We’ve all seen the ergonomic warnings. Adjust your monitor height. Take breaks every twenty minutes. Use a proper keyboard. The IT department sends out reminders about repetitive strain injuries, and we dutifully nod while hunching over our laptops for another six-hour coding session.
But here’s what nobody talks about: your brain is a muscle too, and we’re giving it the cognitive equivalent of carpal tunnel syndrome.
The thinking muscle
I’ve been writing software for over twenty years, and I’ve watched my industry evolve from “ship it when it’s done” to “ship it yesterday, fix it tomorrow.” Somewhere along the way, we forgot that thinking—real, deep problem-solving—is physical work. Your brain burns glucose. It gets fatigued. It needs recovery time.
Just like repetitive motions create micro-tears in your tendons, chronic cognitive overload creates micro-damage to your ability to think clearly. The difference is that when your wrist hurts, you notice. When your thinking muscle is strained, you just assume you’re having a bad day.
The symptoms creep in slowly: you find yourself reaching for familiar solutions instead of elegant ones. You start dreading complex problems. You lose that spark of excitement when someone describes an interesting technical challenge. You become cynical about “yet another refactor” or “yet another framework.”
Sound familiar?
The strain patterns
In my consulting work, I see the same repetitive strain patterns everywhere:
Always-on culture. Slack notifications during dinner. “Quick questions” that aren’t quick. The expectation that you’ll respond to GitHub comments within hours, not days. Your brain never gets to fully disengage from work mode.
Context switching as repetitive motion. Ten minutes of coding, fifteen minutes in a meeting, five minutes answering Slack, back to coding, but now you’ve forgotten what you were thinking about. Repeat fifty times a day. Each context switch is like lifting a small weight—fine once, exhausting when repeated endlessly.
Fighting broken processes daily. Deploying code that requires seventeen manual steps. Writing tests for legacy code that wasn’t designed to be testable. Explaining the same architectural decision for the fourth time because nobody documented it. Death by a thousand paper cuts.
The worst part? We’ve normalized this. We call it “being busy” or “startup life” or “that’s just how software works.” But that’s like saying carpal tunnel is just how typing works.
Feeding the muse
Stephen King once wrote that amateurs sit around waiting for inspiration, while professionals just get up and go to work. But he also emphasized something crucial: you have to feed the muse. You have to give your creative capacity the input and rest it needs to function.
I learned this the hard way during a particularly brutal startup phase. We were pulling sixteen-hour days, living on packaged ramen and coffee, convinced we were being heroic. For three months, I barely read anything that wasn’t code or documentation. I stopped taking walks. I stopped sketching. I convinced myself that anything not directly productive was waste.
By month four, I couldn’t design my way out of a paper bag. Every solution felt forced. Every architectural decision felt like I was just copying something I’d done before. I had starved my muse into submission.
Your creative problem-solving capacity isn’t separate from you—it is you. And just like any other part of you, it needs care, feeding, and rest. It needs input that isn’t work-related. It needs time to wander and make unexpected connections. It needs protection from constant interruption.
What recovery actually looks like
Here’s the thing about cognitive recovery: it’s not obvious. You can’t ice your brain or wear a brace for decision fatigue. And unlike physical RSI, the “rest” isn’t just stopping the problematic activity.
Real cognitive recovery requires engaging different mental systems. Reading fiction engages different neural pathways than technical documentation. Going for a walk without a podcast lets your default mode network do its background processing work. Working with your hands—cooking, woodworking, even doing dishes—can reset your problem-solving perspective.
I’ve started treating my thinking capacity like athletes treat their training. I protect deep work time the way a runner protects their long run days. I build in recovery periods the way musicians build in rest between practice sessions. I’ve learned to recognize the early warning signs of cognitive overload the way I’d recognize the onset of a pulled muscle.
The professional standard we’re missing
We’ve solved this problem in other domains. Athletes have periodization, off-seasons, and mandatory rest days. Manual laborers have shift limits and ergonomic standards. Even call center workers get scheduled breaks.
But software? We act like thinking work doesn’t have physical constraints. We celebrate the developer who works weekends. We badge-of-honor our way through crunch periods. We’ve built an industry culture that would be illegal in manufacturing.
Maybe it’s because our work output is invisible. Nobody can see strained thinking the way they can see a repetitive motion injury. But just because the damage is cognitive doesn’t make it less real.
A different approach
I’m not suggesting we all become part-time workers or that deadlines don’t matter. But we need to start treating our cognitive capacity as what it is: our most valuable and most vulnerable professional asset.
That means protecting deep work time like we protect our wrists. It means building genuine rest into our schedules, not just “fun” screen time. It means feeding our muse intentionally—reading broadly, engaging with ideas outside our immediate domain, giving our brains the variety they need to stay creative.
Most importantly, it means recognizing that sustainable high performance isn’t about grinding harder. It’s about working in harmony with how our minds actually function.
Your brain is a muscle. Treat it like one.
What does cognitive recovery look like for you? I’m curious about the practices that help you stay creative and engaged over the long term. Drop me a line, I’m always interested in how other makers manage the sustainability challenge.