Brain drain is starting to take it’s toll

September 2016 · 4 minute read

As excited as I was to be starting off on a new adventure, nothing could have prepared me for how draining it really it is.

Last week everything maybe got to be a little too full on and I didn’t get a chance then to post this article. It’s quite funny to read back over now, just after a few days, because to be honest, following such a dominant win and going into work with a new project waiting for me, I’ve completely changed my point of view from almost everything that I’d written here:

Everything was so planned and organised and going smooth from day one. I thought I’d hit the ground running but it’s actually a little more difficult finding your feet. I guess it’s all just caught up – or maybe it’s only starting to catch up…

Here I am turning my dream into a reality, coding all day and training in the evenings. I thought it would be as simple as that. But two months in, the works getting more difficult as I’m preparing for another fight just 4 weeks after the last one.

With frustrating work, physical fatigue from training and winter weather, the only comfort seems to come from hot meals, delicious snacks, and chocolatey treats. Permanently worn out from intense, repetitive days throughout the week it’s almost impossible to resist by the time Friday shows its face. And with cut week coming up, I cannot afford to be set in a routine of habitually gaining weight as the week goes on especially not since I seem to be heavier on the whole anyway.

I need to be careful here, I seem to be stuck in a cycle where I’m too tired in the morning to focus quickly at work so I drink a lot of coffee to wake up and I end wind up crashing but the end of the day, right when I need to go to training. I feel more and more that by the end of the day I’m so exhausted from work that my training is really going to suffer. This is not how I want to be feeling right now.

The weekend comes around and all I want to do is anything but look at a computer or tv screen. I want to be outside, socialising and eating. This is not the vision I had, I thought I’d be learning so much that I’d go home at the end of the day and try to re-implement it with new and existing projects, or go home and learn even more to take back to work with me. But that’s not the case.

Maybe it’s because I’m thinking about it too much and I have a tendency to see the bad in every situation or maybe my luck has legitimately run out and the grass is just always greener on the other side. Either way, the only thing to do now is to devise a new strategy, implement a plan of action or come up with some new goals.

And that is exactly what I’ll do! I’ll focus on this next fight and get that out of the way, then I’ll take a little break and let some tight muscles loosen up and whilst breaking, I’ll finally free up the time to go and check out some the Auckland meet ups where I will hopefully surround myself with other passionate developers from whom I can draw inspiration.

I will also spend a couple of weekends to myself, relaxing. I may even go and get pampered, free my mind, chill out. Basically, I’m going to do anything that does exhaust me mentally or physically because I just cannot keep running on overdrive and enjoy it. Usually, I enjoy being too busy. Usually, the tasks I’m busy with are not this intense. Six months or so from now, I have every confidence that I can handle it but until I find myself settled and in my element during the day, I really am going to have to actually take more breaks and put less stress on myself.

This may mean I achieve less additional accomplishments and I don’t get to fight as often as I’d ideally hoped for but it does mean that I’ll last longer and most likely become more valuable in the long run. Ultimately, to succeed in even your most unrealistic goals, you just need to able to take a step back, see the bigger picture, break it down and work through all the minor steps – which WILL include rest periods. And those rest periods are most definitely NOT as minor as you might have once thought.