Have you found any solutions?
Taking time off of work. Thankfully, paid time off is available to me.
On the plus side, at least you recognise its happening to you so you can try and make sure you don't make important decisions in this state.
Unfortunately, I recognize it's happening only some of the time. But important decisions seem to happen to be so frequently I sometimes wonder if my importance sensor is calibrated incorrectly.
I think I need to learn to pace myself better. I remember feeling in a very similar mood to this a while ago, reading some pointing out that people in this set of circumstances needed to learn to pace themselves better, and thinking something along the lines "Of course! That's exactly what I need to do!" and feeling inspired. And now, here I am, weeks later, complaining of a surprisingly similar problem... I think this is evidence I didn't actually learn the lesson of how to pace myself properly.
Edit: Based on this link, I apparently had this realization about pacing not even two months ago. http://lesswrong.com/lw/aks/emotional_regulation_part_i_a_problem_summary/5z6l?context=1#5z6l So I've updated my earlier comment to "weeks" later, and not months.
Good point. I have a tendency to treat the marathon like a sprint. Any plans for how to improve your pacing?
You've inspired me to come up with a mental list of "warning signs" that I should use as an indication I need to drop my hours for a while. (I'm thinking: skipping meals, drops in concentration and finding it harder to keep my temper).
A month or so ago I stumbled across this. It's a blog piece by one Robert Lanza M.D., a legitimate, respected biologist who has made important contributions to tissue engineering, cloning and stem cell research. In his spare time, he is a crackpot.
I know I shouldn't give any of my time to an online pop-psychology magazine which has "Find a Therapist" as the second option on its navigation bar, but the piece in question could have been *designed* to antagonise a LessWrong reader: horrible misapplication of quantum physics, worshipful treatment of the mysterious, making a big deal over easily dissolvable questions, bold and unsubstantiated claims about physics and consciousness... the list goes on. I'm generally past the point in my life where ranting at people who are wrong on the internet holds any appeal, but this particular item got my goat to the point where I had to go and get my goat back.
If reading LW all these years has done anything, it's trained me to take apart that post without even thinking, so (and I'm not proud of this), I wrote a short seven-point response in the comments lucidly explaining its most obvious problems, and signed it Summer Glau. It got removed, and I learned a valuable lesson about productively channeling my anger.
But this started me thinking about how certain things (either subjects or people) antagonise what I now think of as my LessWrong Parts, or more generally cause me distress on an epistemic level, and what my subjective experience of that distress is like so I can recognise and deal with it in future.
I've seen a few other people make comments describing this kind of distress, (this description of "being forced to use your nicely sharpened tools on a task that would destroy them" seems particularly accurate). Common culprits seem to be critical theory, postmodernism and bad philosophy. I've also noticed some people distress me in this fashion, in a way I'm still struggling to characterise.
Who else has this experience? Do you have any choice examples? What hurts you in your LessWrong Parts?