[​​Brown Belt] Let’s hope you have some time before you need to stress about this topic.

You love programming, and you love your job. Most of the time you should be having fun. Every job has its ups and downs, however, and it’s important for your long-term health to weather the storms gracefully.

Zen teachings have the concept of mushin no shin, sometimes translated as “mind like water,” wherein you respond to stimuli from your environment in exact proportion to each stimulus. To a martial artist, she would block or strike her opponent with exactly the right amount of force to accomplish the job—neither too little (thus allowing defeat) nor too much (thus succumbing to anger or zeal).

In your own work, the mushin mind-set means acting and reacting to the pressures of the job with neither defeat nor anger but instead as a consummate professional.

Of course, this is easier said than done. Even the mushin professional who keeps her cool on the job can carry a subconscious burden. You need to recognize the burdens you carry and deal with them in a constructive manner.

Recognizing Stress

Stress reactions may manifest themselves in physical ways: grinding your teeth, tension headaches, or clenched shoulder muscles, for example. While in a place you can relax, take a mental inventory of your body and try to sense muscle tension. Open your jaw wide, and let it come back relaxed. Roll your head gently. Bring your shoulders down. Check in with your body a couple times a day, and over time you’ll notice where you tend to carry tension.

Observe your interactions with other people: are you quick to anger with co-workers when you’re normally mellow? Are others angry with you? Maybe you notice yourself skipping lunch when you used to hang with friends. Or during team meetings you’re usually the optimist in the room, but lately you’ve taken on a tone of defeat.

Finally, observe patterns of your day that may have changed. Most of us are creatures of habit—coffee in the morning, walking to lunch, checking a couple blogs in the afternoon, playing a favorite computer game. Have these changed recently?

This kind of introspection takes a certain self-honesty that may feel uncomfortable (or just goofy) at first. It’s a valid feeling, and since you’re being honest with yourself, go ahead and acknowledge it. Then let it go.

Addressing Physical Stress

The physical component of stress is a symptom of psychological stress, but when it becomes a problem in itself, it feeds back and creates more stress. There are a number of ways to break the cycle:

• Massage therapy can be very therapeutic and have long-lasting effects, depending on the practitioner and your body’s response.

• Biofeedback techniques (see ​Biofeedback​) can teach you to both recognize and release tension.

• Exercise can exhaust muscles and release tension—plus give your mind a break from the computer. (Many tech companies have gyms or provide discounted gym memberships.)

• Fix any ergonomic problems with your workstation, as discussed in Tip 20, ​Treat Your Body Right ​.

You’ll need to find what works for you, of course. But do find something—your physical stress won’t go away on its own.

Long Hours

When you work a salaried job, you are required to get the job done, regardless of how many hours it takes. Reasonable managers will work with you to match your duties to a roughly forty-hour week. Some insist on specific hours (aka butt-in-chair time); others don’t care.

I’ve worked in start-ups that mandated sixty-hour minimum work weeks. That’s part of the gig with start-ups—whether they say it explicitly or not, be prepared for it.

When you’re young, single, and love your job, long hours aren’t a problem. I worked like crazy the first several years of my career and had a great time doing it. If this is where you’re at, go nuts; that’s what the energy of youth is for!

Also, accept that, as a newbie, it’s going to take you longer to get the job done than an experienced programmer. You’ll go down more dead-end paths, make more mistakes, and struggle more with debugging. That’s part of the learning experience, and it takes time.

Later you’ll pick up responsibilities outside of work—spouse, kids, a house to maintain—and those long hours become a real problem. You have several options to consider:

• Optimize your butt-in-chair time. Look at techniques like Pomodoro^[32] and GTD^[33] to focus your time in the office so you can leave earlier.

• Bring in lunch from home instead of going out. You can eat at your desk in ten minutes; going out often takes an hour. (However, do go out with your co-workers from time to time just to shoot the breeze.)

• Take your crunch times in smaller, more frequent doses. If you have project milestones every week or two, then you may need to dedicate only a day every couple weeks for crunch time. By contrast, when milestones are every six months, that’s a lot of time for a project to get offtrack, and crunch times can last for weeks (or months).

• Find a company whose culture values work-life balance. This doesn’t necessarily mean big, slow-moving companies with nine-to-five cultures; there are plenty of small companies whose founders burned out on killer hours themselves.

You can get a lot done in a focused forty hours. The young bucks spending their lives at the office aren’t always that productive—the office becomes a place of socialization and recreation in addition to work; it’s not sixty straight hours of coding.

Burnout

In cycling there’s a state of fatigue known as the bonk. Your body uses glycogen to keep the muscles going, but after hours of pedaling, it runs out. When that happens, the bonk comes on suddenly, and you want to fall off the bike and pass out.

Burning out in your job feels much the same. All the sudden you have an extreme compulsion to quit your job and become a Tibetan yak herder. Or dig ditches. It doesn’t really matter—just anything except typing another line of code.

It’s usually not the code that causes burnout. More often it’s mismanagement: mandatory long hours, death march scheduling, and the like. I’m sure you can stand occasional periods of high stress, but when those periods stretch over months or years, you will burn out.

In cycling you can avoid the bonk by eating simple carbs as you ride. Likewise, you can avoid burnout by getting away from the code and having some fun. (This is why so many high-tech companies have foosball tables.) However, carbs and fun only delay the inevitable: at some point you need to take a real break and rest. I don’t mean a long weekend, either: if you’ve been scrambling for months to ship version 1.0, you’ll need weeks (or more) of vacation to let yourself recover.

If you don’t allow recovery time and you drive yourself to burnout—you’ll know when you do—take some comfort that it doesn’t last forever. You may need to herd yaks for a year, but you’ll get the itch to start programming again.

Take a Vacation

Programmers—especially of the unmarried variety—are terrible about taking vacations. It seems like you’re always in the middle of a big project and you’d get behind if you took a week off. Face it, there’s never a good time to take vacation. Just go.

Don’t limit yourself to the “obligatory vacations” where you visit family on holidays. Go do something interesting. Try windsurfing, rock climbing, scuba diving, going overseas…anything to get your head out of computers for a while. Try the Geek Atlas^[34] if you’re struggling for ideas. As you get older, these opportunities are harder to come by, so get going now.

Why bother? Why spend the time and money? Vacations are where you reset your perspective. You can’t tell you’re in a rut while you’re in it—you need to see it from an outside vantage point. Further, it’s a lot easier to stave off burnout before you burn out.

Take It Seriously

Stress can be a good thing for motivating positive change in your life. It can also be incredibly destructive. Depression, like burnout, sends you into a downward spiral that’s extremely difficult to break out of.

If you’ve been heading downward for a while, get help from trusted friends or a professional. Don’t be embarrassed or pretend it’s not a problem—you’ll pull out a lot faster with help.

Actions

• Try to recognize your body’s physical stress responses. If it’s something you can directly control (like muscle tension), then get in the habit of recognizing it and letting it go. If it’s an autonomic response (such as increased heart rate or panic attack), then work with a biofeedback therapist.

• Try this experiment: next week, when you hit forty hours of office time, go home. Don’t return until next Monday. Depending on your company’s culture, you may not be able to pull this off regularly, but make it a goal.