Mental Health - freeCodeCamp.org

Stress and Mental Health in Tech – What I learned from Dr. Jennifer Akullian's freeCodeCamp Tech Talk

Jessica Wilkins — Thu, 18 Nov 2021 17:54:34 +0000

People in the tech industry face mental health issues like depression and anxiety every day, all around the world. But what can we do about it?

In this article, I will talk about what I learned from Dr. Jennifer Akullian's freeCodeCamp Tech Talk and share her tips for reducing your stress and improving your mental health at work.

Mental Health Research for Tech Workers is Limited

One great resource that Dr. Akullian mentioned in her tech talk is the Open Sourcing Mental Illness non profit organization. OSMI is dedicated to raising awareness surrounding mental health in tech.

OSMI conducts a yearly Mental Health in Tech Survey, where tech individuals around the world can anonymously answer questions concerning their mental health in their workplace.

While this research is valuable to the industry, unfortunately it does have its limitations.

For one, this data only represents those who volunteered to take the survey. Since individuals cannot be forced to disclose their mental health issues, we are unfortunately not getting a full picture of what is going on in the tech industry.

Even in the past few years, the number of survey participants has gone down. In 2014 and 2016, there were over 1200 responses.

But from 2017-2020, it went from 756 to 180 survey responses. Unfortunately, there has been a huge decline in the number of participants which affects the research.

Mental health has always been a sensitive subject and there is a lot of stigma surrounding it. So, it doesn't surprise me that people don't feel safe participating in these types of surveys.

As Dr. Jennifer Akullian points out in her tech talk, there are a lot of serious physical health risks that accompany high stress jobs. If left unaddressed, these issues can lead to dire consequences.

Hopefully, we can get to a place in the future where we feel safe to discuss these issues and contribute to the ongoing research.

To learn more about OSMI, please visit their website.

How We Can Combat Stress in the Workplace

Dr. Jennifer Akullian provides four ways that you can de-stress at work and become a healthier, more productive worker.

SLEEP!

We all need to sleep. Sleep allows our bodies and minds to rest and recharge for the next day.

You might be in a situation where you have important deadlines coming up or annoying bugs in the application that you haven't solved yet.

But staying up and worrying about it isn't going to help the situation. You will probably be less productive in your job running on fumes all the time.

In her tech talk, Dr. Jennifer Akullian urges people to find out why they are not sleeping and seek professional medical help if necessary.

I have personally dealt with sleep issues over the years and figured I could just power through it. But over the past year, I have now learned that is not the healthy way to live and work.

Please take care of your body and mind. You need that time to rest and be ready to go the next day.

Stretch

Sometimes it is easy to stare at your computer and sit at your desk for long periods of time. But that is contributing to the stress and mental health issues facing people in the tech industry.

In her talk, Dr. Jennifer Akullian says,

stretching distributes oxygen to where it is needed, which is to your brain.

You don't need to do hardcore-style stretches. Just do some simple stretches throughout the day.

Get up out of your chair and stretch your back, neck and shoulders. Stand up and hang down over your toes for a little bit.

Make a conscious effort to get up and move a little every so often. Place Post-it notes on your monitor to remind you.

When you take the time to stretch, you will notice that you become a more productive and healthier you.

Take breaks

Taking breaks throughout the day is not a distraction and it doesn't make you a lazy employee.

Dr. Jennifer Akullian considers breaks as,

refocusing your attention on something else to restore your brain.

We have all been in situations where we have been working on a problem and there doesn't seem to be a solution yet. If you keep attacking the problem without breaks then you are not giving your brain the time it needs to restore.

There have been plenty of times in my work, where I will walk away from a challenge for a little bit and be able to rest and come back with a solution.

Breaks are healthy and allow you to be more productive at work.

PLEASE TAKE BREAKS.

Breathe

If you are under a lot of stress at work, take a moment and just breathe.

Dr. Jennifer Akullian says,

if you are paying attention to your breath, you are not attending to the growing list of tasks not being completed.

It is easy for a lot of people to always focus on the laundry list of things to do at their job. Sometimes it feels like there is not enough time in the day to accomplish all of the tasks.

Taking a moment to focus on your breath will bring down your stress and anxiety levels. This will lead to a healthier more productive work day.

Dr. Jennifer Akullian advises you to

take a couple of deep breaths and observe the inhale and exhale. Let's get the oxygen redirected from your muscles back into your brain.

This is a simple task that you can do throughout your work day. But you have to remember to do it.

If you need to set reminders on your phone or computer, then do it.

Remember that your health is important and you want to take the steps to better it.

I would highly advise you to watch the entire 19 minute tech talk given by Dr. Jennifer Akullian on the freeCodeCamp Tech Talks YouTube channel.

If you enjoyed that video, then please subscribe to the channel for more high quality tech content.

Healthy Habits – How to Become a Better Developer and Live a Happier Life

freeCodeCamp — Mon, 12 Apr 2021 21:05:33 +0000

By Jean-Marc Möckel

Being a great developer is not just about writing great code. There are certain habits I’ve discovered that are beneficial to your work and your life as well.

Habits are basically the parts of our lives that make up our daily routines. Once established, they are the most powerful tools we have to change our lives.

In this article I share the five essential habits that I believe will most benefit your work as a developer. But these habits won't just help your coding skills – they will also improve your life and make you happier and healthier.

At the end there's an extra tip for you as a little nugget. So make sure to read to the end.

Habit #1 – Eat Healthy Food

_Photo by [Unsplash](https://unsplash.com/@danielcgold?utm_source=unsplash&utm_medium=referral&utm_content=creditCopyText">Dan Gold on What is healthy food?

But what does it actually mean to eat “healthier”? I’ve learned a lot about good nutrition over the last two years, and I've tried out many methods myself. When I started eating right, I felt a huge improvement in my life and my work as a programmer.

I’m not a nutritionist, but you can consider the following advice as tips from my own experience and knowledge.

Decrease your sugar intake
Drink water instead of soda
Eat just a small amount of sweets per day
When eating fruits, focus more on low-sugar fruits like berries, kiwi, apricot or coconut (and many more)
Take sweetener alternatives like Erythrit
Follow a balanced diet
Eat whole grains like brown rice, buckwheat, quinoa, bulgur, millet and oats (complex carbohydrates)
Get plenty of legumes like lentils, kidney beans, green peas, chickpeas and soybeans
Go for healthy nuts like almonds, pistachios, walnuts, cashews and peanuts
Eat lots of vegetables (preferably cruciferous vegetables) like broccoli, brussels sprouts, kale, cabbage, cauliflower and turnips
Eat seeds like chia seeds, hemp seeds, flax seeds, pumpkin seeds and sesame seeds (they're great on top of your dishes)
Get your “healthy” fats from fish, algae, and the nuts/seeds mentioned above
Minimize your meat intake to around 70g per day (I’d suggest to do your own further research on it because I don’t eat meat)
Eat the most carbohydrates in the morning
Your lightest meal should be at least three hours before you go to sleep

There are many different diets out there and most of them are completely useless in my opinion, since they just seem to try to pull money out of your pocket.

You don’t have to turn vegan like I did, but from my research and talks to doctors, following a mediterranean diet is what’s recommended most of the time. You can read more about it in this article.

If you really want to get serious about it, I’d suggest that you book an appointment with a nutritionist or any other professional in that field. They can help you set up your meal plans and advise you on how to make healthy choices.

Habit #2 – Do Plenty of Physical Activity and Stretching

_Photo by [Unsplash](https://unsplash.com/@aloragriffiths?utm_source=unsplash&utm_medium=referral&utm_content=creditCopyText">Alora Griffiths on Why is physical activity important?

Being physically active is one of the most important factors that helps me perform on a high level as a programmer. It helps relieve stress, clears my mind, and strengthens my body.

Physical activity also helps protect you against many chronic diseases and improves your brain function – which is of course very important as a programmer.

Another great benefit is that it can help you control your weight. So when following a healthier diet and being physically active on a regular basis, you less likely to worry about your weight.

I love to run in the morning on an empty stomach because it gets my blood running and sets my energy for the day. It can be hard, especially when I don’t feel like it – but once I'm done, I know that I’ve already conquered the hardest part of the day right at the beginning.

This forms a strong mindset and loads me with energy. It’s also very beneficial because your body takes the energy it needs from your fat reserves which leads to fat burning.

Why stretching matters, too

Doing regular physical activity is great, but it's only half of the picture. The other half is all about stretching your body.

Stretching helps you improve your flexibility and posture. It also helps ease your pain after sitting all day in front of a computer. Varying your working position from sitting to standing is also a great way to move your body in different ways.

Stretching can also be very beneficial to other areas of your life. It releases tension and therefore reduces your stress levels. It also helps you calm your mind and increase your energy.

Don’t skip the stretching in the morning or in the evening. Your body and your mind will thank you. This video used to help me out a lot.

Habit #3 – Develop Proper Stress Management Techniques

_Photo by [Unsplash](https://unsplash.com/@oneshotespresso?utm_source=unsplash&utm_medium=referral&utm_content=creditCopyText">Hans Vivek on Good stress vs bad stress

But is stress bad in general? Basically it’s a warning system which produces the fight-or-flight response. There are both beneficial and harmful parts about it.

In small doses, stress can help you meet daily challenges and motivate yourself to reach your goals. It can also boost your memory and can help you to accomplish tasks more efficiently.

Too much stress, on the other hand, can cause serious health issues. It can weaken your immune system and can cause high blood pressure, depression, and anxiety.

Some of the most important signals of too much stress are an inability to concentrate, body aches, headaches, appetite changes and getting sick more often. Another very common signal is if you can’t sleep properly anymore and can't turn your mind off.

In my opinion, this bad stress isn’t something you have, it’s something you create for yourself. It’s always a sign that you are thinking about the future and feel anxious about it. Maybe you can’t meet a deadline or you’re thinking about what your boss will do when you’re doing a “bad” job. You feel your heart beating and it begins to take over you.

How to manage your stress

Breathing exercises are one of the best ways to calm your mind, to relieve stress, and help you to be more aware of yourself.

In stressful situations we begin to breath faster which will cause stress in our body. There’s also a thing called screen apnea which means we tend to stop breathing when looking at our screens. You can imagine that this can't be healthy at all!

With breathing exercises you can train yourself to breathe slowly even in stressful situations. Compare it with a cup of tea. Every day you’re filling up the cup with stressful or hectic situations. With relaxing breathing exercises like meditation, tai-chi, qi-gong or diaphragmatic breathing you empty the cup again.

Imagine what happens with the cup and with yourself when you don’t empty it every day and pour more and more tea into it.

If you don’t have any experience with meditation and the like, I can highly recommend that you start with an app like “headspace” or “calm”. They offer guided meditations that are very friendly for beginners. You can also visit a tai-chi group in your area or join a meditation group.

These practices don’t only help you relieve stress, they also train you to be more in the moment and to control your thoughts. You will learn to let the thoughts come and go. And it'll feel like 500 pounds has fallen off your shoulders. You'll also improve your ability to concentrate even better at your job.

Habit #4 – Maintain a Beginner’s Mindset

_Photo by [Unsplash](https://unsplash.com/@brett_jordan?utm_source=unsplash&utm_medium=referral&utm_content=creditCopyText">Brett Jordan on Think back to the beginning

I can still remember how I felt and what it did to me when I discovered coding. It was like tapping into a top secret. Computer Science and especially programming was like magic for me. Those people who were able to write code were like superheroes from my perspective.

Once I took my first steps in writing code myself, I remember feeling like “Holy crap, this will be my thing”. I wanted to learn it all, even though I knew that wasn't possible.

I knew that I was still at the beginning of my journey and I was really open to learning a lot of different things. It was okay for me to not be good at it, but I knew the more I sat down and learned, the better I would become.

I accepted my beginner level and the more I learned, the more I recognized how much I wanted to learn.

Be a beginner again

That’s what I consider to be a beginner's mindset. Looking through the eyes of a beginner who seeks out new stuff to learn and accepts that there is still a ton out there to learn. They still have this excitement to explore more and more.

Maintaining this mindset and recognizing that mistakes are opportunities to learn new skills is key to progress as a developer. Don’t shy away from new challenges, even if you have twenty years of experience.

Habit #5 – Get Enough Sleep and Take Breaks

_Photo by [Unsplash](https://unsplash.com/@adigold1?utm_source=unsplash&utm_medium=referral&utm_content=creditCopyText">Adi Goldstein on The negative effects of not enough sleep

There are many negative effects on our bodies when we don’t sleep enough. It can lead to memory issues because during sleep our brain forms connections that help us process and remember new information.

One of our most important skills is also in danger when we don't sleep enough. We can develop trouble thinking and concentrating. When we don’t get enough rest our problem-solving skills and concentration are negatively affected. So pulling all-nighter after all-nighter might seem efficient first, but can really damage your long term programming skills.

There are many other negative effects like mood changes, weakened immunity, high blood pressure, risk for diabetes, weight gain, risk of heart disease and a low sex drive. Sleep is as essential as water and air for our bodies.

How much sleep is enough?

But what exactly does enough sleep mean? There are different opinions about that topic and I’d suggest finding your own sweet spot. You can test different amounts like six, seven, or eight hours and track your energy levels during your day.

My own sweet spot is in between seven and eight hours. Sleeping less than seven hours sometimes is okay for me but over a longer time I feel that my energy levels go down. On the other side when I sleep more than eight hours it’s also not beneficial for my energy levels after some time.

There are some tricks to help you establish a healthy sleep routine, like avoiding daytime naps, not drinking caffeine a few hours prior to bedtime, going to bed and waking up at the same time (even on weekends!), doing relaxing activities an hour before going to bed like mediations, and not using electronic devices before sleep.

Why taking breaks is important

The same goes for taking breaks during your work time. I normally take a quick break once I get the feeling that I can’t concentrate properly anymore.

The break doesn’t have to be huge. Throwing some darts on my dart board, going for a quick walk with the dog, running for 30 minutes or just standing up, having a good stretch, and making new coffee or tea are some chances to get a little break.

Most of the time I find the solutions for problems I was thinking about for one hour straight during those breaks. Taking me out of that “black hole” does wonders.

Some productivity systems like the pomodoro technique can also help you to establish a routine of taking breaks. You can set a timer for twenty minutes where you’re doing concentrated work, and after that you take a five minute break. That’s one pomodoro. After three or four pomodoros you take a longer break of thirty minutes.

But you can just set up a timer to remind you every hour to take a break of around ten minutes, for example. As always, try different things out and stick to what works best for you.

How to Form Habits

_Photo by [Unsplash](https://unsplash.com/@iaman_upadhyay?utm_source=unsplash&utm_medium=referral&utm_content=creditCopyText">Aman Upadhyay on Habit forming law #1 – Make it obvious

The first law is to make it obvious. Point out triggers that remind or force you to do the new habit.

For example if you want to work out in the morning, pack your bag the evening before and place it along with your outfit at your door. The first thing that you see in the morning is your stuff for working out.

Habit forming law #2 – Make it attractive

The second law is to make it attractive. Combine a habit you HAVE to do (your new habit, like running) with a habit that you LIKE to do (an already existing habit, like listening to your favorite music).

Another way is to search for an environment where your new habit is normal. This could be a local running club for example.

Habit forming law #3 – Make it easy

The third law is to make it easy. We often tend to expect too much of ourselves, especially at the beginning. There is no such thing as an overnight sensation when building habits – they are all formed over time.

The first 60 days are the most important when you're trying to form a habit, and it is established by doing it consistently. So, make it as easy as possible for you.

Cut all the obstacles that may get in your way of doing the habit. For example, if you want to cook your own healthy food, make sure that your kitchen is clean. Because cleaning it up before cooking your food can get in your way, drain your motivation, and lead to you not cooking at all.

A key factor for making it as easy as possible is to follow the two-minute-rule. Do actions that don’t take longer than two minutes.

For example you want to read more and your ultimate goal is to read one book a week, start with one page a day. Remember to first establish the habit and then optimize it. This is essential for getting used to the new habit.

Habit forming law #4 – Make it rewarding

The fourth law is about making it rewarding. After you’ve done your new habit, reward and cheer yourself on. A very common practice is to have a list or calendar and every time you’ve done the thing, you cross another day off.

You can also transfer this process into a habit tracker where you really can see your progress. You won't want to end the streak of consistently doing it. Like in law #3, remember to focus on consistency over quality. What’s been rewarded will be repeated and what’s punished will be avoided.

How to get rid of bad habits

If you want to get rid of bad habits, you can reverse those laws. Let’s say you want to cut down your time watching TV. Make it harder for yourself to turn it on by unplugging it, hiding your remote control in your basement, or by putting the tv completely away.

Or when you slip up and perform a bad habit, burn $50 or anything else that really punishes you.

Are there any habits you definitely have to get better at? Or are there habits I forgot to mention?

Just message me on my instagram account @jeanmarc.dev._ I’m very excited to receive your answers!

The Best Strategy Ever to Unlock Brilliant Ideas

freeCodeCamp — Wed, 31 Jul 2019 17:47:03 +0000

By Sam Harris

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.

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

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

https://upscri.be/w0rlmr

A programmer’s guide to managing stress

freeCodeCamp — Thu, 11 Oct 2018 21:25:44 +0000

By Daragh Byrne

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!

How I fought through anxiety and depression to finish freeCodeCamp’s front end dev program

freeCodeCamp — Tue, 17 Oct 2017 11:29:43 +0000

By Emily Aamodt

I recently completed freeCodeCamp’s front end development program. Woohoo! It took me two and a half years, which initially made me cringe when I thought about it. After thinking back on everything that happened in that time span, I’m proud to have finished at all.

Why did it take so long? Well, the entire time I was silently struggling with depression and anxiety. Only my doctors and a few people close to me knew the truth.

The beginning

I’ve had generalized anxiety my entire life, and clinical depression since I was 11. My family doesn’t really believe in mental illness, so I had to wait until I was out on my own to get help.

With the help of a friend, I went to my doctor and finally got my life back. I started taking anti-depressants and going to a therapist. The meds I was on made me sleepy, but they were so helpful that I was happy to make that tradeoff.

Descent into darkness

About two and a half years ago, around the same time I started freeCodeCamp, I became fed up with how tired the meds made me. It was a massive struggle to get anything done, and I spent the majority of my free time sleeping.

I spent a harrowing two years trying to solve that problem by going off meds, switching meds, switching doctors, switching therapists, and reading self-help books. The list goes on and on. I actually went a full year without meds thinking that, like a lot of people who try anti-depressants, I could wean myself off them and be okay.

Nooooope. I definitely need them. Once I established that fact through excruciating months of suffering, I took the next step: trying to find the right meds for me. Thus began a horrible year and a half of medication roulette. Every drug I tried seemed to have worse side effects than the last. ALL of them had ridiculous withdrawal side effects. I started to believe I was never going to recover, and that made me spiral even further into darkness.

Finally, I found a great psychiatrist who worked with me to troubleshoot my issues (and troubleshoot was his word! It’s one of the reasons he’s my favorite psychiatrist). We eventually landed on a med that worked and found the right dose. Now I finally feel like a functioning human being and I’m not tired all the time.

Slogging through quicksand

While all this was happening, I was working full time and going through freeCodeCamp in my spare time. Amazingly, my work was never really affected. I showed up every day and did my job. It was really hard, but work has always been my number one priority. So I made sure I didn’t mess it up, even when I had a migraine or brain zaps in the middle of the day.

Since freeCodeCamp wasn’t mandatory like my paying job, I struggled to work on it consistently. After pouring all my energy into work and dealing with depression, anxiety, and medication side effects, it was really hard to find the time and energy to practice coding.

Not my first rodeo

I should mention that I’m not a beginner. I took some website building, hardware, and programming classes at the local community college after I finished school, and was looking for a job during the 2009 recession. I was very active in a Ruby meetup group for a few years before freeCodeCamp, and together we completed Zed Shaw’s Ruby the Hard Way. My job is in the software industry, and also involves a lot of coding (VB, definitely not as fun as JavaScript or Ruby) and front-end stuff.

Since I have some programming experience under my belt, there were parts of freeCodeCamp that flew by. Particularly if it was one of those rare moments when I was also feeling okay.

The rest became a slow, frustrating slog. I definitely felt like a loser sometimes, and wondered if I would ever get out of the various ruts I fell into. My productiveness varied wildly. There were times when I slogged through at a slow but steady pace. There were other times when I slowed down to a glacial crawl. I would work on freeCodeCamp material once a week if I was lucky. Occasionally I would just give up and go on a hiatus.

During one particularly long hiatus, I almost decided to stop working on freeCodeCamp forever and just focus on my job and my mental health.

Light at the end of the tunnel

Despite all the setbacks, I somehow kept going. I worked through all the algorithms, the lessons, and the projects. I have a competitive nature, and there was no way I was going to back down from a challenge.

Learning to program is frustrating on its own, even without all the mental illness roadblocks. No matter what happened in life, and no matter how stuck or frustrated I got, I just kept coming back. I wasn’t going to give up. Sometimes I wanted to, but I just kept fighting anyway.

They used to call me “clutch” when I played softball, because I always came through in the end when it was most critical. I’ve retired from competitive sports, but I still have that fighting spirit.

Honestly, I think freeCodeCamp actually helped me get through that rough time. It structured my free time, and distracted me from what was going on with my health. The projects and algorithms in particular required me to focus and ignore any outside distractions.

I’ve always done my best when working under pressure. The freeCodeCamp curriculum provided the tough challenges I needed to pull myself out of my depression and into a flow state. In flow state, there are no panic attacks, and there is no depression. There is only adrenaline and the thrill of solving puzzles. For me, nothing compares to the joy of becoming completely absorbed in a difficult project.

Team effort

As much as I’d like to tell you that I pulled myself up by my own bootstraps (No, not THAT Bootstrap, you nerds!), I had a lot of help:

My local freeCodeCamp group was a great source of inspiration. I don’t go to meetings and events as often as I’d like, but the ones I have attended have been invaluable. Meeting fellow students made it feel like I wasn’t alone, coding in the cold vacuum of space, where no one could hear me scream. The best part of meetups is bouncing ideas off each other and seeing what everyone is working on. It never fails to spark ideas.
My friends who introduced me to freeCodeCamp were instrumental. Talking with them about projects and algorithms was fun, and encouraged me to keep going. Sometimes it was also nice just to have people to commiserate with when we were stuck.
Let’s not forget all the doctors! (Including some of my doctor friends, who gave me awesome advice) It took multiple GPs, psychiatrists, and therapists to get me to this point. I am extremely grateful for all of their help.
My close friends and my boyfriend were a HUGE help! Even though they don’t code, they were always there to cheer me on. Special thanks to my boyfriend for testing all of my projects and giving me advice from a user’s perspective.

What now?

Right now I’m going through P1xt’s Computer Science and Web Development — comprehensive guide and getting ready to delve into the back end and data sections of freeCodeCamp. It’s nice to be able to think clearly and maintain a consistent pace.

Whether I’m studying on my own or working on projects at work, I feel like I’m learning something new every day. That’s extremely rewarding. I know I can never “beat” anxiety and depression, but I’m able to manage them and keep them in check so that they don’t ruin my life.

I’m a private person, and I don’t usually like to talk about this sort of thing. But I feel like it’s import to share my story. Hopefully it can help others who are in similar situations.

If you’re like me, and you struggle with mental illness, don’t give up! You can do it! There are rough times, but you can keep moving forward. Don’t let it stop you from learning to code. Even if you go really slowly, you can make progress and build up your skills. Learning might even give you something to look forward to. It definitely did in my case. And the best part is that you will never run out of new things to learn, especially in this field. So code on!

If you enjoyed this article, please give me some claps so more people see it. Thanks!