A good deal of the advice in this thread is specialized to the sort of single males that make up the bulk of HN/Reddit/tech. As someone who is neither single nor male (I'm a trans woman,) I wanted to provide another viewpoint.
So this isn't specifically in response to the OP, but as someone who has been there, I hope a passing Googler finds it.
The people telling you to meditate or do cognitive-behavioral therapy are almost certainly right.
Neither of them ever really gave me perceptible results until recently. Here is why. If you exist for long enough inside of your own head, you can forget that it's possible to exist any other way. Some variants of CBT [1] call this "cognitive fusion."
If step one of CBT is "thoughts beget feelings, feelings beget thoughts" then step zero has to be "you are not your thoughts and you are not your feelings." This sounds obvious, but I had to have a dissociative episode to grasp it - if you're as deeply fused with your thoughts as I've been, it may not be something you can really grok by hearing it from another person.
So you do meditation or you do therapy, but you unthinkingly assume that the patterns of thought and feeling that you're trying to replace have always been there, and you can't even perceive them. So it doesn't work - the core of CBT is the practice of talking back to your thoughts, but it's really, really hard to do that if you don't (or can't) see the space between you and your thoughts.
I understand that many people have an easily-accessed self-concept separate from what's inside of their head. Tapping into mine is something I have to work at. I don't know if such theory-of-mind problems are something that coders (or trans women) experience at a higher rate than the general population, but anecdotally it seems to be common enough that this is worth dropping here.
THIS! This was exactly my Main Problem for decades. For me, it took psychedelics to see past it. I could see meditation getting me there (I meditate now), but it would take a LOT of meditation.
SUPER grateful for this perspective. My partner and I are both struggling with some ways in which we have been unable to separate from those "it's always been this way so it's always this way" issues. Rather unrelated to the OP, but I found this helpful.
I'm afraid I'm not a therapist, but here's what mine tells me.
My self-esteem/self-compassion problems are essentially caused by a few beliefs about myself and the world that are flatly wrong. I grew up "profoundly gifted" in a rural area, and as a result was basically socialized to believe that my entire identity and value as a person hinged on how intelligent I was perceived to be (belief #1). This resulted in my always being on high alert, even when it didn't outwardly look like it - I had to perform, had to show off, had to be right or close to it, all the time (belief #2). I couldn't _ever_ give myself a break or show myself basic self-compassion for fear that it would "go to my head" and make me an arrogant prick (belief #3).
More recently, the more I learned about the world and its atrocities, the more I felt like they were things that I couldn't look away from or stop thinking about, even to take care of myself, or I was functionally no different from an evil or amoral person (belief #4). But of course I was too busy having anxiety attacks every time I thought about it to actually _do_ anything about those things, so...
There's more where this came from, but I think you get the idea.
I've had to work on unlearning these beliefs through a lot of CBT and ACT (linked in my previous post). The basic practice is something you can do by yourself - there are plenty of personal workbooks for it, which will be turned up by a Google search for "cbt/act therapy workbook." See also [1], [2].
The specific problem I was having, outlined in my earlier post, is that I had become so attached to these beliefs that I believed them on a sub-thought level even as I fully intellectually understood that they were wrong and unhelpful. Thus, when they started to get to me I would _know_ that they were adversely affecting me, but when I reached out to people I just kept finding different "rationalizations"/ways to express the same thing. We usually ended up arguing in circles.
I think the aforementioned dissociative episode I had was induced by playing this game continuously with my partner and another very good friend of mine over a prolonged period, more than a therapy session would typically last. I don't really know what happened, but what I experienced is described pretty well in [3]. My brain stopped processing what I was seeing or relaying my thoughts to my body. It would've been scary had I been able to feel anything, but I came out of it more able to separate myself from my thoughts, which is key.
A mindfulness practice may also help you with doing the above. See [4].
To be able to move on, I also had to construct an identity that wasn't defined by these things, which I did/am doing by further exploring and asserting my gender. This is beyond the scope of this post, and anyway my experience in this area is probably not applicable to you unless you're trans.
So this isn't specifically in response to the OP, but as someone who has been there, I hope a passing Googler finds it.
The people telling you to meditate or do cognitive-behavioral therapy are almost certainly right.
Neither of them ever really gave me perceptible results until recently. Here is why. If you exist for long enough inside of your own head, you can forget that it's possible to exist any other way. Some variants of CBT [1] call this "cognitive fusion."
If step one of CBT is "thoughts beget feelings, feelings beget thoughts" then step zero has to be "you are not your thoughts and you are not your feelings." This sounds obvious, but I had to have a dissociative episode to grasp it - if you're as deeply fused with your thoughts as I've been, it may not be something you can really grok by hearing it from another person.
So you do meditation or you do therapy, but you unthinkingly assume that the patterns of thought and feeling that you're trying to replace have always been there, and you can't even perceive them. So it doesn't work - the core of CBT is the practice of talking back to your thoughts, but it's really, really hard to do that if you don't (or can't) see the space between you and your thoughts.
I understand that many people have an easily-accessed self-concept separate from what's inside of their head. Tapping into mine is something I have to work at. I don't know if such theory-of-mind problems are something that coders (or trans women) experience at a higher rate than the general population, but anecdotally it seems to be common enough that this is worth dropping here.
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Acceptance_and_commitment_ther...