It burns behind my eyelids. Not the normal kind of tired, but a sharp, constant ache. It feels like someone rubbed fine gravel into my eyes while I slept, if I can even call those three hours of restless tossing actual sleep.
I am sitting in a dark room. It is three in the morning, and the only thing illuminating my pale, shaking hands is the cold glow of the monitor. I just solved a bug that has been torturing the team for a week. I should feel a rush. I should feel like a god.
But all I feel is a dull, pounding weight in my chest. It is not a heart attack, I know that now. It is just the physical manifestation of pure, unadulterated stress that has moved into my ribcage and refuses to pay rent.
I am writing this because I have to. Because we need to stop lying to ourselves. We talk a lot about burnout and mental breakdowns in this industry. But we almost never talk about how we systematically destroy our own bodies in the pursuit of the perfect algorithm.
The Myth of the Immortal Brain
When I first started coding, I felt invincible. I truly believed I was pure intellect, a machine that only needed coffee and silence to perform. My body was just an inconvenient vessel for my brain. A biological necessity that I could starve, ignore, and push aside however I pleased.
I bragged about how little I slept. I took pride in sitting completely still for twelve hours straight. I treated my body like an enemy, something that just got in the way with its annoying demands for food, bathroom breaks, and movement.
We live in a culture that glorifies the crunch. Sleeping under the desk, working through the weekend, and completely neglecting physical health are seen as badges of honor and true passion. It is a dangerous lie, and I bought it completely.
But my body kept the score. It absorbed every missed hour of sleep, every caffeine-fueled night, every hour of complete immobility. It started sending small, subtle warning signs. An eyelid twitching. Dull headaches. A stiff lower back.
I ignored them. I popped a painkiller and kept typing. I honestly thought I could outsmart biology with sheer willpower.
When the Body Stops Negotiating
Eventually, my body got tired of negotiating. It stopped sending subtle warnings and went straight to full-scale alarms. That was the moment I realized I was not an immortal machine. I was a human being made of flesh and bone, and I was breaking apart.
It started when I woke up one morning and could not move my right arm. A blinding pain shot through my neck and spine at the slightest movement. I panicked, thinking I was having a stroke. It turned out to be an extreme muscle spasm, the direct result of weeks of constant tension and sitting in the exact same twisted posture.
Then came the insomnia. I literally could not shut my brain down. I lay awake for hours, writing code in the dark behind my eyelids. I woke up exhausted, irritable, and completely drained. I started making stupid mistakes. I started forgetting things. I felt like a stranger trapped inside my own failing body.
And that heavy weight in the chest became my constant companion. I started getting panic attacks on the subway. I isolated myself. All of this suffering, all of this physical decay, for a piece of software that will most likely be completely rewritten from scratch in three years anyway.
The Absurd Trade
It is a completely absurd trade. We sell our physical and mental health to build things that are entirely ephemeral. We wreck our spines and our eyes to optimize a machine that steals people's attention or sells digital garbage. We think we are so smart, that we have these untouchable super brains, but we are just slaves to a culture that demands constant, unnatural output.
I am putting this out there as a warning, and as a public apology to my own body. I have finally started listening. I have started taking care of myself. It is a slow and difficult process, but I have finally accepted the hardest truth of all: my body is my most important tool.
Without it, there is no logic. Without it, there is no code.
Close the laptop. Stand up. Breathe.
Top comments (3)
Yeah we're sitting behind a monitor for way too many hours - go outside more, walk or cycle, enjoy fresh air and nature!
Pulling the "all-nighters" and working 80 hours per week, yeah maybe you can do that when you're young and (still) in good health, but nevertheless - better not!
P.S. glad to hear that you're much better now!
The illusion of being bulletproof in your twenties is exactly what gets us. You treat sleep deprivation like a competitive sport and wear those 80-hour weeks like a badge of honor. But the physical debt always catches up eventually.
Stepping away from the glowing rectangles to just walk and breathe actual outside air is the only real fix. It is honestly embarrassing how long it took me to figure out something that basic.
You described this in a very real way.
One thing that really stands out is the length of time we wait before the body stops us.
Perhaps the harder task is not how to fix this after, but how to learn to stop even when the task is not finished.