Anyone else feel mentally drained by coding but energized by physical work?
I’m in a bit of a weird situation career-wise and I’m curious if anyone else has gone through something similar.
I have around 8 years of experience as a front-end engineer. Senior-level in terms of architecture, ownership, collaboration, mentoring, etc.
I’ve been out of work for a few months now and finding a new role has been much harder than I expected. During that time I picked up a physical job mostly just to avoid sitting at home all day and losing my mind. It helped.
What surprised me is that even though the physical work can be genuinely exhausting, I come home in a noticeably better mood, with more energy and more mental clarity than after programming.
Over the last few days I’ve been working on a take-home assignment for a recruitment process and after literally ~2 hours at the desk I was fighting to stay awake. Not burnout exactly - more like this deep mental boredom/zoning out feeling. The closest comparison I can think of is sitting through an extremely long church sermon as a kid where your brain slowly shuts down from understimulation.
What makes it weirder is that I take decent care of myself:
- strength training 2-3 times a week
- good diet
- sleep is honestly pretty solid compared to modern standards
So physically I don’t think I’m doing badly.
I’m starting to wonder whether years of sitting behind a screen and doing abstract cognitive work all day just changed something in my brain. The contrast between physical work and desk work feels massive now.
Has anyone experienced something similar? How did you deal with it?