use my little kitchen safe self prevention mechanism and similarly with distracting websites like if i’m in a good mood now if i’m in a good rhythm i don’t ever really get tempted to go on distracted maps distracting websites but if i’m coming out of a unproductive period where i’ve just been lacing about then suddenly i have a very strong
Urge to check reddit every 30 minutes so i think those are the two things you’ve got to prevent it and then when you’re in it you got to take baby steps and also add some guardrails do you watch videos or play audiobooks at 2xspeed i know ali abdal who is a pretty big influence on this channel or how i started it he is a huge proponent of just speeding everything
Up and for me i do do it sometimes but it’s not that important to me or not something that i really enjoy doing basically the thought process for me is if i’m like trying to learn something or consume some information then the barrier for kind of entry or for learning it or internalizing it isn’t how fast i can consume the information it is kind of how deeply i
Can consume the information so in those cases i generally don’t do it and similarly when it comes to like listening to an audiobook or watching a video because i want to if i have a video that i actually want to watch then i want to enjoy it like i’m not looking to rush through it so say i have a podcast episode and it’s released for a podcast that i really like
Then i’m happy that it takes a long time because i like listening to the podcast so i don’t want to rush through it i want to have more content to listen to from this podcast there are definite exceptions though like if it is a lecture type video where i just feel like the content is too slow like when i was doing art lectures for my drawing course then i would
Often speed it up and i would instead just watch it several times and take more notes because it wasn’t like some information i was really trying to internalize deeply in the moment as i was watching it i more just wanted to get the important part get the important points from the video and then focus more on internalizing it while i was drawing and similarly with
Youtube videos since i started this channel i’ve started watching more youtube videos of things that i’m not like directly interested in but more just i want to see how other creators are making those videos and in though and in those cases i’ll also generally watch them at 1.5 x or 2x speed okay so that was me answering some questions i definitely noticed that
It is quite difficult to both think and speak at the same time when i’m not sure what i’m going to say i’m not used to recording these type of videos in the same way that i’m used to the other ones so it was a interesting experiment at least and i would like to continue making these types of videos so if you have any questions if it’s about me or productivity
Or habits or mindsets or any of the things i talk about on this channel then just feel free to ask them in the comments and maybe i will feature them in a next video thank you so much for watching and i’ll see you next wednesday
Transcribed from video
Ritalin, Caffeine and Imposter Syndrome. Answering your questions. By Early Owl
