My mental health increased massively when I stopped being a programmer.
I had to do neurofeedback training to reduce the beta wave amplitude if my brain. They were three standard deviations above normal even when I was having an incredibly calm day.
The neurofeedback clinician had me skip my ritalin for a few days before doing that baseline scan. The day of the scan I felt a calm like nothing I’d felt for months. Even in that state my beta waves were three standard deviations above normal.
The neurofeedback training put a stop to my panic attacks.
Anyway, beta waves are used in logical decision-making (the thing a programmer does 10,000 times per day), and they’re also used in fight or flight response. Good thing to know about how the brain works.
Luckily as a software dev I had the money for the neurofeedback. I spent about $7k on that in total, in chunks of about $1500 at a time.
I’m an uber driver. The pay is atrocious, but the work is super easy and I feel energized after a long shift. I may go back to tech, but in a talking job like sales or support. I’m just not built to write code all day.
I stopped taking all the stimulants at some point before being fired. Even after the panic attacks stopped, I still couldn’t get to a point where I could write code more than two hours per day. As a full-time dev I was expected to account for 9 total hours including 8 billable hours per day. It never worked out.
But I stopped taking the stimulants and discovered my productivity was just as high without them. Which with code means still pretty low. But any other kind of work I can go twelve hours without issue. I’m really productive so long as I’m not making precise and articulated decisions all day.
I’m an excellent driver, but the rules don’t change. Driving is the same set of rules every day, every road condition. There’s like maybe 150 rules to memorize and then all I have to do is implement them perfectly. As an autistic I’m really fucking good at that.
Programming is like doing construction, except:
I’ve done a lot of different jobs and programming is easily the most mentally taxing. I always say if you’re doing the same thing twice as a programmer, you’re doing it wrong because you could have automated something.
I just can’t be that creative all day every day.