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 (28)
omg, this hit me hard, thanks for sharing this. and you are so right..
Thank you for reading!
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 ;-)
I totally get this! Itβs kind of a paradox β while some people run marathons, count their steps, and even wear fancy watches to track their sleep π we in IT end up sitting late at night trying to solve βjust one more problem.β
In psychology, this is actually known as the Zeigarnik effect β unfinished things keep pulling our attention and wonβt let go. But yeahβ¦ you canβt keep this up forever, and your body will eventually demand a break.
Iβm already planning a complete chill mode starting mid-April β 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.
βIf 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. π
That sounds like an excellent plan π Iβm actually already doing pretty well in the βterrible televisionβ category β I just finished all of Bridgerton π
So honestly, I might already be halfway through your masterclassβ¦ just missing the βno screensβ part π
Binge-watching Bridgerton is a highly respectable choice for terrible television, but it still involves staring at a glowing rectangle. π
You are already actively failing the most important module of the class.
βThis 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.π
I recommend this read
amazon.com/Spark-Revolutionary-Sci...
βI 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.
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.
βIt 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.
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.
βIt 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.
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!
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.
βIt 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 hurts, but the unpleasant reality is that a lot of this isnβt 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 weβre doing this for something that is just going to be rewritten or forgotten, while weβre stuck with the consequences, and at the end of the day, this isnβt 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.
This one hit hard. π
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 β and maybe get up. π
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.