Software Engineers & Sleepless Nights
Top reasons why do Software Engineers suffer from Sleeplessness?
The 21st Century is often referred to as the digital age, people are carrying computers in their hands, where the world is connected with the Internet, where social media identity of a person is becoming more important than their social identity, and businesses are coming online, and people adapted to new normal as it was the norm in the first case. All the new progress in this digital era would not have been possible without the software engineers churning out codes day and night and giving us the breakthrough stuff.
Software Engineer as a profession is highly rated when it comes to the perks and the salary as compared to other professions. Many people are joining this profession for this reason or maybe because of a very low bar of entering into this profession as compared to other professions which may require a decade of study and practice before even starting the actual work. What people see is that software engineers get to sit in nice AC offices, enjoy a lot of amenities, enjoy perks, and also get a high salary(as compared to others) just for writing code. This is true but just the half-truth and the other half come to notice when they are into this profession. As it is rightly said
Distant drums sounds sweeter.
Now coming to our question:
Why do Software Engineers suffer from sleeplessness?
Software Engineering by the nature of work provides many reasons why software engineers may suffer knowingly or unknowingly from sleeplessness. Further in this article, we will list down few of these reasons. It may not necessary that one may suffer from all reasons or even any one of the reasons or may have some other reason due to which they suffer sleeplessness. Also this is not a medical study but I am writing this from my experience and what I have heard.
With this let's check out the reasons for the sleeplessness of software engineers:
Long Working Hours
Software Engineers as the profession demands a lot of continuous work for the long hours. Generally, the average working hours of software engineers are more than the average working hour of other professions. If you see on papers a software engineer is expected to work an average of 40 hours a week but that is not always true in reality and you may see software engineers working 50–60 hours a week. Having long working hours becomes more stressful when all this time you need to keep your mind and brain active. This will not only results in sleeplessness but also mental stress.
More Mental Work
Software Engineering is the work of the brain and mind. Unlike other professions, Software Engineering hardly requires any physical activity during their work. This results in a strange situation for software engineers, as we have discussed earlier the long working hours for the software engineers where they may need to work for 50–60 hours a week as the result of this continuous working their mind definitely gets tired but due to the lack of physical activity their body is still not tired. After the long working hours if a Software Engineer may want to get a rest and tries to sleep his/her body will not allow him to sleep since he/she is not physically tired due to lack of any physical activity.
Blue Light Effect
Blue Light Syndrom knowingly or unknowingly has affected each one of us. What is a Blue Light Effect(check below)? But to summarize long and continuous exposure to blue light can affect your sleep and cause disease. This is the digital age, we may not notice but we are surrounded by the blue light from different screens. Your mobile, tv, tablets, and even LED bulbs are sources of blue light. This becomes more server and problematic for a software engineer, one who works in front of screens as part of their profession. While sitting in front of a screen a software engineer is continuously exposed to blue light thus affecting his/her sleep badly. There are many ways device makers are trying to prevent this blue light but it can never be eliminated.
Blue Light Effect? Light is made up of red, orange, yellow, green, blue, indigo and violet light. When combined, it becomes the white light we see. Each of these has a different energy and wavelength. Rays on the red end have longer wavelengths and less energy. On the other end, blue rays have shorter wavelengths and more energy. Light that looks white can have a large blue component, which can expose the eye to a higher amount of wavelength from the blue end of the spectrum. Although it is environmentally friendly, blue light can affect your sleep and potentially cause disease.
No Switch-Off Button
Software Engineers are not machines. Many times Software Engineers work on very complex problems and this is how they disrupt the market. Also, many times working on a complex problem they may work on one single problem for days, weeks, and even months, each day’s work is never mutually exclusive. So, it is the tendency of humans to keep thinking of the problem at hand until its completely solved. This is true for software engineers but also much more frequent as compared to other professions. While eating, walking, sitting idle, or even sleeping these problems keep running in their mind. This has become more problematic while working from home, where earlier when the employee used to come back from office and this used to give them the opportunity to shut off from their work but this is not possible while working from home as people are always staying at their place of work. Thus affecting their sleep and mental health.
Pressure of Continuous Adaption
Change is the rule of thumb and this is true in any profession. But what makes the real difference is the pace of change in any field. The software industry is one of the fastest if not fastest-changing industries. While working in the software industry just to remain relevant one has to continuously adapt to the changes. As a result of this software engineers will always need to adapt to the changes to be relevant and keep updating their skills. This has also resulted in cut-throat competition for good opportunities. And all this is adaption and learning new skills and being relevant in the industry is over and above the already existing long and tiring job. This race of continuous improvement has resulted in even longer working hours for software engineers thus increasing the mental pressure and decreasing their sleep.
Summary
In this article, we looked into a few reasons why a software engineer may suffer from sleeplessness. The idea behind this was people may relate to these reasons and work towards solving the problem. It is good to know and talk about the problem than to not know or keep silent. In the end, we just want to say that there can be n reasons for sleeplessness but there are none that cannot be solved.
In the next article we will look at what one can do to prevent this in the future, so look out for that. Until then you can check out my other articles from here.
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