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Comment by dfsegoat | Hacker News Reader

In this last project I was in, which was a bit of a death march - we (Team) ALL got to the point of incurring bizarre sleep disturbances and other cognitive/emotional disturbances:

It would take 3-4 hours once home at our set stop time to "shut off" our brains from thinking about what we were working on - and switch over to "being home" mode and interacting with spouses etc. without being irritable.

We also all had disturbed sleep from "programming dreams" once we could shut our brains down and actually fall asleep.

This is nothing new, I know - but it was intriguing (and frightening) to see these effects manifested consistently across our entire team.

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I have "programming dreams" every night.

Probably isn't healthy, but I program all day at work. Go home and spend a few hours with family, then program an additional few hours every night. Sometimes I fall into the rabbit hole and emerge at 2-3 am after finally finishing what I started. Go to bed, and rinse and repeat the next day.

My brain just won't shut off at this point, but I enjoy absolutely everything about what I do.

Same here, terrible sleep when all you're doing is attempting debugging or refactoring without a keyboard. I am sure my short-term memory of non-programming related activities is severely affected because no matter where I am, I am coding, redesigning or imagining shit that is causing that hard to find memory corruption.

Movies are my unwinding method. And daily 1 hour walks.

> I am sure my short-term memory of non-programming related activities is severely affected because no matter where I am, I am coding, redesigning or imagining shit that is causing that hard to find memory corruption.

same here. I have the worst short-term memory for non-programming things ever.

> My brain just won't shut off at this point, but I enjoy absolutely everything about what I do.

Everybody is different so I’m not saying this will happen to you, but I recognize this mode from personal experience and what happened to me was something went sour. Management took a different direction and the thing I poured my heart in got critiqued and risked being shot down. At that point, I missed all the distance to be able to nuance it or say: it’s just work. Since it consumed much free time, dreams, etc. I found myself in a breakdown, and couldn’t touch code anymore. This luckily only lasted three weeks, but/and it made me change many of my ways to avoid something like that happen again and take three years. Which I’ve heard is not uncommon. Again, YMMV, but thought to share that even tough you have the best of times, mixing up work with non-work/dev can provide the necessary barrier/distance/perspective to deal with setbacks more gracefully.

I should have included the caveat that the coding/programming I do at home is on little side projects and experiments that aren't related to my every-day work.

I do this too -- code for work, take a break, then code for my own thing, then go to sleep. I suspect the third of those plays havoc with the fourth.

  >> finally finishing what I started... Go to bed

I find that I sleep far better if I don't think about work for a half hour before bed.

Even better if it's an hour without work before bed.

I have these dreams as well and several times have actually "solved" a problem in my sleep, woken up in the middle of the night, coded it and it worked.

Sometimes I feel like coding triggers some area of the brain that is slightly autistic or aspergers-like, and I perseverate on it. If I reach a breakthrough I feel better.

I learned to say this to myself - "if I am stuck in a loop, then remember I might need to break out of the loop" - but I mean that not in the programming sense entirely, more behavioral.

Noticing that my brain can actually "think inside the algorithm", even in my sleep, has numerous times caused me to wonder if our brains are capable of essentially "running code" and that maybe neural networks and the like may really be onto something. But that's a different tangent.

I have learned that when I have intense periods of work in our field, like, for a month straight, I have a noticeable carryover effect.

What I mean is, if I work for a month or several months doing 10-12 hour+ days coding, etc. and then I stop to take a few days off, it literally takes several (1-3) days to disengage my mind from "work mode" to "vacation" or "life" mode for lack of better terms.

I'm also finding that this is getting worse as I age. It feels like it takes longer to unwind from the adrenaline fueled state, but I'm usually much better off after I do.

Yeah, not healthy. I'm trying hard not to work the long constant hours with few breaks- but I had some bad employment situations that didn't offer any alternative for a while.

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