11–20 of 73 posts
I run 10 miles a week and bike long distances, make all of my own meals, and have been working with various doctors for years. Nothing seems to help 'fix' the issue altogether.
Intense mental work can drop your blood sugar and oxygen content in your blood, as mentioned by others. Start checking your health and engineer health back in for better coding.
Walking to another floor's bathroom, stepping away from your desk to walk around the building, getting a sit-stand desk, regularly stretching... there's a bunch. Get a tracker, and start experimenting. The same thing for nutrition.
If you haven't, work on deep breathing exercises and consider getting a pulse tracker so you can find a pattern. This is any other data pattern, the effects are just very close to home. If you feel like you should be coding, consider if your life was a resource management game and at what point you would expend resources to get better productivity from your base unit (aka. you).
Good luck!
Related to the right-to-left thinking mode changes, sometimes the words that I am using at become eerily meaningless or unfamiliar. I've spent a few moments asking myself "is that really the way 'else' is spelled?". I recently learned this phenomenon is called semantic satiation [1].
Do you take brakes and walk around? Do you exercise (I mean RUN) while not programming?
That's a novel approach to exercising.
If I am marathoning, though, I use a pomodoro timer and meditate or do something similar to tai chi in between coding sessions. If it isn't that intense, I tend to self-regulate in microdoses using techniques from meditation and an art like tai chi.
I only require multiple days of recovery when I burn out, often resulting from sustained interpersonal conflicts. I have noticed that has been improving since applying techniques from Crucial Conversations.
Not exactly brain fog but I often find myself in extreme left-brained mode after a challenging day of coding. If I meet friends after work I am a horrible conversationalist for up to an hour while my brain slowly (and reluctantly) stops actively churning on coding problems. Related to the right-to-left thinking mode changes, sometimes the words that I am using at become eerily meaningless or unfamiliar. I've spent a…
It isn't a result of repetition for me though. Since I have practiced meditation enough, I can watch how my consciousness shifts and changes. I remember watching a creeping doubt enter, and then a word loses meaning, or I'd forget how it is spelled, even while staring at it. Knowing that jusf a few seconds ago, I knew what it was. I also chalk it up as a state change. I sometimes google it just to be sure and if it shows up, let it go and move on. I don't remember if I ever tried sitting through and seeing how the consciousness shifts back -- would be interesting to watch what happens.
Do you take brakes and walk around? Do you exercise (I mean RUN) while not programming?
I work in an open office environment, so I needed one that was quiet. I bought the Rebel Treadmill 1000 and it's so quiet me and my office mates can hardly hear it over the sound of the HVAC system. Not affiliated with the company that makes them, but I heartily recommend their treadmill if you get in the market for one.
[1] https://8thlight.com/blog/doug-bradbury/2010/02/25/walk-and-...
I used to get this - it turned out that I was not breathing enough, which caused my blood pressure to go up. I would get so focused on a problem my breathing would slowly become more shallow. Now I have a water bottle on my desk and I slowly sip it all day, it forces me to get up every 1-2 hours to use the bathroom and fill the bottle back up -- and I deliberately use the bathroom 1 floor down to force me to go up an…
> I deliberately use the bathroom 1 floor down to force me to go up and down the stairs This is such a good idea that I'm stealing immediately.