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 (69)
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.