For over 20 years, the meditative focus of programming has been one of the best parts of my job.
Every week I’d spend countless hours in a flow state, which quiets the default mode network. The DMN is responsible for daydreaming/reflection but also rumination/worrying, so quieting it settles your mind. If I didn’t manage to write code for a week, I’d start to notice it.
Now it’s context switching all day I’m clearly much more productive now. I’m doing five things at once very effectively, switching between multiple agent sessions from morning to night. After working full-time like this for ~8 months, one thing I’m sure of is that this way of working involves much less time spent in a flow state.
Programming is not like actual meditation. At least, it never was for me. It meant being constantly busy thinking about design choices and alternatives. At best, it meant being very focused in the present, but way too focused and constantly solving puzzles.
There’s been a few times I’ve been truly zen’d out with meditation and it is way fucking nicer than the feeling you get from even doing work you enjoy. It’s much nicer to actually just truly meditate than find a “meditative” hobby. Fishing isn’t meditation. Hiking isn’t meditation. But, you can meditate while you hike or fish if you try and know how to meditate… But you should probably learn to meditate first and get used to it.
It would be way more important in this respect to just sit down next time you’re somewhere comfortable and just focus entirely on your breath, without putting your thoughts into words. Just truly be in that moment, breathing. Peaceful. Not strategizing about how best to handle a task, but just focusing on your breath. or even easier, start with guided meditations. Find somewhere peaceful and comfortable where you won’t be disturbed and just try it out.
It feels like a waste of time at first but then it quickly ends up feeling like a necessary action to just truly exist and be sane, kind of like how if you jog every day eventually you feel like you need it and even look forward to it. At first you might freak out about trying not to think for 20 minutes, then eventually 2 hours feels easy. And the practice can help your mental health in so many ways. It’s kind of like a Vulcan superpower at times, like you might get social anxiety and seriously learn to turn it off. You just get more control over an organ that is responsible for how you think and feel, and that’s way more powerful than people imply. There’s a reason it’s suggested for mental health all the time.