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

I'll second this. Based on my own experience (I'm 50) it's all about energy levels. When my energy is high, I can code like I did two decades ago. Probably better. I guess the difference is that in your twenties, energy is almost for free. As you get older, you've got to be smarter about it - all the usual things - diet, exercise, avoiding stress...

Not that I'm good about those things - I do OK but not great. Sometimes (rarely, thankfully) my energy is so low I can't really code at all, sometimes I'm flying. I'd say by far the biggest factor is my overall state of positivity and optimism. And yeah, life definitely gets more complicated as you get older.

43 year old software engineer here.

- If you drink, curtail it. - Diet is everything. - Get more sleep. - Get quality exercise. - Find another hobby that is interesting but relaxing, but don't try to turn it into a side hustle. (I restore old guitars)

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Your brain is constantly trying to make itself more powerful and better oriented in your environment. It does this by seeking new and stimulating information, information that adds to your understanding of the world. As you get older, your work becomes a less and less rich source of novelty and stimulation. That means your brain doesn't engage automatically the way it used to. It refuses to allocate cycles to the problem. It reduces the mental resources you're working with to a trickle.

Like you, I'm faced with a couple of APIs that I have to understand. In my case, they are third-party SAAS APIs that I need to evaluate as integration targets for a product I work on.

The odds are very low that I'm going to learn anything of lasting technical value from these APIs. Two years from now, I will probably have to wrack my brain to remember if I ever worked with them directly or just heard about them second-hand.

The same is true of most of the programming I do, especially if I do it well. The alternative is to become one of those toxic senior developers who feel entitled to novelty at work and find ways to make simple problems technically stimulating for themselves, and simultaneously unapproachable for many of their teammates.

How do you stay engaged? You have to remember that you can always solve these problems better than you ever have before. Your solution can be more transparent, cheaper to operate, approachable for new devs, easier to hack on without breaking it, better-documented. You can challenge yourself to finish it quickly or to involve junior devs in its development in a way that is constructive to their growth.

If you don't care about making your solution better in those ways, if you only care about solving little puzzles in code, then you will get bored, because you will look at new projects and know that you can solve all the little puzzles in them, and you won't learn anything fundamentally new in the process.

As I’ve gotten older I’ve fallen into this problem but also climbed out of it. It is worrisome that it is permanent, but it likely isn’t. There were several things about my life that I changed that helped me regain my focus and deep concentration abilities.

First was reducing TV, social media, and just scrolling internet news. Doing those things all day was training my brain to have a 1 second attention span. A vacation, if used to just chill out and do boring things for hours at a time can help snap you out. Your body and mind don’t want to live in that frenetic state so your stress will reduce too.

Diet and exercise is also important in making your body run as it was designed and helping your brain to be in a more relaxed, nourished state that will give you more mental stamina. Exercising first thing in the morning is good, but anytime you find your brain conking out is a good time for a run and often i’ve felt better immediately. Cardio helps me, I don’t know about weight training.

Diet is very important, and if you eat lots of carbs, especially late in the day you probably aren’t sleeping well and you might have high blood sugar that is impacting your ability to concentrate. Reducing carb intake, eating good breakfasts and light dinners, and not eating for several hours before sleeping (go to bed hungry, you will sleep much better and feel better in the morning) can make a big difference. If you work remotely and get drowsy after eating and you can take a nap early in the day, go for it!

Also just doing whatever it takes to calm yourself down and sleep long and deep night after night can help a lot.

At this age it is also a very good idea to get blood work done to see if there is any imbalance which could be affecting your well-being.

Finally, like muscles our brain seems to atrophy over time and strengthen as you use it. If you’ve been coasting for a while and haven’t had a real challenge, it might take a couple of weeks of frustration before you rebuild that mental stamina.

All of these life changes are very difficult to do at first, but once you make the change and feel the effects it becomes a lot easier and you feel so much better. I’ve done everything I mentioned here and gotten back my ability to learn and focus to a similar level as my younger self.