The cognitive load from writing software is incredibly high early on in your career. You do not have much experience in solving various types of problems. This lack of experience makes you actively think about each of the problems that you are trying to solve to reach an end-solution. Repeat the cycle a few more times and you will start to feel like you can no longer think at your best.

My goal in this post is to provide you with some ways that I am up keeping my mental health. At the time of this post, I have been in the software development field for two years.

Take Walks

When you are stuck while working on a difficult project, pause your work and go take a walk. It may seem counter-productive, but it is not. In fact, some of my best ideas came to me while I was walking.

Ideally, you would want to take a walk around an area that is quiet. By taking a walk, you are letting your brain rest and recharge. In addition, by being active you are increasing your brain activity, which helps with cognition. If you are interested in how being active can help you as a software developer, I have a post about the topic that you should check out.

Let Ideas Incubate

Incubating ideas through your subconscious thought is something that you might already be doing, but do not realize it. Have you ever experienced a time when a solution suddenly pops into your head? At that moment, you might have been eating, watching TV, walking, or looking at your phone and then suddenly a solution appears out of nowhere.

Your unconscious thought excels at integrating and associating information. At the subconscious level, your mind is carrying out associative searches across all the information that you know. This means that while you are doing things that are irrelevant to the problem you are facing, your brain is quietly solving it in the background. This is why sometimes when you are faced with a complex problem, it is better not to focus all your energy to solve it actively.

Plan Ahead

Developing software is complicated with all the tools that you need to use. Before starting a project, plan what tools you will use and the big picture idea of the project. Check to see the tools you intend to use are compatible with each other. You will be surprised by how much headaches this can save you 🙂 If you know enough details about the project, it would definitely help to break down the project into small parts as well.

Meditate

Meditation or the “art of doing nothing” is great for you (especially your brain). When you are meditating, you are giving your brain a mental break (probably that is long overdue). When you give your brain an opportunity to recharge, it allows you to look at the problem at hand from a different perspective.

In addition, doing nothing will eventually lead to boredom and boredom can trigger your imagination and creativity. When this happens, ideas start coming to you. Some of them are ridiculous, but others may be just the solution you are looking for.

Give Yourself Downtime

We live in a world where we are always “busy” and do not have time to stop. You might be falling behind schedule for your project(s) because you encountered more roadblocks than expected. You might be thinking, “I have too much to do and not have enough time to stop and rest.” However, there are benefits to downtime, which affects your productivity. By giving yourself downtime, you will recharge yourself, increase your productivity, and possibly produce more output in less time. If you need more reasons to why you need to give yourself some downtime check out my post about the benefits of downtime for software developers.

Take Care of Your Health

You cannot fight your biology. At least you cannot fight it forever. Eventually, you will crash and it is not going to be pretty. Therefore, instead of fighting against your biological needs, provide yourself those needs particularly in sleep and exercise.

Sleep Well

Sleep is important for humans, but what you may not know is that sleep plays a vital role in regulating your brain’s health. How much you can learn and at what rate ties to your sleep. Besides sleep benefiting your brain, it also provides overall benefits to your health.

Exercise

As a software developer, chances are you are finding yourself in front of a computer screen most of the day. When you remain stationary for a long period, you are hurting your productivity and health. If you can fit a short workout into your schedule, you will experience an improvement in your health and productivity. I have a post about the benefits of exercise for software developers that you should check out.

Understand Yourself

It is important that you know where your own energy comes from. For example, do you know if you are a lark (morning person), night owl (evening/night person), or humming bird (in between)? Do you know if you are more introverted or extroverted? What time of the day do you feel energetic and when you feel low on energy?

By knowing the answers to those questions, you can balance your day in a way that will work best for you. This means you will be able to maintain a high energy level throughout the day, which is important for your physical and mental well-being.

Prevent Burnout

It is not rare in the software development field to burn out and lose passion for your work. Your mental health is a major contributing factor whether you will experience burnout. Therefore, it is best for you to keep up your mental health. I have a post about ways to prevent burnout that you should check out.

I hope this post was helpful to you. If you found the post helpful, share it with others so they can benefit too.

Do you have something new to add to this list? Are you executing some of these tips on this list?

Let me know at steven@brightdevelopers.com or leave a comment. To stay in touch, follow me on Twitter.