Programming can be one of the worst things for your health.
Sitting at a desk won't kill you, but studies have shown that it isn't as healthy as you might think.
Sitting at a desk for long periods of time can lead to increased levels of stress and anxiety, as well as an increased risk of developing musculoskeletal disorders.
Thankfully, it's easy to make some changes with very little effort.
Here are 6 Tips:
1. Take Screen breaks
As a developer, it is likely that you spend at least eight hours a day, or more, staring at a screen. This type of long screen time can have serious negative effects on your health. To counteract the effects, it is essential to take regular screen breaks throughout the day and outside of work. Taking breaks from screens allows your eyes and mind to rest, helping to maintain overall health, focus, productivity, and creativity.
2. Posture
To ensure optimal bodily alignment and prevent muscle strain, it is important to maintain a straight posture. This means that all joints and bones should be in a straight line, with muscles being used rather than hunched up. The right posture will help to keep the body in balance.
3. Workout / Exercise
To ensure that you are able to maintain a healthy and active lifestyle, it is important to schedule your fitness routine in your daily life. Regular exercise helps to keep your bones and muscles strong, while also helping to improve your overall health and well-being. You can create a fitness schedule that fits into your lifestyle and allows you to include activities that you enjoy, such as running, swimming, cycling, or yoga. Doing so will help to ensure that you can stay active and remain fit
Daily 45 mins of workout will keep your body functioning at an optimum level.
4. Water your body
Drinking water is essential for staying hydrated and is a free and easy way to do so. It is recommended that the average person consume 2.5 liters of water per day to stay healthy and hydrated. Having a regular intake of water throughout the day is a great way to stay on top of your hydration levels.
5. Avoid Burnout
Most coders usually have friends that are also coders, as they often do not get enough time to socialize and escape from their professional life. Nonetheless, having no or limited life outside the coding circle speeds up the process of burnout. Little or no appreciation from project team leaders, excessive workload, and being underpaid are some of the contributors to burnout.
Make a habit of shutting off from work mode and plugging into some other role in your life. Those who have families likely do not find this difficult, as a family can be a great source of recharging. Others can indulge in some kind of hobby, like reading a book or painting. Replenishing your energy resources is important to keep in mind. If energy is mortgaged on a daily basis, you’ll run out of it one day.
6. Good Sleep in Practice
We see tons of pieces of advice that say: ‘write, write, and write a lot of code,’ then test it and continue writing even more — a lot of practice will definitely give you a stronger understanding of how things work. When breaking, and later fixing those things, you will gain problem-solving skills which are critical in our profession. Spend as much time as possible doing that, so you can get more practice.
But those bits of advice are missing the important piece: don’t miss sleep while doing that. Here are a few examples of why sleep helps:
Getting the proper rest boosts your mental health by helping your brain remember tasks easier.
If we have assignments that need to be done for a new project in three weeks, proper rest can help us remember these tasks outside of writing notes.
A sufficient amount of rest also supports decision-making — an extremely critical skill for developers, since a lot of the code we write is based on making decisions and using logic.
Sleeping well will allow you to concentrate on your tasks better, therefore allowing you to get more done with fewer bugs.
On the other hand, a lack of sleep leads to poor attention and less efficient learning. With more sleep, you will be able to consolidate memories, which is essential for learning new information.
Have you ever experienced a task that you were not able to solve until you woke up early in the morning with the solution?
Maybe you also tried to understand some tricky concept about binary trees or recursion and never got it until the next day, when it magically sorted out all those things.
Most probably it happened while you were sleeping.
Working as a programmer can be a demanding job, with long hours spent in front of a computer screen. This can take a toll on your physical and mental health, which is why it's important to make sure you are taking steps to maintain a healthy lifestyle.