TL;DR: How to be a healthy programmer? — workout, get enough sleep, eat healthily, wake up early, structure your day, take breaks, and learn regularly.

If we want to be the best version of ourselves, we need to take some steps to be able to achieve that. When reaching that, you would feel happy, motivated, and healthy.

It would make your professional life more efficient as well, so let’s find out how to achieve all of that.

The seven tips on how to be a healthy programmer:

1. Workout

Being a programmer requires you to be in one place all the time, and that means zero activity throughout the day.

When you sit and code all day or all week long, your body and your overall health will get worse and worse.

How to prevent it from happening?

Be active. Go to a gym, start running, train in your room, go for a bike. These all little activities will help you with being a better programmer a lot!

I can’t imagine taking a day off at the gym when programming, and so should you.

2. Sleep enough

Programming is an office job that requires you to think as efficiently as possible. When you sleep just 4 hours a day, you will struggle to focus and to complete tasks faster.

What is a solution to that?

You must sleep more hours, preferably 7–8 hours per day.

When I started to get more sleep, I immediately felt better waking up the next day. Taking a decent amount of rest is as essential as working.

3. Eat healthily

Programmer !== Builder

A programmer does not have manual labor as a builder does, so he needs to take care of what he eats more than a builder, who will eventually burn the calories while working.

If you don’t like working out, you can always eat healthily, and it would still give you many more results than exercising.

Get a proper diet, do not eat junk food, eat fruits, vegetables, and drink more water.

4. Wake up early

Why do people start their shift at the job in the morning?

Because we are the most productive when doing something in the morning. I made that mistake of waking up late, and that were the most unproductive days I’ve ever had.

I do not want you to feel what I felt every day when I was waking up at noon.

Your brain, straightforwardly speaking, doesn’t work as efficiently as it would if you woke up early.

5. Structure your day

When you don’t have your day planned, you won’t be as productive as someone who has his day planned.

If you think that you have so much free time, you’re wrong. If you had your day planned, you would have no time for friends, parties, or anything related to unproductivity and time waste.

Use a notepad to write your daily goals as well as your bigger goals. Try the Pomodoro technique. Start small, and then eventually give yourself much more difficult tasks to do.

6. Take breaks

In my opinion, the most important thing when it comes to learning is to give yourself a rest.

You may learn for dozens of hours every day, but it won’t be efficient at all if you won’t stop for a moment. Your brain would not be able to process that much information in such a short time.

Again, you can try the Pomodoro Technique, which you can customize to your preferences, but what works for most people is to focus on the task for 25 minutes, take a 5-minute break, and repeat that four times, while the fourth break will last 15 minutes.

I gave this technique a try, and it was worth it.

7. Learn regularly

In programming, things change very frequently.

If you want to stay up-to-date with new technologies, trends, and so on, you need to take your time and learn regularly.

Not only that can help you with getting a new job because of your new tech-stack, but also it can hold you in the learning state of mind.

I do mostly use YouTube, blogs, and social media pages to stay up-to-the-minute with new things going on in our beautiful, programming world.

Thank you!

If you did enjoy this post, be sure to share it, and maybe you’ll help others. Is there something that you would add to this list? Let me know! Have a productive day!