Torque and your sanity

#21 Blockbuster run..

dust off an old RTS game

#22 I've read many times that the key to mental exhaustion is to do some physical activity, jog, swim, walk about. The excercise gets blood flowing to the brain.

Ha - not that I apply that wisdom very well :) I try to hit the gym every once in a while though.

#23 I get caught up on my forums :)

The Trusted One

#24 Switch to coding the Blitz3d version of my game for a while...

or take a smoke break...

--Mike

#25 I keep going till I piss myself off then I work on my perl IRC Bot which probably makes things worse lol.

#26 My solution either involves excessive violence in GTA:SA or large quantities of alcohol.

#27 I have the age old sad problem of not letting anything beat me... so what do I do, stop long enough to get a pot of coffee on my desk and go to it.

Go over it over and over and over and over and over and over (ok im tired of typing it now) until I finaly get it fixed. Recourd so far is 2.1 days with out any sleep before I fixed the problem, happy to say though the problem was a major one and took most of the time to solve!

#28 Some great stuff here, I guess everyone is different. One things for sure, you just have to get away from it for a sec huh.

Thanks everyone that posted
RT

#29 Taking a break or explaining it to someone else works for me. I remember trying explain why code that I thought was logically perfect SHOULD have been working to my girlfriend once and her listening patiently as I tried to put the code in layman's terms. Then she looked at me strangely as I substituted numbers for variables and said "You know you just said 7 + 5 = 15?" Doh! Sometimes your brain justs gets stuck even when you think it's working fine. Well, mine does. Anyways, it worked fine once I relearned remedial math!

#30 Torque- ok, I know what it is but this saa... aaaani... sanisomething you're talking about- sorry, no clues.

#31 Sanity-
the quality or state of being sane; especially : soundness or health of mind

sane-
proceeding from a sound mind : rational

:P

#32 Well interesting question.

For small problem to resolve (bugs as good example), usually trying to explain it to someone bring up the solution quickly.

When I need a serious break to think over a concept or just need to get away and clear my mind, I ride my motorbike for an hour. Scary bit is that sometimes I can't even remember where I have been, proof that driving is an automatism.

#33 I'm not sure how to make the free download work. No icon appeared after installing. I hope to try it, and figure out if I can use it & buy it.

#34 I like to hide the bodies.

#35 I normally end up doing a few rounds of Tower Defence or Tower Wars in WarCraft III. It might be a pointless thing, but it forces my head to do totally different stuff and think in a very different way. This tends to help.
If not I go out jogging or something similar with fresh air around my head.

#36 Marc, that is funny :) I do the same between coding sessions.

#37 Normally I drop what I'm doing for a while. A wise person once imparted to me some information about how the brain works. Apparently if you leave something alone for a while after an intense burst of activity you actually get alot better at it while you're not doing it. And amazingly the reason is apparently due to sleep.

Sleep is where your sub-conscious sorts through all the information (huge amounts of it) your conscious brain has acquired. It's a bit like dumping your RAM memory to your hard-disk when it's overloaded. This process is especially important when learning a new concept or skill. When your subconscious assigns part of the new information to an address in your main memory it groups it with anything else which might be related to it which you've either known for a long time or have recently acquired. The next time your brain meets the situation this process will be utterly complete if you've given it enough time. A thought process which might have taken your conscious mind several moments to perform to make an associative link occurs instantly if it is operating through the subconscious instead as a result of this sorting process having been finished.

The result is your stress levels stay low and your efficiency rockets. Apparently it is deep within your memory or hard disk if you like which is where all the hard-core learned skills are such as walking, languages, etc.. are held. Along with these will be joinery, electrical, gymnastic, driving, bodywork repair skills and all the other stuff which only experience can teach. This is why it is so much easier to complete a task which you have done before even when you don't really understand why. The reason is your less-efficient conscious mind is having to do so much less work than when approaching it for the first time as all that initial learning information has been tagged, grouped and stored in the super-fast accessible parts of the brain.

It might sound far-fetched but it's something I take very seriously today when trying to learn something new or when encountering a difficult problem.

#38 I talk to other people about the problem, or I garden.

Other people who have no idea of the real programming problem at hand provide other solutions, some of which wouldn't work, but most of the time they suggest things that I never would of thought of.

Mostly they don't provide the answer, but get me thinking about the problem from a different perspective. The trick is to get out the rutt....stuck in a rutt, stuck in a rutt, stuck in a rutt...

The gardening thing? Therapeutic. Garden is simple problem solving and lets my mind unwrap for a while.

#39 I leave it and watch some tv, take a snack, take a nap or maybe play a game abit.. usually with nonsense violence and a not too much to think about game play as unreal tournament hehehehe

and i return.. if after couple of more unsuccesful attempts .. i ask for help somewhere hoping someone comes with an enlighting answer..

Cheers!

#40 So to summarize, one should cycle down to an internet pub while having a smoke and drinking a pot of coffee, get roaring drunk while playing warcraft and reading senseless forum posts, then plant some bodies in a garden before getting some sleep?