Why we are thinking about time optimisation completely wrong

Technology has caused a radical change in the way we live our lives. Our eyes are opening to the damage apps like facebook and twitter do to us. We know that the infinite scroll was something we shouldn’t be engaging in.

I’ve enjoyed the headspace of turning my phone into a device that doesn’t have social media on it. I then went one step further and removed email for a ‘month’ challenge. Two weeks into the challenge I stopped even thinking about the challenge and my phone is just a device that doesn’t do email anymore. It’s totally great, I don’t have a burning to-do list of people talking to me in my pocket 24/7. I feel odd that I ever wanted that or felt proud about being such a productive person. Regardless this is not what this blog is about.

The brilliant rise of ‘Edutainment’ with fantastic podcasts and the ability to listen to Audiobooks is not something that we have really scrutinised. But it is worth investigating. I will explain why even using your phone for education should be limited. Your creativity and mental health will blossom and you will thank me for it. This blog will cover why limiting education time will make you a smarter and happier person.

An Extreme Example

There is a ratio of how much time you should spend studying and consuming new content in comparison to how effective you will be. In simple terms, this is astoundingly obvious.

If you spent 0% of your time studying or learning anything you would be clueless. You would get nothing done.

Conversely, if you spent 100% of your time studying and learning. There would be no time at all for having idea’s or doing anything with them. You would be a highly intelligent but equally useless entity. A net drain on humanity. No one wants that. Least of all you.

The Modern Problem

However, in the modern-day, we are surrounded by increasingly mountainous volumes of information that we can never keep up with. We are also surrounded by tech that can supply this information to us in a low-cost manner. We can instantly plug ourselves into learning at every spare moment. You feel wise as you ignore Facebook and other social media distractions to put on a podcast when you walk to work, make your food or hit the gym. You can watch educational videos during your lunch break. This all contributes to making a minor dent in the overwhelming amount of information you aren’t keeping up with.

But where is the time to process this information and make connections, have ideas or use it?

The Argument for 'Edutainment' and Plugging In

If you are studying, building a business, or trying to stay at the top of your field you don’t want to miss opportunities. You want to use the massive amounts of dead time that you have to learn more.

There is so much time in a day to consume the huge variety of useful information available on audio and video. It can give you different opinions about your field or help you learn complex ideas about new things.
You can also learn about humans by even listening to fiction. It shows you how to create a good story or a bad story, and you can even learn about love from 50 Shades of Grey when you are looking for it.

By not using all the extra time to learn you will unlikely be a change-maker in your field.

Before you Press Play

There is a happy medium between optimising your life for learning new stuff and spending spare time with an unoccupied brain. It is hard to find exactly but crucially important.

Like the endless scroll of social media, we have an infinite scroll of edutainment available to us. I started a list of books to read this year from recommendations and 6 months in it is already 350 books long and I’m certain they are all pretty awesome. A ten-minute session looking in my podcast feed easily gives me 100 new podcasts to get through. I get bombarded with lists of amazing blogs that grow my mind and science journalists and (some) newspapers produce brilliant content. Then there’s also politics, the economy, and of course the news. Let’s not even talk about the great content available on the BBC, Youtube and Netflix.

We feel we need to keep up with it. As you start your walk to work and you aren’t listening or doing something, your brain is free to roam around. It feels inefficient to just do nothing, you can instantly solve that with your readily available edutainment and can constantly feel productive.

The Unrecognised Value of Doing Nothing

Doing ‘nothing’ doesn’t provide an instant reward of productivity. You never ‘know’ that you are going to have good ideas if you do nothing for the next 20 minutes of walking. Leaving your brain at peace is setting sail into the unknown with perhaps zero rewards, and it all seems very boring and pointless.

We need to train our brains to not require instant gratification, this feeling of needing to do something is what kicks the brain into gear. It can trigger the brain to do awesome things all by itself if you let it. If you hear that trigger of the brain wanting to do something and just stick on someone else’s thoughts to listen to then you are turning off your brain instead of firing it up.

I will go as fire as stating that you are pissing on your own bonfire instead of adding fuel to it.

You need to learn to like that feeling of an unoccupied brain and embrace it instead of quickly finding a way to suppress it. You need to recognise the brains' inbuilt hunger to do cool stuff for what it is. Let your brain wrestle with the world's problems like the innovator your podcasts are telling you it be.

Body Analogies

Exercise for your brain

If every time you started to feel slightly out of breath someone sat you down and did everything for you, you would not be fit. You would get no exercise at all. This would be grossly unhealthy for your body and produce a feedback loop of decreasing fitness, even getting out of your chair would begin to challenge you. You would end up never using your muscles that would waste away. You would stop being able to walk and become a bed-bound bag of uselessness.

My question to ask yourself. As soon as your brain is about to do some work by itself, should you be sitting it down and making it rest?

Over-Feeding

If you spent all day surrounded by sweets and biscuits you would be constantly reminded of the available food. You would become obese if every time you had a passing thought that perhaps you could eat one of those biscuits you then ate one.

The human is designed to be able to overeat whilst food is available. This prevents it from starving in periods of no food. Humans need to stop their innate behaviour to eat when food is available to be able to stay healthy.

We now live with a device in our pocket that is a constant reminder that we can be learning more things. Our brains are designed to feel a need to satisfy that hunger. Our brain is used to an environment of low information. It was engineered in a time when books didn’t exist and the odd occasion you found something new in your environment you investigated the crap out of it. If once a blue moon someone turned up with news about anything, you listened as if your life depended on it because sometimes it did.

Thus your brain wants to learn about every new thing in its environment to stay up to date so it doesn’t get killed.

That is a powerful innate behaviour optimised to keep your genes going to the next generation. The reason you exist today is directly because your ancestors were better at obsessing about new things in their environment than their peers.

However, the modern world is not going to kill you if you don’t know every new thing. Just like with food, if you let your brain operate on default behaviour it will make you incredibly unhealthy. You need to stop trying to learn everything.

What Even is 'Being Productive'

We need to learn that actually doing nothing is doing something. Your brain is making connections and its best ideas come when you do things like meditating, menial work or exercise without anything else going on. You need to learn to hear your inner voice and become good friends with it.

Focussed vs. Diffuse Thinking

In the science of learning, you need to spend focussed time on new material to understand things. But the magic happens when you stop thinking about it and let the brain go into a 'diffuse' mode of thinking where it makes connections happen between different ideas. This is where billion-dollar ideas like AirBnB and Uber came from, uniting two different bodies of knowledge in the brain into a novel concept. This simply doesn't happen whilst you are in focussed mode.

Learning vs. Rating

You learn much more from a book or podcast if you try and recall it than if you were to just listen to it again. Yet madly most of us consume all this stuff just once and then never revisit it. We quickly forget all the specifics, we can vaguely remember how it made us feel if we remember it at all. So you are basically just creating a pile of ratings in your head by optimising all this time for consuming.

If you spend some time after each podcast or book chapter to think about what you just learnt and test yourself on why it’s useful, you will genuinely gain twice as much from it. That takes 5 minutes but it doubles the effectiveness of the hour you just spent listening to it.

Life Processing

Then there is everything else in your life that you are learning about and dealing with that needs its own processing time. If you don't put time into thinking about what's going on and learning from it and how to improve, then surprisingly you don't learn from it or improve. Tools like journaling can radically increase your rate of improvement and benefit your levels of happiness and well-being.

Playtime

Imagine you are at work and for some odd reason a toddler appears out of nowhere and wants to play with you. It wants to go for a walk and look at flowers and jump in puddles. (or in my own experience, look at puddles and jump in flowers). Then it asks annoying things that are hard to answer:
"why is the sky is blue?
Why are Spaghettis O’s unhealthy and Baked Beans healthy, they grow on the same tree?
And then why does anyone even care about flowers in the first place if they aren’t for jumping in?"

It wants to explore the world and it seems to want to explore your mind and put things together. This is tragically unhelpful for you and so you give it an iPad and hope that it occupies itself and won’t disturb you.

This distraction technique in the hope of getting more work done is what you are doing to your own brain. When your own inner voice pops up and lets you know that you aren’t doing anything you realise you have some spare time. You feel like you could be ‘doing work’ by sticking on a podcast. Your brain will just do pointless stuff otherwise and you’ve got an endless list of things to get through.

When you do this you are turning off your actual consciousness. And yes when you first listen to your consciousness it does pretty dumb stuff as it explores the contents of the environment and your mind. Sometimes it is a whiney bitch and sometimes it is obsessing about the wrong things. But if you let it play around and listen to it and take it seriously, it will reward you back. Let it explore the environment and let it explore the contents of your mind and just like the toddler it will learn profound things.

This isn't a toddler but I saw a puppy and then it magically ended up here for no sensible reason

Change What you Think

When there is a spare moment and you start thinking for yourself for a second, you need to hear your inner voice and say:

"SHOOT. Hello me. Wow, it’s great to find some time together. What’s going on buddy. Let’s have a chat"

Instead of the current:

"SHOOT. I was hoping to get work done. Let’s give you something to do. So I can carry on working"

Your inner voice is not a toddler that you have nothing in common with. This is not a massive drag on your day that you need to escape from but instead a blessing to make the most of.

We need to stop feeling like we are constantly at work and we need to stop feeling like our inner voice is a bad thing to spend time with.

This is important, because your inner voice isn’t just your best friend. It is literally the actual real you. You need to get to know it, listen to it and take it seriously. It’s essential that you stop treating it like a pathetic things that needs distracting. Stop putting stuff in front of it in the hope it never bothers you.

Find out what you actually think and know. Explore ideas and actually take useful thoughts to the next level.

Exercise time

The combination of exercise and not having other stuff going on in your brain is the perfect breeding ground for good ideas.

Exercise very mildly occupies the brain but leaves a lot of space for thinking. It also releases hormones that make you think more positively. This prevents any negative doubts from blocking potential good ideas before you have given time to think about it further. It provides a golden period where your brain can just explore random stuff that it knows and make connections.

Optimising all your exercise time for learning keeps your brain in a focussed mode where it never has ideas. You have to unplug and let your brain think it’s own thoughts instead of permanently listening to those of others.

The Minimum Requirements

Depending on your current situation there are different guidelines. As I mentioned at the start you will fall behind if you never engage in learning useful stuff. The books I have read on my list of 350 this year have done incredible things to how I think. But I’ve also found that unplugging is where I put all that information together and do something useful with it.

I think you should have an obligatory 20 minutes a day where you are completely in touch with yourself. Meditation is brilliant, but if you want to do yoga or walking or cooking it really doesn’t matter. And this is just minimum to be a human.

The Thinking vs. Listen Ratio

After the minimum requirements are filled I think shooting for a balanced ratio is the best strategy. The same as the saying of two ears and one mouth. I think two-thirds of your time listening to info is fine. But you should block out one third for actually thinking your own thoughts.

This depends on the person and the situation. Sometimes I feel like I do just want to do nothing and that my brain has too many ideas anyway. Sometimes having something to listen to is what gets me out the door to go for a run in the first place. But other-times you can feel overwhelmed by problems and you should use all your time available to think.

Conclusion

Based on the best research on how to learn, giving your brain unfocussed time is key. This time is the ultimate source of creativity and brightest ideas.

Stop distracting yourself with other peoples thoughts and give yourself time to listen to your own thoughts.

This is an ironic conclusion as I run the Growth Mindset Podcast which I'd like to think is Edutainment at it's finest. Hopefully this proves I'm not trying to sell you anything except a better life. This wasn't driven by some anti-Apple anti-Amazon complex and just a product of my studies in evolutionary psychology and general anthropology. (human watching). Putting one domain of knowledge together with another and having ideas.

Effects

I was in Tel Aviv last week and wanted to go for a run to the beach and have a swim. Not wanting to leave my phone on the beach I went for an hour run with just myself. An actual human with no device attached to it running around a city it's never been in. How did this become a rare thing so quickly? (ten years ago I drove around America with just a compass...)
It was one of the most lovely mornings ever. I came back with more solutions to my problems and writing ideas than I thought possible. It seems crazy that I usually spend so much of this valuable time with myself having someone else’s thoughts permanently distracting my brain.

I don’t know how far I ran, how many steps I did or where I even went. But that doesn't actually matter. I focussed on new metrics of success for a productive run, number of ideas and sweatiness. I smashed both records.

Question Yourself

I think we should all step back and define what our phone is actually for. As we realise the importance of our mental health and the problems our devices are causing us, this is more important than ever. We need to let go of our FOMO to keep up with the world to spend more time with ourselves.

Simply put. No one else is going to think for you and solve your problems. If you stop being able to think for yourself you are screwed.

Related Reading

Enjoyed this? You might like these similar posts on the topic of being more sensible:

• Top Strategies for Better Decisions (That You aren't Using)

• The Best Life Hack that isn't on any Life Hack List

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This will form part of a five part "pentalogy" (learnt a new word). Be sure to not miss out on the rest of it!

I almost lost my mind once. It was the best thing that ever happened to me.

I almost lost my mind because I wasn’t taking care of it.

Way too much crunch time for an important project, coupled with some ongoing issues in my personal life, pushed my ability to cope with day-to-day life into the red.

Too many tickets. Not enough time. Lost, so very lost, in code.

My heart raced. My mind raced. My ability to think clearly — so important when you’re trying to get working software out the door — went through the floor.

I was super, super stressed.

It affected everything, including how I felt, my relationships, my sleep and appetite, and especially my ability to do my job. It wasn’t a good place — I was on the edge of somewhere nasty.

Total Burnout.

It was the best thing that ever happened to me because, while navigating my way back from the edge, I learned a whole heap about how humans work.

In particular I learned about our mental and physical limits, the nature of stress and anxiety, and most importantly, how to take care of myself so that I could stop this happening again. I want to share some of that with you here.

It’s valuable information, and it applies to everyone. Programming often scores well in terms of job satisfaction, but programmers are, despite their protestations to the contrary, humans and are subject to the same limitations as anyone else.

_>> This article originally appeared on www.codingmindfully.c_om. <<

How stress works

Programming culture emphasises excellence and ability. This can make it difficult to admit to ourselves or others that we might be having an issue with stress.

However, it’s literally baked into our neural and physical circuitry, so everybody has to deal with it at some point.

Stress in the mind and body

Stress is a series of physiological and mental changes that happen when our body and mind perceive a threat or challenge in our environment.

Stress and relaxation are defined by the level of physiological arousal and muscular tension in the body.

To be relaxed is to have the optimal level of physiological arousal and muscle tension for your current situation.

To be stressed or anxious is to have too much physiological arousal and muscle tension for your current situation.

The stress response — also known as fight or flight — kicks in when we process information that indicates we’re under threat or facing a challenge. The physical symptoms of arousal can include:

• muscle tension
• increased heart rate and blood pressure
• shallow breathing (into the chest rather than the belly)
• nausea
• a sense of mental busyness
• narrow attentional focus
• emotional reactivity (you lose your sh*t with everyone)

Evolutionary theory offers a neat way of explaining anything that humans experience in terms of survival.

The stress response can be viewed as a means of keeping us alive by preparing us to meet a challenge.

All of the physical responses associated with stress serve a purpose. For example, we tense up in preparation for explosive movement — very useful if we’re about to escape from a bear that we’ve encountered on a forest path.

Not always so useful if we’re hunched over a desk running some unit tests…

Or our digestion shuts down so that the energy it uses might be redirected to making our escape, which explains the nausea.

The same thing happens with our immune response. Energy is conserved by shutting it down temporarily, at the expense of reduced immunity. This is why you often get sick at times of increased stress, and why excessive stress is associated with long-term, chronic illnesses.

Stress and the nervous system

Stress is a pretty low-level response in humans. It’s mediated by the sympathetic branch of the autonomic nervous system. Think of this as some pretty deeply embedded hardware — we’re talking at the level of BIOS here.

The autonomic nervous system is responsible for a whole heap of automatic behaviour in humans — stuff you don’t have to think about, you just do.

There’s a parasympathetic branch too, which has pretty much the opposite effect when it’s activated. Which is great news, as we’ll see later.

You can think of these as like the accelerator and brake in a car. You need both to get to where you’re going, but too much of them and you’re either not going anywhere, or driving straight off the road.

Perception of threat

An interesting thing about the stress response is that it doesn’t require the existence of a real, physical threat. Simply remembering a stressful situation can trigger the physical and mental responses. Go ahead, try it!

The threat response can be activated whenever a challenge or threat is perceived. This is why an email or conversation with your boss can be stressful, even though you are not in immediate physical danger.

Good and bad stress

A little bit of everything is good, in moderation. Red wine, project management processes, and even stress.

Stress is actually a pretty useful response in a challenging or threatening situation. One of the many reasons that we’ve thrived as a species is our ability to evade threats and rise to challenges.

We need a little bit of stress response in order to get things done. Call this good stress.

For example, as I’m writing this article, I’m experiencing some low-level parasympathetic activation. My foot is ticking as adrenaline is released, and my mind feels sharpened as I concentrate on the process of writing.

This is optimal for the situation of trying to create an article. And, crucially, when I’m finished, my mind and body will return to a less aroused, less tense state, because I know how to relax them both.

The optimal state to produce is known as flow and I wrote about it here.

The stress response is a crucial part of meeting the challenges we face.
Stressful events can even cause a strengthening effect.

Many of the things that are “good for us” cause a stress response in the body (think heavy exercise in particular).

The difference between good stress and bad stress is the chance to return to equilibrium (homeostasis), which has beneficial effects in itself.

We’ve all been buzzed with the adrenaline of getting through a coding session many times in our career. For some of us, it’s addictive.

Low-level stress provides fuel for getting things done. Many of us learn to embrace and even enjoy it.

The problems come when our stress response is activated excessively or continuously, without the chance to return to equilibrium.

Every programmer has been on a death march at some point. Think about how you feel after a few weeks in crunch mode. You’re probably tired, maybe getting sick, your concentration is waning, and you just generally don’t feel good.

Your focus deteriorates, which is no good for your productivity.

It turns out that continuously flooding your system with stress hormones, diminishing your digestive system and immune response, and being consumed by excessive thinking is not only uncomfortable, but also pretty bad for you in the long term.

It’s this type of stress I’ll talk about for the rest of the article, because it’s the most common.

Programmers and stress

Sometimes, there are inherent sources of stress caused by the nature of the career itself.

As programmers, we need to consider a number of factors when examining our relationship to stress.

We live in our heads

Most of us turned to a career in programming because we like thinking about things and solving problems. We live in our heads a lot of the time, and are happy that way.

This means that we can become a bit disconnected from our bodies.

Because we’re not always paying attention, it’s easy to ignore some of the physical symptoms of stress. If we don’t notice the problem, we can’t go about solving it.

Part of healthy stress management is noticing when we’re experiencing excessive stress, so we can take appropriate action.

Cultural expectations

Extrinsic sources of stress are found in the working culture we operate in. Stress and busyness can be seen as a badge of honour, a sign of a productive employee, or just part of the job.

Because we’re all amazing super-human code machines (hint: we’re not!), there’s often an expectation that we’ll keep delivering to a super-high standard sprint after sprint, project after project, with no time to rest or repair.

Intrinsic sources of stress come from within ourselves. Programming culture values intellect, which causes us to compare ourselves to others, which leads to impostor syndrome or feeling guilty, both sources of stress in their own right.

Diet and exercise

“A programmer is a mechanism for turning caffeine into code,” so goes the old saying. I’d add sugar to that list too! Stimulants like caffeine actually amplify the stress response. Again, this is fine in moderation, but not great long-term.

Sitting at a desk all day isn’t exactly conducive to physical fitness. The tension that is part of the stress response can accumulate in the body, leading to huge buildups of stress over time.

Diet and exercise are both definitely part of the equation when it comes to programming and stress. Consider getting more active or taking it easy on the caffeine and sugary snacks for a while.

Stress management strategies

So what’s a busy programmer to do? Stress exists, it’s going to get excessive sometimes, and, in the long term, it’s not good for you if you don’t work on your relationship to it.

If you knew this about a system you’d developed and maintained, you’d take action, right? (RIGHT???)

Thankfully, stress has been thoroughly researched. There are a number of strategies that you can consider when trying to manage stress in your life.

They fall into three categories:

• Address the source
• Undo the damage
• Reduce your baseline

Address the source

Sometimes it’s necessary and sensible to work on removing the sources of excessive stress in your life. Think about what causes you the most stress, and work to do something about it.

With low level, acute stress, it’s possible to mentally reframe it. Is that actually stress you are feeling about an upcoming demo? Could you possibly interpret those sensations as excitement instead? Sometimes this little mental shift is all that it takes to feel differently about the stressful situation.

But for ongoing stresses, it might be time to start making changes. As a grown adult human, you have more power than you know, so start using it!

Start a conversation with your boss about the effect all the overtime is having on your output. Drop that troublesome client. Think about changing jobs if necessary. Ask your family for more support with personal administration if you can.

Consider removing yourself from any toxic relationships in your life. If you’re pressed for time, consider whether you really need all of those side projects.

In short, find some time to rest and work on applying the brakes of the nervous system for a bit.

Often there are internal sources we can work on too. What are your beliefs about being busy? Do you see it as important? Is it part of your self-worth?

Do you push yourself extra hard, even though it probably wouldn’t matter if you worked ten percent less? Do you see rest as a sign of weakness?

What about your outlook? Do you tend to catastrophise? Do you look on every situation with negativity or positivity? How is that voice in your head when you listen to it? Upbeat or gloomy?

How about your diet? Your physical exercise routine?

A quick audit of the internal and external sources of stress in your life will provide you with a list of actions you can take to remove them, if possible. It will really help to talk this over with a friend or colleague. It’s sometimes hard to take a clear perspective when you’re in the middle of a stressful patch.

Undo the damage

Of course, it’s not possible to remove all of the sources of stress in life. If you’ve found a way, untold riches await, so congratulations! And please let me know your secret.

You can certainly try to undo the damage though. And exercise is an extremely effective way to do this. Exercise release endorphins, which not only feel good, but also act to reduce the negative effects of released stress hormones.

Exercise regimes are extremely personal. It can take a while to find one that works for you. My preferred stress buster is yoga — it combines physical demands with deep breathing, which, as we’ll soon see, is a great way to initiate relaxation. But anything that involves moderate to strong physical exercise will do.

Meditation has also been a great tool for me. It’s a simple practice that can have immediate results.

Pro-active stress management

We all have a baseline stress level that fluctuates during our lifetime. By taking a pro-active approach, it’s possible to reduce this baseline.

Making stress reduction a focus of your life is a worthy goal. The less affected you are by excessive stress, the more effective you’ll be.

Embrace conscious relaxation exercises, such as the one below. Or learn mindfulness skills, which numerous studies have shown reduce the effects of stress.

A quick relaxation exercise

Here’s a quick exercise that helps most people relax.

There’s a video version on the front page of my website, www.codingmindfully.com — check it out now. If you enjoy it, sign up to my list and I’ll send you more goodies.

It works on the simple principle that it’s possible to activate the parasympathetic branch of your nervous system — the part responsible for the relaxation response. You start to slow and deepen your breathing.

Slow, deep breathing is associated with the parasympathetic response, so when you take control of this aspect of the relaxation response, it tricks your body into activating the rest.

Find a place where you can sit quietly for a few minutes. Your desk will do, but if you can find somewhere you can be alone and undisturbed, that’s even better.

Most of us are shallow, fast breathers, which is associated with the stress response. For this exercise, place your hand on your belly. We’ll focus on breathing deeply.

Close your eyes, take a note of how you feel, and slowly take a breath in. Breathe in such a way that you feel your belly rise before your chest expands. Put your hand on your belly so you can feel it move.

Make the breath as long and slow as you can — perhaps it might start out slightly faster, and then slow down. As you exhale, let your belly contract before your chest.

Repeat this for a couple of minutes, generally for around ten to fifteen breaths. Notice any change in your state of mind or body?

How well did this work for you?

Do you pass the stress test?

Everyone has different needs when it comes to learning how to manage stress in their life. How resilient you are in the face of stress is determined by a complex set of biological and environmental factors. Your relationship with stress can, and does, change over your lifetime.

I’ve created a simple checklist that will tell you if you’re dipping out of healthy stress and into burnout — you can download it here.

Many people find that learning more about their relationship with stress is very rewarding. Chronic stress is a state of misdirected energy, which causes many aspects of your life to suffer.

There is a delicate balance between optimal performance and stress. Too little or too much stress kicks us “out of the zone”.

Taking control of excess stress has numerous benefits, whether they be purely physical, such as improved immune function, blood pressure, and so on; or mental, such as clearer thinking, improved focus, and increased likelihood of finding flow states.

As a programmer, with a mentally demanding job, it’s natural to look for ways to improve the quality of your thinking, and stress management is a direct route.

A stressed person is emotionally reactive, which often affects communication and decision-making. Learning to manage excessive stress naturally leads to emotional balance, which has a knock-on effect in all of your relationships: relaxed people are easier to be around.

Programmer burnout is a real phenomenon, and often job stress is a big factor. I’ve personally experienced it twice (which is how I came to learn so much about stress!).

In all engineering projects, preventative measures are cheaper and more effective long term. So if you feel you’re on the way to burnout, why not apply this approach to stress management in your life?

So how does stress play out in your life? Just enough? Too much? What could you do today to start reducing the burden?

Email me — daragh at my domain (codingmindfully) dot com and let me know!

What is Meditation?

Meditation can be many things depending on whom you ask. In this article, it refers to the idea of intentionally sitting and focusing on the present. Although it’s most often associated with Eastern religions, it’s not a religious practice. It doesn’t matter if you’re Christian, Muslim, Mormon, Jewish or any other faith. It’s a way to train the mind, which will change your perspective on life.

When I mention the word “meditation” in the article, I’m referring to “a practice to develop conscious awareness of the present moment.” But, I will additionally use the word “mindfulness.” They are terms often mentioned together or used as synonyms.

Meditation is the formal practice of sitting down, or walking, standing, or lying down. Whereas mindfulness is about being aware, and it applies to everything.

To give an example, when I wake up in the morning, I sit on a small cushion and observe my breath for 15 minutes. This is an example of meditation. While pouring a glass of water, I spill water on the ground and notice my feelings of anger rise up inside me. This noticing of anger rising but smiling in spite of it is mindfulness. I’m mindful of my emotions which allows me to stay in control.

Meditation and Programming

In the world of programming, we often need focused attention when building programs and writing code without repetitions. Think of it as being “in the zone” or as some know it, in the “flow” state. This is when you submerge yourself in your text editor and forget about everything else. Your mind is only thinking of that present moment. Being in this mode, you fully experience that “coding high” of writing functions that make or do things to achieve a bigger goal.

As mentioned before, meditation is a practice to develop your level of attention on the present moment. Now, if we practice meditation on a regular basis, we can train our mind in to live with more awareness. This can be applied to any area of life.

And that includes programming as well — because of the amount of focus needed while developing software. As programmers, we need to meditate and spend time observing our breath and nothing else. We will be able to translate that practice while coding, and be able to focus more deeply on our programs.

My Personal Experience

I began meditating four years ago when I heard about the benefits from a TED talk I watched called The Happy Secret to Better Work by Shawn Anchor. The idea of a regular meditation practice and the ability to live fully in the present interested me. I remember buying a book on Zen Buddhism and then started meditating. I had no idea what I was doing.

This initial meditation phase started when I was studying abroad in Buenos Aires, Argentina during college in 2013. After watching the video, I went to a bookstore and looked in the Eastern Philosophy section hoping I’d find something on meditation. Luckily for me, I found one titled Los tres pilares del Zen or in English, The Three Pillars of Zen. “Genial! I’ll learn to meditate and practice my Spanish at the same time”, so I thought to myself.

Although it seemed like a great idea at first, it proved to be tougher than I anticipated. My Spanish language skills were good. But the technical language used to describe the meditation practices troubled me in the beginning. Luckily there were photos in the book, and I used my dictionary when I didn’t understand something.

I started meditation with a simple practice. I observed my breath. One inhale and one exhale = breath. I counted to ten. This was a great starting point for a beginner. I kept a small journal and did it a few times per week but couldn’t keep it consistent. It was tough because I only did it when I found time instead of adding it to my routine.

Fast-forward to 2014 and 2015 — I continued meditating on and off a few times per week. Yet, I still had trouble maintaining a daily practice. I tried doing it before bed, but I wasn’t consistent because the nights on the weekends were unpredictable.

In August 2016, I decided to make it a part of my nightly routine. Each night, I followed the same steps:

• Set alarm for the next morning
• Sit down and observe the breath for a few minutes
• Brush teeth

This routine made my practice 5x more effective. I added meditation to my life and made it a habit. As a result of this, it became easier and easier to find time for meditation. I didn’t have to think because it was part of my routine.

More recently in July, I switched my evening practice to a morning practice after a friend convinced me to switch. He suggested meditating in the morning because it provided you with a wonderful way to start the day. It also gave you a “blank slate” to begin your day.

Like before, I created an “automated” routine and added in meditation to make it easier for my brain to remember. The routine is as follows —

Wake up

• Wash face
• Meditate for 15 minutes
• Smile and begin day with a clear mind

Besides switching to a morning practice, my friend suggested I use a free app to track my meditation progress called Insight Timer. I love it because it has a meditation timer, guided meditations, and a minimal social network so you see when your friends meditate. You could hold yourself accountable this way. I also suggest trying Yoga Nidra for helping you sleep.

I’ve been using the app to track my meditation progress and recently achieved 100 days in a row as of November 5th. My goal is to hit 365 days in a row.

The Benefits

The purpose of writing this article was to explain how meditation can benefit all in the tech industry. It can be of help especially in a field like programming, where we constantly struggle or feel frustration when things don’t work out.

Here are some ways you, as a programmer and human being, may benefit from meditation —

Focus on one block of code at a time

Taking on new projects as a developer can be daunting. The most difficult part of a new project is figuring out where to start. We immediately think about all the things that need to be accomplished.

Similar to focusing only on the breath, we should dedicate our efforts on one piece at a time.

Mindfulness will help us become aware of the stress and all the working parts of our project. Programmers must let go that feeling of overextension and begin with the first task. We stay mindful of the task at hand. This will prevent “thought-overload” when developing more advanced software. It can even be helpful with agile software development like Scrum, where you’re adapting often.

The more you meditate, the stronger your minds becomes (Mrazek).

Enhance your cognitive abilities

Programming has many difficult concepts we must wrap our heads around to solve complex problems. To do that, we need the cognitive ability to process theory and visualize how all the moving pieces work together in one single system.

In a recent article published in the Harvard Business Review, Goleman states that mindfulness practice can help us with both “strategic work” and problem-solving. Through meditation, you’ll be able to further enhance these cognitive abilities. This in turn will benefit your study of programming no matter your skill level.

Live in the present

In order to maintain a healthy balance between working as a programmer and life, we should embrace the present moment . This applies to coding and also other areas of life.

The beautiful part about meditation is “singular focus” — by that I mean, doing one thing and only that thing. When you sit to meditate, you have one goal — be there in that moment. It’s easier said than done but the principle is what’s important. If we apply that principle in our lives, it can serve us in many areas. When you’re with your family or friends, be there in the conversation and moment. When you’re coding, write code and focus on building. Meditation facilitates building this skill of living in the present.

Handling the ups and downs of coding

As programmers, we often feel stressed when we can’t solve a problem or when we’re behind on a deadline. It can also happen when we’ve been tasked with something we don’t know how to do. I have had this issue happen to me many of times. Sometimes while experiencing much frustration, I contemplate smashing my computer onto the ground.

With regular meditation practice, we can learn to use our breath as a way to handle negative situations in a stress-free way (Corliss). Using this method, we can apply it to those situations in which you run into an issue or a bug that you cannot fix.

Later, you realize it’s because you were missing a semicolon, or because you forgot to account for something in your function. Those small moments can have a large impact on the rest of your coding session. Using our breath we can stop, let the negative feelings come in, experience them for that moment and then let them go. This will allow you to bounce back quicker when you’re struggling with a project.

Increase your level of happiness

The most significant benefit of any type of meditation is an increase in your level of happiness. When you meditate, you learn to focus on the simplest activity we do every day — breathing. By learning to observe the breath, you train your mind to take joy in the little things. You wake up to life and start to live every moment in the present instead of living in the past or future as most of us tend to do.

After you start meditating, you’ll notice how much satisfaction you feel after accomplishing even the littlest of things. Such as when you write your first function or when you figure out how to horizontally center that div. All those “small wins” that you once took for granted or didn’t fully enjoy will feel bigger, because you pay more attention to them — just like your breath (Fredrickson).

Here’s how to get started

Here’s a list of steps you can take today to get started —

1. Figure out how much time you can spend meditating. My suggestion would be between 2–10 minutes. Anything more and you may feel overwhelmed. It’s better to start soft and gently.
2. Decide where you’re going to do it — usually a quiet room works best. It can be done sitting on the ground or in a chair.
3. Set a timer for however long you decide to meditate. This way, you won’t have to worry about checking the time every 15 seconds.
4. Sit, take a deep breath in through your nose and out through your mouth. Smile.
5. Breathe slowly and observe the air coming in through your nose and going out your mouth. One inhale and one exhale count for each breath. Count ten breaths then start over.
6. When your mind wanders, stop, acknowledge it, smile, then return to your breath. This is *the most important step. It’s inevitable that your mind will wander but you must not punish yourself for this. It’s normal behavior but we must remind the mind that we acknowledged it and then return to the breath. I wish someone would have told me this when I began meditating. I didn’t learn this until this year — almost 4 years later.
7. After your timer goes off, thank yourself for making time to meditate and smile.

If that felt good, see if you can do it two times next week. Then, add another day the week after. You can also experiment with increasing the amount of time you meditate. I decided to start at the beginning again with 2 minutes in July and then slowly worked my way up to 18 minutes.

I learned this technique from an awesome book called The Motivation Hackerby Nick Winter. He calls it the “success spiral.” You start off with a small number that seems too trivial to track (like 2 minutes a day) and then slowly increment it until you reach your goal.

I do want to stress this — that the number isn’t important. What’s most important is that if you’re serious about it, you dedicate time to it every day. Like #100DaysOfCode, the best thing you can do is make it part of your daily routine until it becomes a habit. You’ll get more out of it.

Recommended Resources

Just like coding, there are a plethora of free resources out there! I highly recommend doing your own research and seeing what you find. Here are some suggestions to get started —

If you like books and want to read about meditation

• Awakening the Buddha Within by Lama Surya Das . This book changed my entire perspective on life. I loved it. It was one of the first books I read on meditation and Buddhism.
• Why is the Dalai Lama Always Smiling? by Lama Tsomo . Tsomo uses a more casual approach so everyone can easily relate to her. But she also includes scientific evidence to back-up her claims. I really enjoyed it. She also includes different Tibetan meditation practices.
• Real World Mindfulness for Beginners by Brenda Salgado . A dear friend recommended it because it includes practices and exercises good for beginners. I hope to use it with my co-workers in the office.
• The Mind Illuminated by Culadasa . This book is a little more advanced. I’m reading it now to bring my meditation practice to the next level.

If you like e-courses

Try this Free 8-week e-course on meditation for beginners by Namchak. I did this in August 2016 and have since been using the meditation technique during my everyday practice.

If you like apps

• Insight Timer — It’s free, has a timer with bells and guided meditation. You can also add friends and see their progress (great for accountability!)
• Headspace — This one is paid, but I’ve heard great things from friends who use it.

Regardless of who you are, meditation is a powerful practice that will change your life. I lead a meditation group that meets twice a month via Google Hangout. If you start meditating and would like a community with whom you can study and practice, you can send me a DM on Twitter for more details.

I hope you found this article useful. Please let me know by clapping, sharing it on social media or leaving a comment below. And if you’re an experienced meditator, please share any additional resources in a comment below for the community!

Sources

• Corliss, Julie. “Mindfulness Meditation May Ease Anxiety, Mental Stress.” Harvard Health Blog,Harvard Health Publishing, 3 Oct. 2017, www.health.harvard.edu/blog/mindfulness-meditation-may-ease-anxiety-mental-stress-201401086967.
• Fredrickson, Barbara L. et al. “Open Hearts Build Lives: Positive Emotions, Induced Through Loving-Kindness Meditation, Build Consequential Personal Resources.” Journal of personality and social psychology 95.5 (2008): 1045–1062. PMC. Web. 12 Nov. 2017.
• Goleman, Daniel. “Mindfulness Isn’t the Answer to Everything. Here’s When It Helps.” Harvard Business Review, Harvard Business Publishing, 28 Sept. 2017, hbr.org/2017/09/heres-what-mindfulness-is-and-isnt-good-for.
• Mrazek, Michael D., et al. “Mindfulness Training Improves Working Memory Capacity and GRE Performance While Reducing Mind Wandering.” Psychological Science, vol. 24, no. 5, 2013, pp. 776–781., doi:10.1177/0956797612459659.