Focus on Physical Health, Diet and Sleep

If you desire positive mental health, high intellectual output and happiness. Focus on physical health, diet and sleep. There is no foundation for a healthy mind without these. We know too much about the brain-body connection to ignore this relationship and not act accordingly, both individually, socially and in the workplace. A company would do well to consider the aggregate effects of these habitual changes within its employee’s lifestyles.   

 “Programming is an extension of our minds, and anything that compromises our minds will hurt our programming skills.”

“Work life balance and wellness impact us in a subtler way then technical practices do. It’s easy to point to a bug and say, “This couldn’t have happened in Rust.” It’s a lot harder to point to a bug and say, “This wouldn’t have happened if the programmer wasn’t stressed out and sleep-deprived. There’s no feedback loop that pushes developers away from too much stress and too little sleep.

 In contrast, there are plenty of things that push us toward it. Things like scope creep. Like being understaffed. Like production fires, or last-minute changes, or an upcoming release, or bad bosses, or company culture. Because it’s easier to ask more of people than to address the sickness in the system.”

-Hillel Wayne

Here is Hillel Wayne’s piece on this subject .