Lower Your Stress, Improve Your Code: Techniques to Manage Stress While Coding

We all can agree that working as a developer sometimes can be very difficult and stressful. As a web developer, we cannot shy away from tight deadlines and unexpected bugs. Those challenges and several issue outside work can really affected our physical and mental health. And if we don’t know how to manage it right, we will probably struggle with anxiety and be unproductive at work.

So here are the five techniques we personally use and might help you to manage stress.

1. Morning Journal

We’ve been practicing this is a technique for a couple of years and it’s freaking golden.

Start Every morning, by writing down these two things:

• Brain dump — write all of your thoughts, feelings, and what you experience.
• The goal for today — one main goal that you have to achieve today, no matter what.

Every time we finish this 5-10 minutes routine, we feel completely different. We’re able to calm down storms in our mind.

If you reflect and write everything you have on your mind (what you are stressing about), you will procrastinate less throughout the day and think less about that one problem you have.

2. Walking

When you feel under stress (e.g. you can’t find a solution to some coding problem), it is very helpful to go on a short 15- to 20-minute walk. It is not only temporarily take you away from the problem but sometimes while you walking the solution often pops up in your head. Don’t bring headphones just walk and enjoy your surroundings.

3. Right Breaks

After hours of coding and designing let yourself have a little break. It is scientifically proven that our brain works best when we go hard, then rest. Focus all your energy and thoughts for 50-90 minutes, then taking a quality break for 15-22 minutes. It means no scrolling IG or Facebooks during the break. Instead, get hydrated, stretch your muscle, or go for a walk.

After doing these right breaks for several times, we feel more relaxed, focused, and we can work for 8 hours without feeling like crap at the end.

4. Flight Mode

If you think that that notifications on your phone and computer didn’t matter, you are totally wrong! Even a little pop up are enough to distract that break down your focus.

Nowadays, we would turn off all notifications (left some incase of something urgent happened) for hours so no one can distract us. For that period of time, we often complete my big goal for the day.

At first, it was difficult as we already used to constantly check on our phones and social media. But after sometime, we’ve noticed that we stopped worrying about it. By not worrying about those stuffs, we feel more focused and less anxious. It is funny how such a simple have a huge impact.

So turn off notifications and tell people to not distract you with unimportant stuff during your working hours.

5. Clean Desk

Obviously as a developer, we spend most of our time in our desk. So, our desk environment will somehow affect our productivity. We notice that when working in a messy desk, we take longer time to find a solution to coding problems and it stresses us out. But when we clean it, the stress melt away.