I highly recommend meditation. I have a steady practice of sitting for 20-30 minutes every day at around the same time, and find that it helps a lot with the various problems you've discussed. It feels great to have small period of time each day to work on steadying the mind and all its incessant thought loops.
Meditation is obviously not a panacea, and doesn't give much in the way of immediate results -- which unfortunately makes it easy to abandon. But after sticking with it for a while, I think you'll find that you'll have fewer emotional peaks and valleys, and will therefore be a bit more productive (amongst other things).
I'm glad you had some good luck with the Hacker's Diet. I too have been following the methods in that book for a couple years now, and have steadily lost a good amount of weight. I think the main thing that I took away from it was how important awareness is. Just recording my weight each day and plotting a moving average gave some insight that I never previously would have considered. And I think the same is true for meditation. You'd be surprised what new kinds of awareness about your own emotional state arises when you are just sitting with nothing but your mind.
Meditation is obviously not a panacea, and doesn't give much in the way of immediate results -- which unfortunately makes it easy to abandon. But after sticking with it for a while, I think you'll find that you'll have fewer emotional peaks and valleys, and will therefore be a bit more productive (amongst other things).
I'm glad you had some good luck with the Hacker's Diet. I too have been following the methods in that book for a couple years now, and have steadily lost a good amount of weight. I think the main thing that I took away from it was how important awareness is. Just recording my weight each day and plotting a moving average gave some insight that I never previously would have considered. And I think the same is true for meditation. You'd be surprised what new kinds of awareness about your own emotional state arises when you are just sitting with nothing but your mind.