Mental health for software engineers: my inner truth

Boost your work-life balance with a few tips from a software engineer perspective

Photo by Martin Sanchez on Unsplash

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Mental health seems to be quite a topic nowadays. Its not just important to stay focused on your carreer goals or aim to impress your coworkers with your set of skills. Is equally important to listen to your body, especially during moments when you more “fragile”. By fragile, I mean when you are fatigued, had a bad night of sleep or have too many things on your mind (deliveries, stress at work, personal life, and so on).

My main goal here is to highlight the importance of a good mental health, but also give you a few life hacks to improve your work-life balance, but also boost your productivity.

Friendly reminder

First of all, I am not an expert in this domain. At all. If, for some reason, you are not able to improve your way of living, no matter how you try, seek professional help. There is no problem with that. Professionals studied several year about this topic and may be able to give you the proper tools to tackle the problem you’re facing.

All the details that I am about to share are from a perspective of a workaholic software engineer, an addict to tech, but also from someone that suffered from stress and anxiety in different occasions. Several occasions I neglected the time off from work, in which I was unable to disconnect not matter how I tried. And several times, I came back to work the next day feeling like I was “ran over by a truck”, not feeling refreshed at all. It was time to finish this snowball effect.

Being a resilient and determined person helped me to force myself to create a routine to disconnect from work and don’t pull the strings too hard when I was on a good shape.

Tiny details matter

Take special attention to details. Whenever you feel that you reached a plateau and have no sense of progress, try to see the whole picture. What you may not find relevant in isolation, will take a great impact in the long-term.

Take every micro-learning as a success and with a positivism. Trust the process.

Working from home

On pre-Covid, I used to commute every single day. Traffic jams, overwhelming public transportation, delays, strikes. All this became part of me during those days. Without noticing, this was corroding my inner self. Being carsick very easily, I was not able to read a book, check the news. Although I could do this things in a train, but also listening to music, it was pretty boring.

Working from home brought wonders. Not just because I skipped all the commuting process that can drive anyone nuts, but most importantly I could structure my week schedule in a more effective way and allocate that precious time to be productive and create value to me (and others). Being a [very] morning person, and my productivity levels being at its peak, I could get things done properly and in a good time manner.

Positive

1. Avoid commuting;
2. Less distractions;
3. Learn about different topics and read books;
4. Workout (gym);
5. Avoid having to do all [boring] domestics tasks at the end of the day or weekends;

Negative

1. Decrease of social interaction;
2. Less active due to being always working from home;

Its all about tradeoffs. As you could see above, there are also some disadvantages about working from home fully. It took a bit of learning to take the negative parts out of equation and some routines. For instance, working from home reduced drastically the social interaction, but taking initiative to be with friends, trying to schedule dinners with them, attend meetups and learn new things helped to reduce that loss.

Regardless if you are working from home or not, taking breaks is essential to keep your levels of productivity and reasoning stable. I use that time to take a walk, go for a coffee, grab a book and read a few pages. You name it. For sure you are more creative than I am. Use that creativity in your favor.

Working out also contribute positively to your motivation and productivity. However, adding workouts in a consistent way to your daily routine was sometimes a challenge. Specially on days when it gets extremely cold, or you are feeling lazy. Trust me, the post-workout feeling on those days are so refreshing.

Frustrations come and go

For sure you can relate with this particular situation. You have a weird bug that happens a few times. You check the logs, try to replicate, ask around about OS specifics, you try a few approaches to replicate the problem. The hours go by and you see not light at the end of the tunnel. Your inner self start to scream, looking for answers that do not exist. You leave everything behind and call it a day. Next day, you start fresh and you fix the issue in a very short time. Of course, this is not a rule of thumb, but it happens so many time. So many times.

Let me give you another example. Sometimes, you think about a particular problem and try to think about different ways of tackling the problem. You are feeling super confident that your approach will work smoothly, you even confirmed with others. Until it didn’t. All the time invested in the solution, just for one particular detail derail the whole implementation. You have to rethink about the whole solution.

Frustrations happen all the time. It happened with me, and they will happen in the future. That’s the cost of being out of the comfort zone.

My personal advice for you at those times:

1. Take small breaks during the day;
2. If you are calling a day with unfinished businesses, take as much notes needed on your notebook so you don’t forget about any detail, potential edge cases. Todo lists are so easy to make, gives you purpose and will enlighten you when you get back to it;
3. Take smaller proofs of concept, so you don’t invest so much time in a single solution and you can experiment different approaches;

For so many times, life taught me that is not all about the quantity, but the quality.

Take breaks

Is never too much to mention that small breaks do miracles. It gives your brain time to process everything and take the overwhelm feeling out of you. Or even when you are crushing in productivity and getting things done at a good pace. Take a walk, go to your favourite book shelf and read a few pages of a novel or a technical book, play an instrument, exercise a bit, do some stretches. The combinations are infinite. You can even optimize that by taking a break when a deploy is being done, you are waiting for a PR to proceed with your development, there are so many options. However, being someone working in IT, I would advise to take breaks that require some movements and stretching. To many hours sitting on a desk takes its toll over time.

Natural light

Whether you are working from home or not, if you are exposed to natural light during is crucial for different reasons [1][2]:

1. Boosts mood and well-being by reducing the feeling of stress and anxiety. Overall, it will create a more positive working environment;
2. Increase of productivity levels. Natural light enhances focus, cognitive function and engagement in the daily tasks;
3. Regulates sleep patterns in which helps maintaining a healthy sleep-wake cycle;
4. Reduce eye strain;
5. Promotes vitamin D production: Sunlight is a natural source of vitamin D, which is essential for bone health and immune function. In moderation of course;
6. Enhances Creativity: Natural light can inspire creativity and help with problem-solving;
7. Creates a Healthier Environment: Natural light can improve the overall air quality and atmosphere of a room. It can also make the space feel larger and more inviting, which is important when spending long hours at home.

All in all, incorporating natural light into your workspace can lead to a healthier, more productive, and enjoyable working experience. Over time, it will boost your well-being in a positive manner. Your body will be thankful.

Goals

Not sure about you, but I do have goals for each pillar of my life. Personal life, sports, music instrument, and so on. Every year, I find joy in writing goals for the year. Not for the sake of giving pressure to myself to finish them, but having goals in mind gives me a hell of motivation. In a positive way. The feeling of improvement, getting close to the goal, but also making an retrospective when a goal is not met. Over the years, I kept inventing myself, gained new habits, felt more matured to face new (and more demanding) challenges. Just to give you a few ideas:

1. As a rock climber, climb my very first 7b+ [3];
2. As a piano enthusiast, play smoothly the Moonlight Sonata (Quasi una Fantasia) by Ludwig van Beethoven [4];
3. Learn about AWS Sage Maker [5];

Although is important to have goals that will help you improve as a software engineer, is also relevant to have other kinds of goals, not related with work, because it will help you abstract from your daily work and give you motivation to come back the next day.

Last but not least, keep learning

Never take knowledge for granted is always the advice I give to myself. Not sure if this was inherited or not, or if it was just from my routines, but the goals that I have in mind and seeing progress over time, give me a total boost of motivation, but also perspective about what I lacked the most and needed to improve. The lack of progress give me frustrations at times, I will not lie. But remembering that is not about the destination, but the journey itself is what keeps me going. You may relate with “I can do this”, “this is doable”, no?

Ralph Waldo Emerson: It’s not the destination, it’s the journey

Try to find joy in those micro-learnings, whether that is inside or outside of work. Over the last few years, I reinvented myself several times, and let me be honest with you, the feeling of unknown gave me shivers sometimes. But at the same time joy of discovering, making mistakes, practice and do mistakes again.

If you reached this far, I would like to thank you for reading and really hope you found this article inspiring and helpful.

References

[1] Benefits of Natural Light in the Workplace — https://hbr.org/2018/09/the-1-office-perk-natural-light

[2] The #1 Office Perk? Natural Light — https://hbr.org/2018/09/the-1-office-perk-natural-light

[3] Understanding climbing grades — https://www.sportrock.com/post/understanding-climbing-grades

[4] Moonlight Sonata by Ludwig van Beethoven — https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=oqnKwesvSGQ&ab_channel=UnityRebound

[5] AWS Sage Maker — https://aws.amazon.com/sagemaker/