DEV Community: Eshaan

5 Neuro-Hacks to Supercharge Your Focus

Eshaan — Fri, 23 Aug 2024 18:48:44 +0000

Ever find yourself staring blankly at the screen, wondering why your brain refuses to cooperate? You're not alone. We've all been there—lost in the fog of distraction while trying to get things done.

But what if I told you that a few tweaks to your daily routine could hack your neurology and give your focus the turbo boost it desperately needs? From posture to caffeine, here’s a brainy guide to staying sharp without breaking a sweat (or your coffee mug).

1. Sit Like You Mean It

Your mom was right — posture matters, but it's more than just avoiding back pain. Research shows that sitting upright, without slouching or reclining, can significantly impact your brain's ability to stay alert.

This is because an upright posture activates the locus coeruleus, a small but mighty region in the brainstem responsible for arousal and attention. Behave's author Sapolsky explains that when this area is stimulated, it increases the release of norepinephrine, a neurotransmitter in the brain and spinal cord that plays a crucial role in maintaining focus and vigilance.

Interestingly, the position of your monitor also plays a role in this process. By keeping your screen slightly above eye level (as small as 3 degrees above eye-level), you can derive the most benefits from locus coeruleus and shift into a greater focus!

TL;DR: Sitting upright and keeping your monitor slightly above eye level can release crucial brain-chemicals for focus.

2. Breathe Deep, Stay Sharp

Cyclic hyperventilation (breathing rapidly for around 25 times), does more for your brain than just filling your lungs with air.

Andrew Huberman explains that when you engage in deep breathing, the movements of the diaphragm directly impacts the heart-rate and the release of adrenaline, which is a powerful neurotransmitter responsible for increasing focus, energy, and alertness. It can help create a tunnel like vision, focusing only on what's necessary.

The effect of adrenaline is akin to flipping a switch in your brain, shifting it into a state of heightened awareness. This can be particularly useful when you need to concentrate on demanding tasks or when you're feeling sluggish. By deliberately practicing deep breathing exercises, especially before diving into cognitive work, you can effectively prime your brain for peak performance.

TL;DR: Deep breathing boosts oxygen levels and releases adrenaline, making your brain more alert and ready to focus.

3. Master Your Brain’s Natural Rhythms

Your brain operates on various cycles, one of the most important being ultradian rhythms. These are natural biological cycles that occur multiple times within a 24-hour period, and they significantly influence your periods of focus and rest.

Unlike the more well-known circadian rhythms, which regulate your sleep-wake cycle over 24 hours, ultradian rhythms typically last about 90 minutes. During these cycles, your brain moves through phases of heightened cognitive focus to lower energy states.

Research suggests that most people can harness these rhythms for maximum productivity about 1 to 4 times a day, each lasting around 90 minutes.

How to recognize when you're in an "on" phase — the moment after waking up, when you feel the most alert (due to natural cortisol spikes) is when you can say that a rhythm has begun. Harnessing this allows you to plan your most demanding tasks during these periods of peak focus.

TL;DR: Your brain has natural focus cycles; find and use them to get the most out of your day.

4. Caffeine: The OG Focus Drug

Caffeine is more than just your morning pick-me-up—it’s a powerful cognitive enhancer. When you consume coffee, it increases the availability and efficacy of dopamine receptors in your brain. Dopamine is the neurotransmitter that drives motivation, and pleasure, meaning that caffeine can make your brain more receptive to processing information and staying on task.

Moreover, caffeine also influences your adrenal system, which plays a critical role in regulating your alertness throughout the day. By strategically timing your caffeine intake, you can enhance your focus while minimizing the chances of an energy dip later.

However, timing is everything. The best time to drink coffee is 90-120 minutes after waking up. This timing helps avoid the inevitable caffeine crash that comes later in the day from an early spike in adenosine, a chemical that promotes sleepiness.

Additionally, reconsider that afternoon coffee, as caffeine can stay in your system longer than you think, potentially disrupting your sleep later on (even if you can sleep after it, the quality and depth of sleep remains affected)

By managing your diet and caffeine intake, you can avoid the pitfalls of the midday slump and keep your focus sharp all day.

TL;DR: Drink coffee 90-120 minutes after waking up to boost focus and avoid a crash later. Also skip the afternoon coffee to get better sleep.

5. Ditch the Carbs, Save Your Focus

We’ve all experienced the post-lunch slump, that dreaded dip in energy that makes focusing seem impossible. The main culprit? Carb-heavy meals that cause a spike in blood sugar, followed by a rapid crash. This fluctuation in glucose levels can leave you feeling sluggish and unfocused, just when you need to be at your best.

The solution is simple: opt for lighter, protein-rich lunches instead of carb-loaded ones. This will help maintain steady blood sugar levels, keeping your energy and focus stable throughout the afternoon.

TL;DR: Eat lighter, protein-rich lunches to avoid the midday crash and stay focused.

In a nutshell, mastering neuro-hacks is like upgrading your brain's operating system—suddenly, you're running faster, smoother, and with way fewer crashes. So, whether it's loading on caffeine or some deep-breathing magic, these tricks are your backstage pass to focus heaven.

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Middleware is an open-source tool designed to help engineering leaders measure and analyze the effectiveness of their teams using the DORA metrics. The DORA metrics are a set of four key values that provide insights into software delivery performance and operational efficiency.

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Deployment Frequency: The frequency of code deployments to production or an operational environment.
Lead Time for Changes: The time it takes for a commit to make it into production.
Mean Time to Restore: The time it takes to restore service after an incident or failure.
Change Failure Rate: The percentage of deployments that result in failures or require remediation.

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Now, go forth and be the productivity ninja you were meant to be—just don't forget to unplug once in a while!

How I stopped my procrastination: Insights into developer mindset

Eshaan — Fri, 05 Jul 2024 17:33:52 +0000

You’ve been at your job for years, you know how to write code good enough to get you by comfortably, yet every now and then there’s a ticket, a ticket that lingers on-and-on on that kanban board, red with delays, reschedules and “is this done?” comments. “I’ll pick it up first thing in the morning” is what you told yourself yesterday, and the day is already dusking off.

We as programmers and developers are likely to procrastinate, and there are good enough reasons for it. And being lazy might be one of them, but the documentation of our brains is much bigger than that.

Why programmers are likely to procrastinate

Cognitive overload 😵‍💫

As problem-solvers, we tend to use the ‘most-contextual’ part of the brain way too often, i.e the Frontal Cortex.

The frontal cortex is responsible for executive functions, which involve analyzing information, identifying patterns, decision making, and most importantly, doing-the-right-thing-even-if-it-is-the-hard-thing-to-do actions.

For these seemingly-simple tasks, the frontal cortex needs bucket-loads of energy, exhibiting a very high metabolic rate.

We, as mere mortals with anti-bluelight glasses, have fixed reserves of energy, and when we expend them, compromises start to occur.

Behave’s author Sapolsky point out that when the frontal cortex is overloaded, subjects become less prosocial, they lie more, are less charitable, and are more likely to cheat on their diets.

“Willpower is more than just a metaphor; self-control is a finite resource”,

he says, stating that doing-the-right-thing-even-if-it-is-the-hard-thing-to-do is not merely an emotional and moral choice, but is far deeply tied to the physiology of the brain.

I’m just a kid

We have all had our fair share of beginner-developer moments. When we plowed through nights and days trying to learn and retain how that x language or y framework functions. And the number of times we almost gave up.

But after a certain threshold, coding didn’t seem to have that big of a draining effect. And there’s a good reason for it.

When we practice and learn something, we start shifting the cognitive processes to the more reflexive (stemming from a reflex action, an automatic “muscle memory”) parts of the brain, like the cerebellum.

And once that is achieved, we reduce the burden of computation on the Frontal cortex, making the tasks less energy-taxing.

Decision Fatigue

Cognitive tasks are not limited to logic-oriented, calculative, cautious tasks that one does as a programmer.

It also includes a seemingly simple task: Decision making, like using the correct approach to write readable code, or something as simple as which task should I ship first?

And like cognitive loads, decision-fatigue is tied to your energy reserves too, and can ultimately affect your productivity.

Process rather than Procrastinate

Now that we have broken down Procrastination, it's time to actually tackle it.

1. Germinate

To achieve anything, whether it’s your jira-ticket’s completion, or a side project, one must start to build. “Am I taking the most efficient, readable, perfectly orchestrated approach to solve this problem”; the friction of uncertainty and self doubt usually make it hard enough to begin with.

Opening your laptop is the first victory to overcome the code-block. And the only way to do that is to have something certain, some anchor that doesn’t give you any unease.

I’ve had times where I tried to find a perfect time window to start programming on a weekend, that was me trying to find a unicorn.

So I made it a point that at a certain hour in the morning, I will open Monkey Type and try to hit the day’s first 80+ words a minute.

It’s something I stole from Atomic Habits, and it helped immensely. This simple ritual in the first 5 minutes of my day consisted of adrenaline-rushed, muscle-memory reflexes that had nothing to do with uncertainty of my task.

Thus, I could be eased into opening my IDE to complete that Jira ticket, whose dread had haunted my jira board for a week.

2. Granular-ize

Something I learnt fairly recently is to plan in a way that your programming journey will have little to no decision making once you start with writing code.

Everything about the development process can, and should be pre-planned, into its utmost smallest task-granules, making things as clear as they possibly can be.

The concept of Engineering Requirements Document (ERDs) was something I looked down upon as corporate scut-work for the upper management to feel included in the process.

Turns out I was wrong, and it’s intended to make sure that all the decision fatigue occurs during initial stages, and the rest of the shipment of tickets spread throughout the week remains relatively unharmed from taxing your Frontal cortex’s energy reserves.

3. Game-ify

Updating my Jira tickets on my kanban board didn’t give me enough belongingness to the fruits of my labor. Neither was I able to track my personal progress of what I completed, what I shipped and what I spilled.

So I kept a set of my mini daily tasks on a local Microsoft’s To Do list. The satisfying chime of completing the task gave me a big boost on being on track, without having to worry about what is left undone and what is yet to be picked up.

Since this was personal, I could add tasks like “get a brownie on 3 completions” and wait for it to ping up when I marked it as done.

Motivation is a cocktail of neurotransmitters, make sure you zap your brains with some hits, every now and then.

Another tool that can help in the same is Middleware’s Project Overview. It systematically gave the reason for my spills and overcommitment in a sprint, and can help give an overview of your Jira Boards and Projects.

4. Gauge, Grapple and Give-up (not totally)

Friction in the building process goes far beyond decision-fatigues. You fail at something for long enough and you are likely to not want to do that thing anymore.

It's wise to gauge the problem, allocate a time-duration, and wrestle with the problem with all your might. But when you know that it’s time-up, ask for help.

You need to make a voluntary decision to make the problem smaller than your hands, or add more hands to it.

There’s nothing wrong with an extra set of limbs, or brains. Homo erectus showed the first signs of ordered-socialization within communities, and then came homo sapiens with their big-brains of computation. Companionship precedes cognition, at least within evolution.

5. Conclusion

We as developers often forget how human we are, I mean we are running services that cater to millions of humans.

Who are we, but gods on keyboards?

But, something as little as a missed breakfast can affect our productivity, and something as big as a system-failure can drive us to work harder. We are complex machines with simple values.

As a developer who would rather write a script for an hour, rather than clicking 4 buttons in 4 seconds, I can vouch, it’s always wise to fix a process rather than the absolute problem. Fix habitual actions, and you fix procrastination.