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Discussion on: Depression & Anxiety in programming

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Brian Sachetta

Thanks for posting this. I think a lot more people deal with mental health issues than we are aware of (myself included); it's a really important topic to discuss in our community.

I've dealt with anxiety for the past ten years, and my experiences in engineering have helped me come up with strategies for dealing with it.

The most important realization I came to in regard to my mental health was that, being a developer, I tend to overanalyze things and think critically more often than I should. This is obviously helpful when I'm trying to write a new algorithm, but when it comes to my anxiety, it's often quite harmful.

I believe anxiety stems from two places: our innate fight-or-flight responses to things that scare us and our thoughts about those scary things. When we feel anxious about an important project or upcoming deadline, we typically feel afraid (by default) and then get in our heads and try to reason ourselves out of that fear response.

This almost never works, however. The only way out of anxiety is to get out of your head. We cannot "solve" or "outthink" our anxiety, we can only let it dissipate by deliberately taking our focus off it. Thus, when I'm having a tough day, I use a number of different strategies to get my mind off whatever is frightening me. A few examples include working on a new dev feature, breathing deeply, or reciting a powerful mantra (such as "everything will be okay").

I actually wrote a book on this very subject recently, so if anyone would like to check it out, I would be quite honored. It includes all the strategies I use on a daily basis as well as a good amount of the science behind anxiety. I know it's sometimes frowned upon to self-promote here, but I really do believe the information is powerful and can help lots of people.

Here's a link to it: amazon.com/Get-Out-Your-Head-Overc...

If you ever need to talk to someone about your mental health struggles, please just send me a message. I'm always happy to chat.