I want to be careful with this one. Mental health is not a casual topic. It is not a productivity hack or a wellness framework to be packaged and shipped in five bullet points. It is the most personal thing a person can carry — and in the software industry, it is one of the least talked about.
We talk about systems at scale. We talk about architecture decisions and sprint velocity and technical debt. We do not talk about the engineer sitting quietly at their desk who has not felt like themselves for months. We do not talk about the team lead who is handling production incidents by day and lying awake by night, replaying conversations, doubting their decisions, feeling the weight of everything they are supposed to hold together.
I have been that person. More than once. And I want to write about what helped — not as advice, but as a personal account of what I actually did. You will need to find your own version. But maybe seeing mine will give you a place to start.
· · ·The Hardest Part Is the First Part
Before any practice, any technique, any framework — there is a threshold that most people never cross, and it is this: admitting to yourself that something is wrong.
Not wrong with the project. Not wrong with the team. Wrong with you — with how you are feeling, how you are coping, what you are carrying. That admission is genuinely difficult. It feels like weakness in an industry that prizes strength. It feels like confession in a culture that prizes confidence. And so most people reframe it: it is just stress. It is just a hard sprint. It will pass once the deployment is done.
Naming what you feel is not weakness. It is the only way to begin addressing it.
I am not a therapist and I am not qualified to tell you what you are feeling or why. What I can say is that in my own experience, the moment I stopped performing "fine" — to myself, not even to anyone else — something shifted. Recognition is not a cure. But you cannot navigate toward a destination you refuse to acknowledge.
· · ·What I Actually Do
These are not prescriptions. They are practices I have returned to across different periods of my career — in Lahore when the workload was punishing, in Tokyo when I was a foreigner navigating a culture I did not fully understand, in Munich when the distance from family became something I had not prepared for. Different pressures, same toolkit.
I need time with just myself. Not productive time — not reading to learn or exercising to stay sharp. Time where I do exactly what I want, without purpose. Read something for pleasure. Watch something without guilt. Walk without a destination. I call this me time, and for a long time I treated it as a luxury I would earn after the work was done. It is not a luxury. It is maintenance. The work never ends — so you schedule the solitude or you do not get it.
When I am in a difficult period, the environment I am sitting in becomes part of the problem. The desk, the screen, the same four walls — they are not neutral. They are loaded with everything that is weighing on me. The most effective thing I can do is remove myself from that environment. Not a different coffee shop. Something genuinely different — a park, a forest, a drive somewhere with no signal. Nature specifically has a quality that screens cannot replicate: it does not ask anything of you. It just continues existing, and somehow that is enough.
Journaling sounds small. It is not small. When something is circling in your mind — replaying, compounding, growing with each pass — writing it down is one of the most reliable ways to stop the loop. Write in detail. Write the thing you are actually afraid of, not the sanitised version. Write what you cannot say to anyone. I have found that the act of translating internal noise into written sentences creates a distance between you and the feeling. You can look at it from the outside. You can examine it. That examination almost always reveals that the thing is more specific — and therefore more solvable — than it felt in your head.
This includes professional help — mental health apps, therapists, counsellors. I would not advise against these; for some people they are essential. But help also includes the practices you build into your own life: meditation, yoga, breathwork — anything that helps you develop a relationship with your own state rather than being ambushed by it. What I have learned is that self-awareness does not come naturally to most people, certainly not to engineers who are trained to think outward — toward systems, toward problems, toward solutions. You have to practise turning that attention inward. The tools exist. Use them without embarrassment.
Some people drain you. Some people restore you. I have become increasingly deliberate about this over the years. This is not about being unkind to people who are difficult — it is about being honest about the energy cost of certain relationships and certain environments. If a work culture is systematically toxic, if a friendship is extractive, if a social circle leaves you feeling worse every time — that is information. Act on it. Equally: find the people who think the way you think. Spend time with family, with friends who know you across time. Visit home when you can. Reconnecting with people who knew you before the title, before the career, before the performance — that is grounding in a way that nothing else replicates.
I know how that sounds. But I mean it without any irony. Gratitude is not a soft suggestion for people who have not experienced real difficulty. It is a disciplined cognitive practice that requires you to actively name what is working — even when, especially when, the dominant narrative in your head is about what is failing. Pay attention to the people around you. Acknowledge what they do. Notice what you have rather than only what you lack. Research on longevity and wellbeing consistently points to gratitude as one of the strongest predictors of both. I believe it. And I think the most important form of gratitude in a difficult period is this: remembering that the current chapter is not the whole story. It is an interval. Hope is not naive — it is the evidence-based position that things change.
Before the Practices: Find the Source
All six of these practices are responses. They help you cope, recover, sustain. But there is a prior question that matters more: what is actually causing it?
Sometimes the cause is external and addressable. A role that has become misaligned. A team dynamic that has broken down. An impossible workload that no one has named out loud. A working arrangement that is eroding your life outside work. These things can often be changed — not easily, not immediately, but they can be changed. The practices above will help you function while you work toward that change. But they are not a substitute for making the change.
Sometimes the cause is internal — patterns of thinking you have carried for years, standards you hold yourself to that no one else imposed, a relationship with failure or uncertainty that was never examined. That work is slower, but it is also more durable. Changing the external environment does not resolve what lives in the internal one.
The first step, in both cases, is writing a clear statement of what is actually wrong. Not "everything feels heavy" — that is a symptom. What specifically is causing it? Once you can name it precisely, you can ask: is this in my control? If yes, what is the smallest first step? If no, which of the practices helps me carry it without being destroyed by it?
The goal is not the absence of difficulty. It is the ability to remain yourself while navigating it.
I want to end where I started. I am not offering a system. I am offering what has worked for me, written as honestly as I can manage. You will face different pressures in different seasons. The specific practices that help you will probably be different from mine. But the structure — admission, practice, root cause — I believe that structure is universal. Start there. You do not have to have it solved to begin.