Ask HN: I'm 40 and feel my mental ability declining. Programming seems harder.

I would not consider me as much of an authority to give advice, but here are my highly personal take. I believe that this is more about focus and the ability to do a task with high intention. Also, I stopped active professional programming quite a while back, and hence this is me, a developer turned designer turned business person talking.

In my twenties, I can churn out things pretty much non-stop. I think I was trying to "prove it" and I could clock extras in the evening and weekends to move ahead. I could do something repeatedly until it was better than the last. I also tend to take on other people's tasks a lot.

In my thirties, I was still shuffling, not just me and my task but many other people too. I loved the messiness of deadlines, the near-misses, taking on new things, and being in the front of the battle, fighting in it and not flying over it.

I have now hit my forties; I realize I like to take time but do it right the first or second time. I also want to selectively do things with an outsized return on my time invested.

In short, I would have liked a Gatling gun in my younger days, but now I want precise sharpshooters. I'm of the opinion that it is OK to slow down, breathe, and take more targeted precision strikes.

I've hit the same walls as you have described and found that it's less about cognitive function and more about a combination of burnout, imposter syndrome, and some quirks of my ADHD. I still love to program but when I get the chance to I largely can't organize my thoughts well enough to make much progress, but its because I left a job about 7 months ago where I had been repeatedly hitting burnout in a really nasty several-year long cycle. Now when I sit down to do it I have a thousand things in my brain and I can't stay focused on it. I switched to managing individuals as well over the last few years since I have some natural giftings there but it's made it so that my skills at just zoning in and coding for hours is effectively atrophied since I am so interrupt-driven as a manager (constant emails/IMs and being mindful of my team who I should be supporting rather than my own personal technical goals)..

I've found I need to stop comparing myself to my late twenties self and understand that my burdens are different and I need to set different expectations of myself. As my responsibilities and noise/interference have grown, my ability to do complex design/development has been inversely effected and waned significantly and _that's ok_. I need better tools and to be better at managing my time and energies to be more targeted/specific and I am much more effective than I was all those years ago. I just have to be more intentional and forgiving of myself.

Your mind will eventually be back at peak performance, but meanwhile you can use pen & paper to help you with this.

Write down what are the big challenges/problems, try to break them down and write about it, keep dividing it until you start to see that you can tackle the indidual pieces.

I'm 42 and I've been in a mental place similar to yours, but a little more drastic due to a hard time in my life, and it took a while to get back into top shape, but the effort to break down my problems on paper helped me tackle some immediate tasks I had to accomplish.

Motivation comes and goes and is unreliable, it's better to be self disciplined and well organized.

Some very good advice in this thread. I would only add one thing. Just do not resort to drugs (legal or illegal) in the hopes to improve performance. Drugs like adderall (or even anti-depressants like SSRI's, etc.) might show some benefits, but likely only the short term. By then, you will have trouble getting off, and cessation of the drug will take you back worse from where you started.

Also, you might not be getting enough physical excercise. Probably the best anti-depressive/stimulant there is.