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...
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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.
Yeah been there done that, I was just like that, way too fanatic - going outside to relax and connect with nature is such a treasure!
P.S. yeah it's odd/funny to see young people (teens) in supermarkets etc consuming tons of junk food, and still being lean and thin ;-)
When you say 80 hours per week, do you mean strictly focused working time, or does that include other work related activities throughout your day?
It is almost never 80 hours of pure, deep-focus coding. The human brain simply cannot sustain that level of intense logic for that long. It is usually a mix of active programming, staring blankly at failing pipelines, endless meetings, and that terrible twilight zone where you are technically off the clock but still sitting at your desk obsessively checking for alerts.
But the harsh reality is that your body does not care what is on the screen. Whether you are writing a brilliant algorithm or just hopelessly scrolling through documentation, you are still frozen in that same chair, holding the exact same tense posture. The physical damage accumulates exactly the same way.
Yep I see It’s not even about the hours, it’s the cognitive load and consistency over time that takes serious discipline Respect!
omg, this hit me hard, thanks for sharing this. and you are so right..
Thank you for reading!
I totally get this! It’s kind of a paradox — while some people run marathons, count their steps, and even wear fancy watches to track their sleep 😄 we in IT end up sitting late at night trying to solve “just one more problem.”
In psychology, this is actually known as the Zeigarnik effect — unfinished things keep pulling our attention and won’t let go. But yeah… you can’t keep this up forever, and your body will eventually demand a break.
I’m already planning a complete chill mode starting mid-April — the only question is whether I still remember how to truly rest...
The Zeigarnik effect sounds like a very polite, scientific excuse for our collective obsession with broken code. It is a brutal contrast though, watching normal people track their sleep cycles while we sit in the dark tracking memory leaks.
If you really have forgotten how to rest by the time mid-April rolls around, I am officially offering a masterclass in doing absolutely nothing. The curriculum involves zero screens, terrible television, and me actively guarding your router so you cannot cheat. Let me know when you are ready to book your first lesson. 😂
That sounds like an excellent plan 😄 I’m actually already doing pretty well in the “terrible television” category — I just finished all of Bridgerton 😂
So honestly, I might already be halfway through your masterclass… just missing the “no screens” part 😅
Binge-watching Bridgerton is a highly respectable choice for terrible television, but it still involves staring at a glowing rectangle. 😂
You are already actively failing the most important module of the class.
This just proves my point that you cannot be trusted to disconnect on your own. The router confiscation is no longer just an empty threat, it is now a mandatory part of the curriculum. I am clearly going to have to enforce this detox in person to make sure you do not accidentally open a code editor while pretending to watch historical romance. Consider yourself warned.😂
Haha, yeah, an assistant like that would actually be pretty useful! 😄
But honestly, I’ve calmed down a bit lately thanks to Facebook. A lot of people my age seem to have these… unusual hobbies like running or digging in the garden and spend tons of time on them.
So in that light, my hobby — blog-driven programming — doesn’t seem that weird after all. And sometimes it even lets you see a bit of the world 😄
By the way, do you happen to have any conferences in northern Sweden? Preferably in winter — I’ve been dreaming about seeing the Northern Lights 😅
Rationalizing your screen addiction just because other people plant tomatoes is a very creative defense mechanism. But I am willing to overlook it, mostly because you just accidentally asked the perfect person. 😄
I consider myself an unofficial expert on the Northern Lights. Standing in the freezing dark up in the absolute middle of nowhere while the sky completely lights up is exactly the kind of forced reality check you desperately need. 😊
I am officially making it my mission to find a winter conference up there that we can use as a convenient cover story. The moment one pops up, I am letting you know, and I will personally handle the aurora tour guide duties. All you have to do is pack a ridiculously warm jacket and accept the fact that your laptop will be confiscated upon arrival. 😉
It reminds me of when I got a massive headache from coding for hours. I got scared to the point that I need to do daily exercises from now on. You are right, our health is the greatest asset we could have as humans. No money, fame, or accomplishment can top a healthy and working body.
It is terrifying how we only start paying attention when the body literally forces us to stop. I know that exact feeling of getting genuinely scared by a physical reaction just from sitting at a desk. We sacrifice our baseline functioning for code that will probably be obsolete in a few years anyway. I am really glad you listened to that warning and started moving. Absolutely nothing we build on these screens is worth breaking ourselves over.
I recommend this read
amazon.com/Spark-Revolutionary-Sci...
I just read the summary of the book and it makes complete sense. We spend an unreasonable amount of time trying to optimize our software workflows while completely starving the physical brain of the movement it actually needs to function. Thank you for taking the time to share it.
This a healthy reminder. I try and start most of my days with a physical workout. And it's on the days I work out that I feel most productive. So it's a fallacy to argue that working out takes away time from actual work, because if you are helping your body maintain peak performance then you will easily make back that hour of exercise you did at the start of the day.
It is strange how we convince ourselves that staring blankly at a screen for an extra hour is more productive than just stepping away and moving our bodies. You are completely right about the time trade-off. Giving up an hour in the morning actually saves time later, simply because it stops you from writing terrible code that you just have to rewrite the next day anyway. It is just really hard to break that mental habit of wanting to be constantly glued to the desk.
I have a timer set for 11 am and another for 3 pm to remind me of that very thing: get away from the screen and keyboard; go for a walk, do some push-ups; go get some fresh air. I especially find it helpful when I’m mulling over a problem as the change in pace and scenery seems to work like a reset button for my brain. An important article… thanks for writing it!
Having to set a literal alarm just to remind yourself that you inhabit a physical body is a dark reality of our profession, but it is completely necessary. It is almost offensive how stepping away to do some push-ups or just breathe actual air solves a complex logic problem faster than staring at the same function for another hour. The brain just needs that background processing time, and the screen actively prevents it. I am really glad you have those hard interrupts built into your daily routine.
I started hitting the gym when I got my first BI job and I was surprised it changed my work more than my body. Something about being physically spent but mentally way more clear. Still the best productivity hack I never expected.
It is a very strange paradox. You go to the gym and completely drain your physical energy, but somehow your brain completely reboots in the process. We spend so much time looking for the perfect productivity app or the right software workflow, when the actual fix is just lifting heavy things or running until you are too tired to overthink. It makes absolutely no logical sense on paper, but it is completely true.
This hits.... We treat our bodies like disposable hardware something to be ignored until it breaks, then replaced.
The irony is we optimize everything else. Code quality, system architecture, performance metrics. Then we sit in the same chair for 10 hours, fuel ourselves with caffeine, and wonder why everything feels wrong.
The crunch culture isn't a badge of honor. It's a bug in how we think about work.
Glad you're listening now. 🦁
Calling crunch culture a bug in how we think about work is exactly right. We spend our entire days obsessing over the health of our servers and the performance of our applications, but we treat our own biological hardware like it has an infinite warranty. The contrast between how carefully we manage memory leaks and how recklessly we handle our own physical decay is completely absurd. It takes a lot of unlearning to finally start treating the body with the same baseline respect we give to a production environment. 🙂
Thank you for your valuable voice in this matter! I couldn't agree more, and it would be a lie to say I haven't been there. What's also interesting is understanding the reason behind pushing oneself to the limit – very often it's impostor syndrome and the deep urge to prove our worth not only to the outside world but, most importantly, to ourselves. Meanwhile, it's a straight path to burnout and a mental breakdown.
Only later did I discover that everything starts working better when I give it a break. Especially the body and mind. I hope younger generations can learn that from our mistakes.
Impostor syndrome is the most expensive fuel we use, it burns through your health way faster than any deadline.
It’s wild how we’ll spend hours debugging a memory leak in an app while ignoring the fact that our own internal batteries have been at 1% for months. We treat our hardware with more respect than our own spines.
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.
That is the absolute hardest part. Walking away from a broken build or an unsolved bug feels physically uncomfortable. Our brains are just wired to close the loop, to find the fix before we allow ourselves to rest.
Learning to literally close the laptop while things are still completely broken and just walk away takes way more discipline than the actual programming. You are completely right about that.
Thanks for reading!
this is way too relatable
I used to think I could just push through anything as long as I stayed focused
but the physical side catches up faster than you expect
the part about treating your body like “just a container for your brain” really hits
The illusion that the brain and the body are completely separate systems is the most dangerous lie we tell ourselves in this profession. We operate under the assumption that the physical shell is just an inconvenience that can be bypassed with caffeine and stubbornness. The realization that the brain literally stops functioning correctly when the container breaks down is always a harsh awakening. I am just glad more of us are starting to acknowledge how completely unsustainable that mindset actually is.
I go to the gym daily for 20 years. I feel no physical decay or pain. Not mentally either.
20 years programming and not a single lesion or eyes problems. No back pain, or arms pain.
You trade if you're naive. I do not kill myself for any company. Never did.
80 hours in a week not even paying enough. 6pm I'm leaving.
You are absolutely right. The hard boundary of logging off at exactly 6 PM and forcing yourself to train every single day is exactly the immunity this industry requires. A lot of developers fall into the naive trap early in their careers, genuinely believing that sacrificing their physical health for a company is just an expected part of the job. Having the absolute discipline to refuse that trade for twenty years is exactly why you have survived without the physical decay. It is the exact baseline standard the rest of the industry needs to adopt.
Exactly. It's so past millenium to be like "oh, you have a job in the office, your life's so easy, because I'm a construction worker"...
No, actually, you can seriously harm your body over the years, when you are not extremely nitpicky about ergonomy, regular sports, regular movement & other exercises during work hours.
The comparison to physical labor is so accurate. People assume that because we sit in climate-controlled rooms in comfortable chairs, our bodies are completely safe.
But while a construction worker might wear down their joints through heavy lifting, we destroy ours through sheer immobility. The decay is just silent and slow. You genuinely have to treat your ergonomics and your daily movement like a mandatory second job, otherwise, this career will just quietly dismantle your physical health over the years.
Something that worked for me after dealing with similar wrist/neck issues: I got a split keyboard (Kinesis Advantage) and a monitor arm so the screen is actually at eye level. Sounds like a small thing but it completely changed my posture without me having to think about it.
The other game changer was switching to a standing desk with a balance board. Not standing all day — maybe 2-3 hours total — but the micro-movements keep everything from locking up the way it does when you're frozen in a chair.
The "just one more commit" trap is real though. I've started literally setting my IDE to auto-save and just walking away mid-thought. The fix usually comes to me in the shower anyway.
Relying on pure willpower to sit up straight never actually works when you are deep in a complex problem. Changing the physical hardware of your desk so the right posture happens automatically is a much smarter strategy.
But the most impressive part of your routine is having the sheer discipline to walk away mid-thought. Deliberately leaving a broken function hanging open feels like a psychological violation, but you are entirely right. Staring intensely at the IDE for another hour rarely solves the problem, while just standing in the shower usually writes the fix for you in five minutes. We just have to be brave enough to actually step away.
This hurts, but the unpleasant reality is that a lot of this isn’t even industry demands, but things we justify as passion because they reward us in the short term, and getting those bugs fixed at 3 AM is a rush, but your body is keeping score, and that score is one you pay later, with compound interest. The worst part is that we’re doing this for something that is just going to be rewritten or forgotten, while we’re stuck with the consequences, and at the end of the day, this isn’t passion, this is poor resource allocation, and the resource is you.
Calling it poor resource allocation is probably the most painful and accurate way to frame this entire problem. We hide behind the word passion because it sounds so much better than admitting we are just addicted to the cheap dopamine hit of solving a puzzle in the middle of the night. The thought of the body charging compound interest on all those skipped hours of sleep is genuinely terrifying. We spend our days carefully managing server memory and optimizing queries, and then we just completely trash our own biological hardware without a second thought. It is a completely backwards way to operate.
Yes, to all of this. My sleep has been suffering lately from my racing brain and this is the touchstone I need right now to stop and consider my priorities.
When the brain refuses to shut down because it is still trying to run background processes and solve logic puzzles in the dark, that is usually the loudest warning sign your physical system can give you. We get so accustomed to running on adrenaline and staring at screens that actual, quiet rest starts to feel completely unnatural. I am really glad this text found you at a moment when you needed it. Reevaluating your priorities is incredibly difficult when you are already running on empty, but forcing that hard mental disconnect before getting into bed is the only way to stop the cycle.
This one hit hard. 🙏
I've been in that chair the one where you tell yourself just one more commit while your back is screaming, your eyes are burning, and you haven't moved in four hours. The logic part of your brain convinces you that shipping is more important than standing up.
The part about physical decay being invisible until it's not that's the trap. You don't notice the slow accumulation. One day you're fine, then suddenly you can't sit without pain, and you realize the bill came due a long time ago.
I started setting a physical interrupt a while back a literal timer that forces me to stand, stretch, walk for 2 minutes. It felt stupid at first. Now it feels like the only thing keeping me functional.
The hard truth is: the code will always be there. The body won't.
Thank you for writing this. It's one of those posts that makes people pause and think — and maybe get up. 🙌
That line about the code always being there while the body will not is the brutal truth we constantly try to outsmart. Setting a literal timer to force an interruption feels so incredibly stupid when you first start doing it, but it is terrifying how quickly it becomes the only thing keeping you intact. You are completely right about the slow accumulation. We just get used to a little bit more pain every week until the physical system finally crashes entirely. I am really glad you put that hard interrupt in place before the damage became permanent.
Gaddemn this is just exactly what im doing
That realization you are having right now is exactly why I wrote this. Since you are actively doing it as we speak, consider this a direct intervention. Push your chair back, stand up, and leave the room for five minutes. Whatever logic problem you are trying to solve right now can wait. Your spine cannot.
Great reflection! BTW the header image gave me a bit of a scare when I first opened the article 😅 really fits with the overall warning tone
catching a glimpse of your own reflection in a dark monitor at three in the morning is much scarier. 😂
I deliberately wanted an image that felt genuinely uncomfortable to look at, because the reality of how we treat our physical bodies in this industry is not polished or aesthetic at all. I am really glad the visual warning worked exactly as intended.
You’re right, we all need some self-compassion sometimes. That’s why I often pull my friends away from their desks at the office and say, "Come on, let’s go get some fresh air” 😁
Every office desperately needs someone who does exactly that. When you are deep in a complex problem, the monitor just becomes your entire reality, and you completely forget that you actually have legs or that there is oxygen outside. Having a colleague who actively breaks that trance and forces you out the door is incredibly valuable. Your friends are very lucky to have you around.
I used to pull in tens of hours during my junior year but now, 8 hours is 8 hours.
my favorite thing to do after sitting in front of the screen all day is doing chores, seeing things get physically done and cleaned up gives me a refresh and a dopamine boost which helps me forget about my work pretty fast.
"The body keeps the score." That book and various talks by Gabor Mate (YouTube) changed my life. I hope you are able to get the rest you need my friend, as everyone else. Past generations of my family traded their backs for physical labor, and what we do today isn't much different without proper form, proper ergonomics, and knowing when enough is enough
My friend, every single word resonated with me. This is such a beautifully written piece, I genuinely felt like it was written about me.
You're absolutely spot on when you talk about solving "unsolvable" bugs, delivering new projects, and juggling a million things at once. Those moments are supposed to make us feel like gods, but in reality, they just become the baseline, expected, normalized, no matter how far they stretch beyond our responsibilities or even our limits and abilities in general.
I went through something similar recently while working on the project that ended up winning me the GitHub Copilot CLI challenge. It had been snowing heavily a couple weeks before that, and I spent hours shoveling just to clear my driveway. My neck, shoulder, and arm were already protesting, but I ignored it and even added my usual workout on top.
The next morning, I woke up feeling like someone had stabbed my shoulder, the entire upper right side of my body was in complete agony. I could barely sit upright. And still, I pushed through and finished the project in THAT condition. I honestly don't even know how.
Only after that did I finally go to the doctor and get an MRI. The pain had become unbearable and lasted for nearly three weeks. Thankfully, it turned out to be just muscle tension, and I'm fine now. But that's not really the point.
The real problem is that I know I probably won't learn from it. I'll keep pushing, keep ignoring the signals, and keep punishing my body in the name of productivity.
We take so many things for granted... until they force us to stop.
Thanks for your article!
Very true, balance really is everything.
It’s easy to forget that good code depends on a healthy mind, and a healthy mind depends on things like sleep, movement, and even community.
I’ve definitely noticed that when I neglect those, my thinking slows down, my attitude dips and my code gets worse, even if I’m spending more time at the keyboard.
Coding is just one part of being human, and ironically, stepping away from it is often what makes us better at it. The best are not always the most obsessed, they’re the most intentional about balanced.
If your system needs people to sit 10–12 hours without moving to make progress, the system is wrong. Either scope is off, or priorities are unclear. Good teams don’t rely on willpower. They rely on constraints. Fixed work hours, forced breaks, smaller tasks. I had a rule: no one pushes code after 9pm unless prod is down. Productivity went up, not down.
Something that helped me take breaks more seriously: understanding what's actually happening neurologically when you step away. The brain's default mode network — the system responsible for connecting disparate ideas and generating insights — is most active during rest and mind-wandering, not during focused work. The "shower epiphany" phenomenon isn't just a cliché; it's your DMN doing the work your prefrontal cortex was too exhausted to do.
So every hour you push through on fumes isn't just costing your health — it's suppressing the exact mental state that would have solved the problem faster. Reframing breaks as "doing the work differently" rather than "stopping work" made it much easier to actually step away from the screen.
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This hit hard. I’ve been there too — chasing that “just one more fix” feeling and ignoring everything else like it doesn’t matter. But it does.
The part about treating the body like an enemy… that’s real. We act like we’re just brains, but eventually the body forces you to listen.
Glad you’re choosing to take care of yourself now. No piece of code is worth breaking yourself for.
Great post. For the past 8 months I haven't skipped a single morning workout, and I also make myself walk at least 30 minutes every day. It's the bare minimum, really, but it's made a huge difference in how my body feels.
This is one of the few posts on this subject that doesn’t soften the exchange.
A lot of us were taught, directly or indirectly, to treat the body like a peripheral to the mind, something to override with caffeine, neglect, and sheer force until the work is done. But the body keeps score. It converts that bargain into pain, fatigue, panic, insomnia, brain fog, and eventually a quieter kind of collapse that looks normal from the outside because this industry has normalized it.
What landed for me most was the underlying question: what are we actually sacrificing ourselves for? So much of what we break ourselves to produce is temporary. Deadlines pass. stacks change. products get replaced. entire codebases disappear. But the nervous system that absorbed the cost does not just snap back because the sprint ended.
That is why this piece works. It refuses to frame physical deterioration as some noble side effect of ambition. It names it for what it is: a destructive trade that tech culture still rewards until the damage becomes too obvious to hide.
More people need to say this plainly. Sustainable work is not laziness, softness, or lack of discipline. It is the baseline requirement for doing meaningful work without turning your own body into the casualty.
I am in the same process right now. I realized that I didn't treat my body right for two solid decades (probably ever since I quit training in Tae Kwon Do as a youth). I am probably gonna hold a company internal talk about mindfulness later in the year, and I thought of my closing lines today, which fits this article perfectly:
We are humans. We don't function. We live.
This really resonates. Many of us in tech push ourselves hard and sometimes overlook our health, thinking it’s part of being productive. In the long run, no work is worth compromising your well-being.
A gentle reminder that caring for yourself is not a break from work, it’s an essential part of it.
I feel so validated after reading this. I was travelling for 5 hours, working for 9+ hours from office and even after coming back home. I used to sleep only for 4 hours. Lunch breaks skipped for client calls, and tight deadlines given by senior manager. All these to pay the bills and home EMI that my father owned. Company took advantages knowing that employees are in need for the job. No extra payment, and free insults when asked for overwork compensation. No one acknowledged my poor sleep, irritability, twitching eyelids, dry eyes, but one fine day I put the resignation, and after reading someone else's experience I now feel brave enough that I quited that job.
I only work 35 hours per week as a software developper (with 7 hours in formation per week), but I still feel mentally tired at the end of the day. But physically, I feel like I could run 5km, and doing exercise or just going for a walk really helps me relieve the strain of a day staring blankly at a shiny screen.
this is completely AI generated
What scares me most is how normalized this has become. People don’t even realize they’re burning out until it’s too late.
Physical debt, I am in it right now.
Yeah, that's right.
Great!