In light of Kate Spade and Anthony Bourdain's suicides, I want to ask all of you:
How do you cope in hopeless situations?
How do you approach your employer and/or team when you're feeling the low tide slowly engulfing your existence?
How can tech help with mental health?
I find myself drowning in self-doubt, beating myself down when I don't understand a coding concept; I see the solution and it seems so simple, thus I berate myself for not understanding it or coming up with the solution at all.
Stepping away, if I can, helps. But what do you do when you're too deep into the spiral of hopelessness?
I will be going to Hack Mental Health's "Reverse Hackathon" this weekend in San Francisco, and live-tweeting my team's progress as much as I can.
Latest comments (24)
From an emotional point of view, the life of a developer is like a rollercoaster. Days of anxiety from performance expectations and low self-esteem when no coding solution seems to be easily found to days of pride and happiness when you can finally find a solution.
Recognizing this "rollercoaster pattern" has helped me many times in my professional career. If I do not get easily a concept or do not figure a solution out at first, I do not beat myself down, because I know that it "just" means I have to do some more effort, that I need a bit more time - for more research, for more study. Or that I need to decompose the problem in smaller more meaningful problems/tiny baby steps, that I can solve. Learning, and particularly learning to code, is never easy, it comes with a mental cost. Just like gym workouts, some are tougher than others and require more willingness to "suffer", to obtain a change. But when you realize that you changed the way you wanted, oh boy! That moment is pure joy.
If I am "too deep into the spiral of hopelessness" because of coding, I would code anyway, as a response. In the best way I can, even if my best coding contains still a lot of mistakes.
I would need to qualify "code anyway", though: I mean, I would keep on coding, but with the reserve of not getting mentally exhausted. If you are a sport type, then exercising can help a lot to avoid mental exhaustion. Dancing is particularly cheerful and regenerating for me, for instance. But I get a great mental relief from drawing, too or playing piano. Arts in general can offer great mental helps - both if you practice them actively or if you just "consume" them (by going to an art museum instead of drawing or listening to music, instead of playing it, for instance).
Hey Cat. Mental health tracking and enhancing shouldn't be only your individual responsibility but whole your team and organization should help.
The common issue I find is people just don't understand how they can help each other in a meaningful way. It all often starts from understanding what impacts our self-esteem, and life satisfaction.
For this reason my team is using team health check app. This let us understand how all team (sometimes including stakeholders) feels about different aspect of our daily work and collaboration, so we can very quickly turnaround it into the honest discussion about the most important matters for us.
You can read more about it in my post Tools that help me build healthy and performing teams.
The best wishes and a lot of mental toughness!
I work from home at least two days a week which helps a lot.
I code. I started coding as a way cope with depression. I'm an introvert and in general have trouble socialising with people, I just keep coding thinking that this will change things for me one day.
This happens a lot, I'm from a non CS background so I know how it feels. Things that literally took me weeks or months to learn, another person might learn in a day or two.
Just don't give up. Not knowing the answer today, doesn't mean you will never find it. If you have no clue on how to solve something, explore something else instead. You will find your eureka moment eventually.
Exactly, Mark! 100% agree!
To be short, this is a concept that I call the inversion of rationality.
I noticed that on contrary to other people, I ended up thinking rationally on different places than they do.
Everything technical is very very instinctive to me. This has been driving me all my life to code. I just do stuff by believing that's how to do it. Sometimes it's wrong and I change it. Sometimes I read my code years later and think it's garbage. Sometimes I think I'm a genius. But the point is that I didn't ask myself too many questions before doing it. I don't have to known what I'm doing but instead I do believe in it at the time I'm doing it.
On the other hand I used to be bullied at school for years so when a client calls me like their office is burning and their project is the absolute top-priority unless the world is going to end well I don't care. I can listen to rational arguments about why a deadline is important and I take care to deliver a high-end final result but only because I rationally chose to. Any rational reason would come in the way and I would drop it all without remorse.
So I guess that's how I cope with all the bullshit.
Cat, the problem is that some people will always make you feel like 'you know nothing, Jon Snow'!
Some developers are way ahead of you that you'd think "ooh, am I bad?", for which the answer is NO. You are who you are and they are who they are. The experience is all that makes you different.
If you read something and don't understand it right away, then you probably are the same as 90% of developers! Just give it time to sit in. Your brain will try to understand the concept in the background. Comeback to it in couple of days and you'll see that now you understand it.
In a nutshell, DON'T WORRY! As long as you are trying, you are gonna be OK!
I find running to be very helpful. In particular long distance running. We've all heard about the "runner's high". I think it deserves a better name though. I like to go for a good run when I'm down. And not come back until I feel better.
Seconded. All of this. I would add talking to your therapist about medication, if you haven't already. It doesn't need to be used long-term but it can be a huge help in times of crisis, as long as it doesn't become a crutch. A good therapist can help you minimise the risks. It saved me.
It's also important to find a therapist that you have a good relationship with, and can guide you through a type of therapy that works for you. My first therapist was completely wrong for me - too much of a psychoanalyst. My second therapist was great. CBT is the gold standard, but ACT (Acceptance Commitment Therapy) worked better for me. It's kinda like a combination of CBT and mindfulness.
I think self-doubt and "imposter syndrome" is very common in this industry.
When doubting myself and my abilities, I try to remember that everyone else does too. I'm not the only one, and although I didn't understand this thing, I do now and can learn from it.
I don't think there are any silver bullets, but a few things that seem to help:
Acknowledging that mental ups and downs are a part of being all of us, and normal, and a health issue rather than something we "should fix". This plays out in a few ways for me...
Getting enough sleep. Seriously. When I'm sleep deprived my mental health crashes like woah.
Getting enough light. I noticed in the last year I was feeling down a lot more in the winter... the reason? Since going to work for myself I've been working from my home office where I normally rely on natural light. This has been a net positive, but when we had rainy/dark days it brought me way down... remembering to turn on extra lights on those days was a big help.
And just as an aside - that feeling of berating yourself for not getting a concept, and then it seems so simple after the fact... that's also 100% a part of being human. This stuff is hard. I don't think I know anyone who hasn't struggled with it at some point, anyone saying it isn't hard has probably just forgotten what it was like when they were learning. The struggle is real, and props to you for continuing through it.