DEV Community: Kris Zhang

Why Programmers Feel Exhausted Even When They’re Not Working

Kris Zhang — Mon, 02 Nov 2026 00:00:00 +0000

I used to feel that I had only three or four hours a day to concentrate on creating things. The rest of the day was broken up by exercise, walks, cooking, scrolling through short videos, doing nothing for a while, and taking a nap. What bothered me was how little time seemed to be left for my work. Looking back at that list now, I can see how little attention I was paying to the differences between those activities, because I was mostly concerned with how much time they left me for creating something.

With that way of counting, it was easy to overlook how much of the day I spent mentally occupied. I was counting the hours spent doing an obvious task, while leaving out the time spent thinking about one, taking in new information, or trying to work something out. So even when there were gaps in my schedule, those gaps didn’t necessarily give me much of a break. Some of what I called free time was already occupied before I decided what to do with it.

The Work I Wasn’t Counting

For example, I used to pick up my phone as soon as I woke up and keep looking at it during breakfast. At the same time, my mind would be running ahead to the day’s work. If I was going to write code, I would mentally go through what I needed to do and how to do it, rehearsing the task before I had actually started. I could already feel tired before beginning the work itself, but that preparation was easy to leave out when I looked back at how many hours I had worked.

Then, when I felt too tired to do anything, I would lie down and look at my phone again. After watching short videos for a long time, I sometimes found the more stimulating ones still playing in my head. I could put the phone away and close my eyes, but the images were still there, and I didn’t feel settled. Time had passed without me doing any work, yet I hadn’t come out of it feeling rested, and there was now even more going on in my head.

This becomes harder to notice when the things we do are interesting or useful. A personal project, a technical article, or a video about something we want to learn can feel like a welcome change from paid work. But interest can also keep us going when we’re already tired, especially if there’s another detail we want to understand. We may spend an evening moving between several things we enjoy, while continuing to ask questions, take in information, and work through problems the whole time.

When Work Filled the Whole Day

I saw another part of this during a period when I was working on my own. After leaving a job, I moved to a city far from home because I wanted somewhere quiet where I could concentrate on creating content. I knew no one there. I cooked or ordered food, bought daily necessities online, went out for walks, and sometimes did a little bodyweight exercise at home. The rest of my time went into coding, writing articles, and making videos, which looked like a fairly disciplined way to live.

At first, there were things to buy and unpack, and I had some contact with delivery drivers and food couriers. About a month later, I started recording a new online course and decided to finish all the lessons before releasing it. During that time, I also stopped posting the public content that had given me some interaction online. As I put more of my attention into the course, I was also losing some of the few points of contact I had.

After about two months of this, I woke up one day feeling awful. From the moment I got up, I could already see the whole day through to bedtime: breakfast, recording lessons, lunch, more recording, a walk, cooking dinner alone, more course work, and then sleep. There were breaks in that routine, and I did leave the house, but almost everything still revolved around the same project. I hardly talked to anyone, and even away from the work itself, I kept thinking about what I was creating.

When I stopped, I became very aware that I was alone and had no one to share any of it with. The work could still have value, but that didn’t make the rest of the day feel satisfying. Gradually, I did fewer things outside my work and felt more exhausted, until even a little work on the course left me feeling weak. Having control over my schedule hadn’t given me the kind of daily life I had expected, because I had made plenty of room to create things and very little room for anything else.

Things gradually felt better after I moved back to a place where I knew people. Being around familiar people gave me a sense of safety, and my sleep slowly improved too. That experience made me pay more attention to what was actually happening during the hours outside work. Quiet, time alone, and the freedom to arrange my day had all seemed helpful for concentrating, but I also needed contact with people and ways to come out of the state of thinking about my work all the time.

Looking Beyond Working Hours

For programmers, I think this is one reason exhaustion can be difficult to make sense of. We can finish a workday and still be turning over an unfinished problem at dinner, reading about a new tool afterward, or planning tomorrow’s task while supposedly resting. If we work independently, the hours may be even harder to distinguish, because the project we want to work on can fill the spaces where other parts of life used to be. The work has continued in several forms, although the hours we count as work may look quite modest.

So if some of this feels familiar, I would start by looking at the part of the day already marked as time off. Before deciding that we should have achieved more, we can include the time spent rehearsing tasks, researching, worrying, and trying to settle down afterward. Those parts of the day were easy for me to miss because they didn’t always produce anything I could point to. Once I began noticing them, I had a clearer idea of what I was asking of myself, and why leaving the desk hadn’t always been enough to feel that work was over.

I wrote more about these experiences and what I changed afterward in The Overloaded Programmer.

Why I Wrote The Overloaded Programmer

Kris Zhang — Wed, 28 Oct 2026 00:00:00 +0000

After getting COVID, I unfortunately developed a form of Long COVID marked by chronic fatigue. During that time, I became much more sensitive to changes in my mind and body, and that also made it easier for me to notice how much strain our everyday habits can put on us. When we’re healthy, we may not feel it, but over the years, that strain is bound to show up in one way or another. I had already experienced overload before COVID, and Long COVID helped me understand why.

You don’t have to go through the same pain I did to recognize these problems. I’ve written about how I became overloaded at work and recovered from it in a book called The Overloaded Programmer: Stop Running Your Whole Life on Your Brain.

I want to start by talking a little about why I wrote this book.

There was a time when I worked at a company during the day, then came home, had dinner, and worked on a side project with some friends. Saturdays and Sundays were much the same, so the weekend was basically another two workdays. I was very interested in the project and happy to put time into it, but gradually, weekends barely felt like weekends anymore, and I felt tense all the time. Later, thinking became harder, my mind felt foggy, and I never felt properly rested, but I didn’t take it very seriously at the time. I thought I was just tired and would feel better after a while.

After going through similar experiences a few times, I began looking more closely at what I was actually doing each day: writing code and solving problems at work, then continuing to study and work on projects afterward. When I got tired, I would lie down and scroll through my phone, reading the news, watching short videos, or researching something that interested me. I had left my desk, but my brain still wasn’t getting a real break.

There were also some drains on my energy that were harder to notice. As programmers, we’re good at analyzing problems: when there’s a bug in our code, we look for the cause and work through it step by step until the code runs properly. That habit can carry over into life too, so when we’re upset, we want to work out exactly why; when we’re worried about the future, we want to examine every possible path; and when something about our lives feels wrong, we try to figure out what else needs adjusting. I did this a lot myself.

For example, when I felt lonely, I would search for answers and analyze the problem, trying to work out how to stop feeling that way. I found plenty of advice, but I wasn’t spending any more time with people. Once I put my phone down, I was still on my own, and the next time I felt bad, I went looking for answers again. Analyzing the problem gave me a sense that I was doing something about it, but if I stopped there, very little changed in real life, and I used up time I could have spent resting or taking action.

When AI came along, it became even easier to get caught in this process, because I could ask about anything on my mind and get a reply right away, with one question leading to another. Sometimes I only meant to look into a new feature, but ended up researching its use cases, syntax, and how it was implemented. The same thing happened with everyday life: there was always one more thing to analyze. I gradually realized that even “trying to get better” could keep draining my energy.

So I started making changes to my daily life, setting some boundaries around work and screens and making time when I didn’t have to keep solving problems. I did some housework, went for walks, listened to music, and spent time with people. Even if there were things I hadn’t figured out, I tried leaving them for a while and doing the small things right in front of me instead, which seemed ordinary but gave me a real sense of satisfaction. If we always feel there are more important problems to research, features to finish, or things to think through, everyday life keeps slipping further and further down the list of priorities, leaving us feeling empty.

Of course, making changes didn’t go especially smoothly for me. I once planned out a whole new daily routine: when to go to bed and get up, when to work, when to exercise, and when to do housework. I was very motivated while making the plan, but once I tried to follow it, I found there was too much to change at once and couldn’t keep it up, so the plan itself became another burden. Later, I began adjusting just one small part of my day at a time, keeping that going until it felt fairly easy before adding more. I still slipped back into old habits sometimes, but I would gradually work my way back.

These experiences are all in the book too.

At the beginning of the book, I describe how I gradually became overloaded and the drains on our energy outside work that are easy to overlook. The middle part covers rest, stopping points, and how to make more time for things in the real world, while the final part looks at the obstacles we encounter when making changes: why we struggle to do things even when we know we should, and how to keep going once we’ve started.

If you also love technology and enjoy learning, creating, and solving problems, I hope this book helps you keep doing those things and still have enough energy left after work to do other things, spend time with people, and enjoy your life. That’s what I most want to share through this book.

Book link: Amazon