Self-Care For Developers

Christopher Tero
Nov 5 · 5 min read
Photo by Nicole Wolf on Unsplash

When most people think of coding they think of people immobile in their office chairs, hanging over their keyboards 40+ hours a week in an office, and then possibly a few hours a night at home afterwards. And for some, this picture isn’t too far fetched. Let’s face it; Coding is not the most physically active occupation. Involving hours of screen time each day and the propensity to munch on junk food and down soda or beer through the day, it can lead to an unhealthy lifestyle if the developer isn’t careful. Here are a few simple habits to help the developer (or any office occupation) keep healthy while working the job they love.

Exercise

While proper exercise is important for most people, it is especially important for someone who has a job that involves them sitting still most of the day. It doesn’t have to be extravagant, but doing 10–15 minutes of simple exercises in the morning 3–4 times a week will help a person be more energized and focused through the day, and just help them feel better overall.

Another aspect of exercise that is sometimes overlooked but can be quite beneficial is simply doing more walking. The average American gets somewhere between 3000–4000 steps a day, while the recommended amount is closer to 10000. One advantage of walking is that it can be easily implemented in many ways including the following:

  • Parking further away from your destination
  • Taking the stairs instead of the elevator
  • Getting off the bus one stop earlier
  • Walking your dog (or a friends)
  • Go walking with your family or with a friend
  • Take a brief (5–10 minute) walk during your lunch break

There are certainly many more ways to implement walking, but these should be enough to get started.

One more way to get better exercise at a desk job is to see if you can get a standing desk. If you can it will certainly burn more calories than sitting at your desk all day, and in addition you can do simple standing exercises while you work for even more activity.

Choose Healthy Foods

Often when working at a desk for extended periods it can be a temptation to grab a soda or a bag of chips to munch on while working. In addition, if someone is in the bad habit of rushing out the door in the morning they may either settle for a less healthy breakfast option or skip breakfast altogether, which only encourages snacking later in the day. Fast food can especially be a culprit in contributing to a poor diet.

First, make sure to get a nutritional breakfast. It can be something as simple as yogurt with fruit, but a decent breakfast is important for helping you feel energized throughout the day. Secondly, if you are in the habit of snacking at work, choose healthier snacks instead of junk food. Foods like nuts, dried or fresh fruit, and dark (70%+) chocolate in moderation can be good choices. You may also want to substitute your sodas and beer with water. Finally, be sure your main meals are primarily composed of nutritional foods like fruits, vegetables, whole grains, fish, and at most moderate amounts of meat.

Whatever the snack or food choices, a healthy diet is important to anyone’s self care, especially those with an office job like developers.

Take Breaks

Every developer has at some point been stuck on a problem for multiple hours, just trying to hammer away at it to break through. If you have been stuck for a while, give yourself a break. Take a walk and clear your head, play a game of ping-pong, or do a few reps at the gym. Giving your mind a break allows it to reset, and when you return to the problem it will be from a fresh perspective and often allow you to break through the mental barrier you were having. Or to catch that pesky missing semicolon or wrongly cased variable name.

Keep Work at Work

It can often be tempting to bring projects home in the evenings or over the weekends and work from home, but having a personal life separate from work is important to the developer’s well being. This is perhaps more difficult in coding than most other occupations. Construction workers leave the job site at the end of the day, cooks hang up their apron and leave the kitchen, and line workers leave the factory in the evenings. But with coding the developer can pull up the repository on GitHub from home, or work on a side-tool to help their main project at work.

This can be even more difficult for developers that work from home. The lines between work life and home life can become blurred, and work can become all encompassing 24/7. While the temptation is to think that more hours means better productivity, often too much work can detract from the developers performance, as well as leaving them without a life. So for developers who work from home, have a dedicated “office space” that is for work, and only work during work hours while there. This can be a simple as a specific chair, desk, or spot at the table, but having some distinct work area that you can leave after work hours are through can contribute to a better work-life balance.

Sleep

If there is one thing that will kill a person’s productivity and quality of life, it is lack of sleep. And yet most people tend to like to “burn the midnight oil” every night while getting up early in order to make it to work in the mornings. The general recommendation for most people is 8 hours of sleep each night, yet the average American is more likely to get between 6–7 hours. For most people, if they would simply cut out an hour or two of extra activities and use that time to catch up on sleep, their quality of life could be much improved. Just because a person can operate on 6 hours of sleep at night does not mean that they should do so.


As coders we pride ourselves on being able to solve problems. Yet many of us often run into the problem of poor self care and fail to fix it. Let’s be sure to set aside the time and effort we need in order to solve our self care problems and improve our quality of life.

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