Coding and Getting Enough Rest Can Make You a Good Programmer

Photo By Joshua Reddekopp on Unsplash

Mamang knows that during your journey of learning to code, you will most likely lose some sleep at some point. But did you know that getting enough rest can actually make you a better programmer?

Staying up late trying to fix an unresolvable bug keeps you awake way past normal sleeping hours. Then, you wake up in the middle of the night with syntax running through your mind.

Apa pun yang terjadi, ngoding menuntut secara kognitif, memerlukan perhatian tingkat tinggi. Selain itu, pemahaman konseptual yang mendalam, pemecahan masalah, dan proses mental lainnya.

No matter what, coding is cognitively demanding, requiring a high level of focus. It also involves deep conceptual understanding, problem-solving, and other complex mental processes.

Such cognitively intense tasks tend to stay in your thoughts, disrupting your sleep schedule. Let’s discuss how reducing excessive coding hours and getting enough rest can help you become a better programmer.

Sleep is truly amazing. On the other hand, sleep deprivation can be difficult to overcome.

Have you ever stayed up too late one night and found it hard to focus the next day? Or started your day early, only to struggle to fall asleep at night? Lack of sleep is dangerous and reduces your focus.

On the other hand, a good night’s sleep makes you feel refreshed—like recharging your battery or enjoying your favorite fresh meal. So, what exactly happens in your brain while you sleep?

For a long time, scientists knew very little about why we sleep and what happens when we do. However, in recent years, researchers have concluded that sleep is not just good for our brain and body.

Of course, sleep gives your body a chance to recover and regain energy, but it also plays a crucial role in memory and learning—two essential functions that every programmer needs to succeed.

Sleep has a significant impact on our memory. It plays a crucial role in our ability to acquire, process, store, and later recall new information.

All three of these functions must occur for something to become a lasting memory, and research shows that poor or insufficient sleep negatively affects each of them.

In Why We Sleep, neuroscientist and sleep researcher Matthew Walker refers to a study in which students were divided into two groups and asked to memorize a list of facts that would later be tested.

After studying the facts, one group was allowed to sleep overnight, while the other stayed awake, preventing them from sleeping until the next day.

Both groups were then given two nights to recover before being tested on the facts they had tried to memorize.

The results showed that the sleep-deprived group experienced a 40% decline in their ability to recall the facts. They were significantly less effective at retaining new information compared to those who had slept well on the first night.

Effectively, the well-rested group performed well on the test, while the sleep-deprived group failed.

Many of us have experienced studying the night before an exam, only to realize that the facts we thought we had learned had disappeared when we tried to recall them during the test.

So, what can we learn from this? After acquiring new information, it is crucial to get a good night’s sleep if we want to retain it.

It may sound strange, but sleep actually functions like pressing the “save” button in your brain, allowing you to retain what you’ve learned.

When you first encounter new information, it is initially stored in the hippocampus, which serves as short-term memory storage.

Although the hippocampus is useful for temporarily storing information, it is not the best place for keeping crucial details, as memories there can fade quickly.

However, during sleep, newly acquired information transfers from short-term storage in the hippocampus to the neocortex—the long-term storage area at the top of the brain.

While this process is not yet fully understood, it is clear that getting a good night’s sleep or even a quality nap helps us process and store information more effectively in our memory.

Problem-solving is a fundamental part of being a programmer. Often, when we encounter a bug, we take a brute force approach—typing for hours and making small tweaks to our code, hoping to stumble upon the solution.

The problem is, the longer we work without finding a fix, the more mentally exhausted and frustrated we become, and the less likely we are to discover the solution to the issue we initially set out to resolve.

But what if there’s a better way? This might sound counterintuitive, but what if instead of forcing a solution, we took a break from coding and just went to sleep?

Researchers at Northwestern University set out to understand how sleep benefits daytime performance by having participants work on a series of puzzles while listening to specific sound cues.

That night, while they slept, the participants were played the same sound cues associated with half of the puzzles they had previously failed to solve.

The next morning, participants were more likely to solve the puzzles that had sound cues played overnight compared to the puzzles that had no associated sound cues.

A good night’s sleep helps organize your memories, allowing you to use them more effectively the next day.

Transferring newly learned information from short-term to long-term memory, reorganizing existing memories, or continuing to process difficult problems long after we’ve closed our eyes for the night—all of these are key benefits of sleep.

So, the next time you encounter a coding problem that seems impossible to solve, try stepping away from the screen and getting some rest. You might be surprised at how well this approach works!

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Source : blog.danielcranney.com