Fixing “fried brain” syndrome

Question

I just wrote an amazing amount of code (for me) yesterday. I'm a new developer and my brain is fried. According to Code Complete 2.0, this isn't just me. How can I get my brain back in gear so I can get some good work done today?

Answer 1

It is a very usual thing when we are excited and committed to finish tasks at one-shot!

short answer: Be Realistic in planning your daily work load!

Train yourself to get better in estimating daily work whenever possible. Keeping good productivity phase is more important than over-delivering and being burnt-out.

However, if it happens then you need to take control of the situation!

Some rules of thumb might be:

• stop looking at monitor or searching when feeling exhausted or stuck
• stand up, go and take a walk, get some fresh air.
• go fishing (1/2 hour would be fine), seriously. Colleague of mine used to do that when stressed out !
• stop thinking about the problem. however, your brain will still look for solution behind the scene (aka, multi-threading is kicked off)
• After a break you should be feeling much better and more fresh to continue

In most cases, this short break will help to re-focus your thoughts and better understand what is the issue and how to deal with it.

There are very good long posts on tips and tricks as well: A Programmer’s Greatest Enemy

• Four Kinds of Stuck
• What do you do when you feel stuck?

Another related post on SE - When stuck, how quickly should one resort to Stack Overflow?

Answer 2

Excercise is great for overcoming mental problems. I would reccomend biking for a half-hour or more to get the blood flowing and to stimulate your brain with some new scenery. It can sometimes be difficult to start exercising, but I promise you that you will not regret it once you are finished.

Avoid stimulants like coffee and energy drinks. I can tell you from experience that they will give you more energy, and then your brain will use that energy to be even more anxious and twitchy about how hard it is to get any work done.

Answer 3

I've got news for you: you're not a machine.

There's no magic trick to "get back in gear yada yada";
you overperformed, now you'll underperform, for a while.

Good chances are it will be twice as much as the time you spent overperforming.

So... was your performance good enough to justify all the subsequent recovering?

Or you'll better find a more sustainable, rhythmic, way of working?

If it was worth, welcome to workaholicism: you'll pull out incredible feats all of your life, and brag about them, (glossing over the "recovering" parts that followed) until one of your internal organs decides otherwise.

I strongly suggest the other road, though.

Answer 4

One side of our work is the amount of code, this is easy to measure, and feels great when it is huge, and it even works... The other side is the structure of the code, and the amount of code we have not written, because we created a good structure, proper segmentation.

When writing a lot of code, we create answers to our questions, which is fine and very important: it has to work first, before overthinking the problem. But after this period we have a bunch of code, that is very likely partly good and partly bad:

• there are some bugs to find (this is easier)
• and some structural damages, carries our misconceptions, things to take apart and put together in another way.

After coding there is a meditative phase, step back, relax, look around - and let your brain just wonder around the current answers. Try to "talk" in the current language you have just created (your components, and their interfaces), put them into broader context, think about their development in the future. There will be questions arising, problems with the current answers and codes, that you'd better rethink, correct, refactor before going on. Okay, the previous huge amount of code may collapse to its fractions along the way, but it does not feel any less better.

The real aim is a tiny clear diamond doing the job of a bucket of coal... ;-)

At least this is how it works for me, and I am quite used to this "bipolar" and uncontrollable behavior of my brain. After such "why am I sooo slow??" periods I regularly identify errors in my current approach that would make any further coding a failure and garbage to be thrown out. I tend to admit that my brain knows more about this whole stuff than my conscious, willful mind.

Answer 5

You know ...

Mens sana in corpore sano

Take care of yourself. Don't push too hard. You will work better if your brain doesn't have to worry about your health and feels relaxed that you have everything under control ;).

Answer 6

Perhaps this will help you: Log out, before your burnout

Answer 7

Short answer? Do something else for a while!

Human minds are only capable of concentrating on tasks for limited periods of time. After that, boredom and fatigue set in and your productivity falls off the cliff. If you find this happening to you, then that's the time to go make a cup of coffee, check out today's XKCD, or get caught up on your email or some other job you've been putting off because it wasn't high priority.

A related problem is that of burnout, where you've been working on something for so long that you've lost the ability to care about it anymore. I'd describe fried-brain as the acute version and burnout as the chronic version. Again, the answer is to do something else for a while, the difference being that the something else is something you may need to do for a few days-weeks rather than a few minutes-hours. Going on holiday is the typical cure for burnout.

Answer 8

You've got to take care of yourself. My first boss used to march me through town 3 or 4 times per day whether I liked it or not. You will find that some of your most productive thinking is done exercising or just sitting outside the office talking things over.