Finding Depth

A path towards presence of mind, productivity, and general well-being. Hopefully, it doesn't come off as too preachy.

For those of you who, like me, are prone to hopping around posts like this:

• Introduction
• Sleep
• Meditation
• Food
• Exercise
• Laser Mode
• Conclusion
• Sources

Introduction

This post is designed to read as a distillation of books, articles, and podcasts I have consumed over the last 3 years while attempting to learn how to learn and become more productive at work. The side effect, however, is that these strategies have helped me become more aware of myself and live life with a bit more depth. What works for me may not be the answer for others.

More than anything I write below, I recommend reading the books I reference in the Sources section (if this at all interests you). The arguments, research, and metrics detailed by those authors creates a much more compelling case than some random guy writing his first blog post ever could (i.e. me).

Sleep

As (most of) our days begin with waking up, it seems to make sense that the first topic here is sleep, and the minutes surrounding it.

Why do we need it?
Sleep is important for many reasons, but mainly it is when our brains and bodies gets the down-time to recover and rebuild itself for the coming day. When you are sleeping, you eliminate the need to spend energy on the monotanous tasks our consciousness demands, namely: eating, moving, and thinking. This extra energy allows your mind/body to focus on repairing damaged cells through a process called autophagy - one of the more metal bodily functions, as it is essentially the process of 'good' cells cannibalizing 'bad' (damaged) cells.

On the negative side of things, the research shows less sleep leads to:

• A shorter life span.
• A lesser capacity to realize you need more sleep, funnily enough.
• Higher chance of developing Alzheimer's.
• Higher chance of gaining weight.
• Higher chance of experiencing anxiety and depression.
• A lesser capacity for memorization and creativity.
• 10-30% less time to reach physical exhaustion.
• And a lot of other very, truly bad stuff.

How much do we need?
The vast majority of the Earth's population of humans require 7-9 hours per night. Some minuscule percentage of super-humans can make do with ~5 hours, but that percentage does not include me or (probably) you. Another thing to note here is that it is very hard to catch up on lost sleep. For example, one study showed that if you get 6-7 hrs a night for 10 days, your cognitive capacity is as dysfunctional as someone who has spent the entire previous 24 hours awake. Naps don't help much either.

How do I get quality sleep?
There are tons of great strategies to use for getting quality sleep, but I will list the few that I use:

• Avoid screens (or at least, turn on blue light filtering) for at least 1 hour prior to bed.
• Get into bed 1 hour before you actually want to be asleep.
• Write down your ideal morning routine on a piece of paper, and read it before closing your eyes for the night.
• Do not eat within 2 hours of your bedtime.
• Read for 1 hour prior to bed, maybe Why We Sleep by Matthew Walker? wink wink
• Sleep in complete darkness.
• Sleep with a fan on.
• Extra Credit:
  • Use Phillips Hue (or similar) to simulate sunset and sunrise in your home.
    • Ex: Set a Hue light in your bedroom to begin dimming at 9 pm, turn completely off at 10 pm (bedtime), then slowly start fading back on at 5:30 am.
  • Get an accurate sleep tracker like an Oura Ring. Measure a baseline sleep score with your normal habits over a couple weeks. Then implement the above strategies and compare your results!
  • Utilize 'Heat Shock Proteins'!
    • Research shows that using a sauna and/or taking a cold shower before bed improves sleep. All the the strategies above that I use have specific reasons (scientific research and personal experience) behind each of them. Each are explained in the Sources below.

Meditation

During his research for one of his books (Tools of Titans, I think), author/teacher/podcaster/crazy-man Tim Ferriss found that the one thing that (nearly) every high performer he interviewed had in common was some form of a mindfulness practice.

What is it?
Meditation is basically training the mind to have control over emotions - decreasing emotional reactivity. For many, this allows for a more thoughtful and deliberate approach to the day. Those mornings where every stress point you've experienced in the last decade bubbles up to the surface and bears its teeth - that's where meditation helps. The evenings where you come home to the entirety of your kitchen's square footage being covered in the dirty dishes your roommate has apparently decided to collect into the world's grossest museum display? Meditation helps deal with that too.

What are the Benefits?
There are many, but the big ones, to me, are as follows:

• Increase awareness, clarity, and peace of mind.
• Increase focus.
• Reduce mind-wandering.
• Reduce symptoms of depression and anxiety.
• And so much more!

How to implement it?
Use a well-reviewed meditation app, like Headspace (paid) or Oak and pin it to your routine early in the day. Ex: wake up, chug some water, do a few burpees, brush your teeth, then meditate every morning. The Power of Habit states that there are 3 steps to every habit each of us has: Cue, Routine, Reward. Substituting a bad habit (for me, this was scrolling Instagram after I woke up) with a good habit (meditation), is as simple as keeping the Cue and Reward as similar as possible, but changing the Routine.
Ex:

• Cue = Grabbing my phone to turn off my alarm.
• (Old) Routine = Checking Instagram.
• (New) Routine = Opening Headspace and meditating for ~10 mins.
• Reward = Smartphone fueled dopamine hit. Keep in mind, for most people it takes about 66 days to form a habit disruptive to their current routines. There will be predictable bumps in the road in maintaining your new meditation practice. Knowing when those bumps are likely to arise is, for me, one of the most effective ways of powering through them. Read The Power of Habit for the nitty-gritty details.

Food

Food! A glorious thing. Don't worry; I am not a proponent of soylent or the bell-pepper diet. Just like everything else in this post, my goal for when and what I eat is to promote awareness, cognition, and happiness. That last part is why my diet on Sunday was, exclusively, 6.5 apple cider donuts and 2 servings of homeade apple crisp with ice cream on top. Our goal here will be to eat whenever and whatever allows us to have a high level of energy all-day. Being distracted by hunger pangs, or energy loss will make it far more difficult to be as productive as we have the potential to be.

What should I eat?
Fancy diets, calorie counting, and meal-prepping can seem daunting. The detail that some supposed fitness gurus recommend can be overwhelming. For our purposes, we can get the majority of the results from 2 simple rules: eat natural foods, and avoid refined sugar.

When I say 'natural', I mean as un-processed as possible. In other words, stick to fruit, meat, fish, nuts, yogurt, vegetables, and if you need to 'carbo-load' for a 5k (say Michael Scott's Dunder Mifflin Scranton Meredith Palmer Memorial Celebrity Rabies Awareness Pro-Am Fun Run Race for the Cure, for example) stick to whole grains. Our bodies have not developed to digest highly process and refined foods, and the research proves that. You wouldn't (shouldn't) expect your car to drive very far if you filled the gas tank orange soda.

The refined sugar avoidance is with good reason as well. Sugar in excess bumps up inflammatory bio-markers (bad), accelerates aging (also bad), and causes Type 2 diabetes (similarly, bad). In terms of daily productivity, refined sugar causes short peaks and extended troughs in energy levels. So, even if we discard all of the above side effects that are more long term, refined sugar still would not fit into our goal of cultivating an even energy level throughout the day. Some examples of refined sugar are: soda, candy, and cookies (more or less, anything with sugar that is not fruit).

Extra Credit: do a genetic test (like 23andMe) and submit your results to Found My Fitness. This site was created by Dr. Rhonda Patrick, a brilliant woman focused on longevity, nutrition, and optimal health research. Perhaps the most actionable insights the report provides are those pertaining to your genetic pre-disposition to effectively or ineffectively process different foods, and your likelihood to be deficient in certain vitamins and minerals. If you want proof of Rhonda's brilliance, listen to one of the many podcasts she has appeared on as a guest. A couple that come to mind are: The Tim Ferriss Show, and Joe Rogan Experience.

When should I eat?
Perhaps the most underappreciated (or unknown?) 'diet' method is time-restricted eating, AKA intermittent fasting. It is the cheapest and least time-consuming diet there is, as the only requirement is to do nothing when you might be eating instead. Doing nothing is pretty easy I've found.

There are many different schedules possible for time-restricted eating, but one of the more straightforward schedules is called the 16:8 schedule. 16:8 just means we will eat all of our food for the day in an 8-hour window (ex: 12 pm-8 pm), and consume only water, tea, or coffee the other 16 hours. This can generally be accomplished by skipping breakfast.

The Benefits of Fasting:

• Like I mentioned above, it's free!
• Increase autophagy (the repair process I mentioned above in Sleep!).
• Improve insulin sensitivity and, thus, energy regulation.
• Our bodies start to use fat stores for fuel, rather than sugar and carbs, leading to fat loss.

Another interesting bit that Dr. Fung refers to in The Complete Guide to Fasting: our mental clarity and adrenaline levels both jump while we are fasting. This was very surprising to me, at first. I initially figured that, if I was fasting, I would be tired, moody, unproductive, and maybe start following a bunch of BBQ-related instagram pages. In actuality, only that last part was true! Digging a bit deeper, it started to make sense; when our body 'realizes' it has not eaten in 16, 24, or however many hours, it starts to go into overdrive to 'find food'. The theory is that this is an evolutionary mechanism. Back in the day (20000 B.C., or whatever), we were generally in a cycle of feast and fast. A hunt would be successful, and everyone would eat well. But, if a week goes by and no one gets a mammoth, what is our response? We would have to be on our game in those moments - thinking clearly, with high energy. So, why not simulate a similar situation with intermittent fasting?

Exercise

Exercise is not mentioned too much in any of the books I reference below, but there are many, many reasons why it still deserves a place in everyone's daily routine, especially those of us looking to maximize awareness and productivity in our coding careers.

Among its many health benefits, exercise is a quick, controlled way to practice making yourself uncomfortable with performing an intense, singular activity (one may notice the parallels to coding here). It is an incredible method for jumpstarting the day with an early win that also promotes energy production and in a (slightly vain, but still good) way, increases self-confidence. All of this output is incredibly beneficial in our search for depth, with lasting benefits throughout the day.

But, what does exercise actually do to your body and brain that helps us so much?
The Deets:

• Increases neurotrophic factors in the brain by 2-3x!
  • Improves our memory and ability to learn new stuff.
  • Specifically, this results from a minimum of ~30 mins of cardio.
• Increases blood flow to the brain, promoting the formation of new blood vessels/cells.
• Releases compounds like norepinephrine, serotonin, and dopamine that make you happier and less emotionally reactive.
• Improves the delivery of oxygen to the muscles.
  • Not sure what the mechanism is, but this has been shown to shrink fat cells, which decreases inflammation!

Laser Mode

Laser Mode, AKA Deep Work or Flow State: an "optimal state of consciousness where we feel our best and perform our best" (via psychologist Mihály Csíkszentmihályi). This is the state of being that we acquire knowledge most quickly, churn through our tickets for the current sprint, and get a personal record during our daily workout. It is also the state that everything above optimizes.

How do we get into Laser Mode and stay there?

• Know what your goals are for the day; have a clear plan.
• Minimize distractions as much as possible.
  • There are many ways to do this, but some examples are:
    • Only have the necessary tabs open on your machine.
    • Put your phone and messaging apps on 'Do Not Disturb'.
    • Work in solitude (and/or invest in some noise-cancelling headphones).
    • Communicate to coworkers that you will be unavailable during your Laser Mode time.
• Keep ample water/coffee/tea within reach.
• Practice the art of 'Batching'.
  • Schedule time where you will complete all of your 'busy' work/tasks that do not require deep focus such that you may focus on mentally/physically intense work without interruption.
  • Ex: 9-11 am Laser Mode, 11 am-12 pm answer Slack messages and eat lunch, 12-12:30 pm go for a walk outdoors, 12:30-3 pm, Laser Mode.
• This may have been implied from other bullet points, but no multi-tasking.
  • Multi-tasking may make us feel more busy and productive, but studies show it does more harm than good.

Extra Credit: Research binaural beats and their potential benefits! If you are convinced by the current science, check out sites like brain.fm and use their soundtracks to help nudge your brain into a state of deep focus.

Conclusion

I know this is not the typical dev.to post, but these topics have greatly contributed to my career in software development and my personal life. If anyone feels I left anything important out or has any book/podcast recommendations along these lines, please let me know in the comments below! This is a subject I am passionate about and I always enjoy learning more about various techniques to improve quality of life and work. Thank you for reading - I hope it was time well-spent.

[Deleted User]

Sources

• Books, in no particular order:
  • Deep Work by Cal Newport
  • Digital Minimalism by Cal Newport
  • The Power of Habit by Charles Duhigg
  • Why We Sleep by Matthew Walker
  • The 4 Hour Work Week by Tim Ferriss
  • Own the Day, Own Your Life by Aubrey Marcus
  • The Alchemist by Paulo Coelho
  • The Complete Guide to Fasting by Jason Fung and Jimmy Moore
  • Make Time: How to Focus on What Matters Every Day by Jake Knapp
• Apps, in no particular order:
  • Headspace
  • Strong
  • Zero
  • Strides
  • Freeletics
  • Oak