A student and worker’s learnings about mental health
I started to get into the programming world in March 2020, through basic things like HTML, CSS, and C#. This journey started at the beginning of the pandemic here in Brazil, so as I was a high school student and classes were stopped for a while, besides not doing anything else, what was left for me was to learn to program. I’ve always respected the pandemic a lot, especially in the year 2020, so my apartment was the place I spent 24 hours a day, next to my computer. If you who are reading stop and think, this may even be a good thing, because I had a lot of time to learn to program calmly, but I would say no.
The only thing I did was study, in the morning, afternoon, and night. The routine didn’t change, I was just focused on learning to program, getting good as soon as possible, and I didn’t care about anything else. This process took place throughout the entire year, until November when I started as an intern at a company that develops solutions for the industry. A new chapter of my life started there, so I wanted to study even more, and I started to get even more obsessed with getting good at programming, regardless of what I had to sacrifice in my mind to make it happen. In March 2021, a year after this whole exhausting process began, I started to feel the mental effects of just studying excessively, I had a burnout that I caused by simply wanting to get good at coding and dedicate myself 100% to it for a year of my life, doing nothing else in the meantime. And here is my opportunity so that we can get into the topic of Mental Health in this short text.
We are humans, we are not machines, we cannot work and/or study all the time for a long period of time. I started having anxiety attacks from acting like a machine for a year without resting, and it made me realize how important it is to have a balance and take care of health, both mental and physical. I had and still have many dreams, that’s why I wanted to dedicate 100% of my time to achieving them, but that’s not good, we have to live in the present because without it, there’s no future. Fortunately, nowadays I learned from my mistakes and I manage to combine my studies, work and still have fun in my routine, in a way that doesn’t generate burnout as it happened in March 2021.
If I can say anything to help someone who is going through the experience I went through, it’s to take care of your health above all else. Whatever you’re doing excessively, studying non-stop, or whatever, don’t do it, nothing in large quantities is good. We can dedicate ourselves a lot to something and still take care of ourselves, so we won’t have health problems later on and we can work and study for much longer 😂. Don’t do what I did, you’re going to get sick, go watch a series, go out with friends, do anything that will make you happy at the end of the day, that’s what matters in life, the rest is rest.
Mental health is the most important thing in a person’s life, student, programmer, or whoever, if they are well, they will be able to accomplish the things we want much more easily and at the same time live well.
Anyway, I think it’s important to share this experience, to try to reach people who are going through the situation I went through and somehow help them avoid burnout in them as I did. It’s good to study, work, and do different things, but nothing in excess that ends up affecting our health, we are in life to be happy and have fun.
Everything in life is easier with a smile on your face.
