Demersus Devlog #7 - Learning to Step Back

The ‘Situation’

Yesterday while tutoring I’ve had a very unpleasant experience where I simply blanked out - complete brain fog. I was staring at the problem in front of me and I just felt a pressure in my head - zero thoughts, zero ideas just emptiness and shame. “This is supposed to be simple”, “I’m the teacher, this is supposed to be easy for me…”, “What is going on?”.

I decided to simply let go, I said “I’m sorry, it’s just not my day, let’s just end things here, you don’t have to pay for anything”. This was the breaking point for me. I finally realized I’ve been on the edge of burnout for way too long, at it finally hit me good.

I’ve looked in to the symptoms of brain fog and all of it lined up:

I felt horrible, like I was loosing control of brain, like dementia patient in a body of a 23 year old. Then I’ve moved on to the causes and unsurprisingly that aligned pretty well too. Among other things, the main causes being stress, poor sleep, poor nutrition and other anxiety / neurodivergent issues.

Subtle Foreshadowing

I’ve already kind of wrote about this in my previous ’therapy post’ But to do a quick recap, the brutal crunch for Radiorum (my first game dev project) over the winter break, combined with all of the midterm exams, the growing pressure and anxiety relating to the upcoming contest and Demersus while doing tutoring and some minor freelance work all through (not to mention me pretty much never allowing myself to truly have a break) this simply finally snapped the camel’s back.

It’s not like I couldn’t see the issues constantly creeping in to view. With mental struggles like anxiety and stress, really big issues with sleep, sometimes with procrastination and focus, but I simply said to myself “If I won’t who will?”, you know, got to lock in and keep grinding away. And yet here we are…

Open Your Eyes

If you’re ambitious and / or high achieving (or even worse a perfectionist too), you’ll most likely end up in this vicious pattern. You won’t allow yourself to rest, you’ll keep on taking on more things than you admittedly should, trying to pull the whole team’s standard up by yourself, planning more and more ambitious projects but you realistically can’t keep that up

I think we can all agree that when you start seeing winter / summer or any other break as “oh! I’ll finally have time to work on X” instead of it being an opportunity to take at least a small breather - there is a bit of a problem.

If you haven’t played a video game, watched a movie, series, anime, haven’t exercised, went out with your friends or did any sort of entertainment / hobby activity - there is a bit of a problem.

If you’re constantly trying to force yourself to work but every time you do, you keep loosing focus, getting distracted and simply can’t get in to ‘flow state’ - there is a bit of a problem.

If you’re brain is desperately trying to force you to finally slow down a little by making you procrastinate a whole lot - there might be a bit of a problem.

Understand that it’s okay, sometimes all of us need a break. After all, for better or for worse - we’re only human. Just open your eyes to the fact that you do too and that it’s okay to do so.

Doing What Seems Best

After finally breaking that mental barrier and allowing myself to let go, step back for a tiny bit and just have a breather for once I decided to cancel all of my upcoming tutoring sessions (pretty much for the entire duration of the dev cycle ~about 5/6 months), dialing back on things, and setting my mind on resting (at least through the rest of this week and the next one - although during the next one I’ll be finally building and doing some setup of my new PC).

I think that, this way of approaching things will allow me to do better work for Demersus in the end even though, I’m taking ~2 weeks from the dev cycle. This project and contest is extremely important for me. It’s most likely the most influential thing of both mine and my buddy’s futures right now.

So in the end, we have to impress our professors, every judge, Łódź Tech as a whole, properly represent our university, destroy everyone else but worse of all meet our own standards.

What’s Next?

After canceling all my upcoming tutoring and ‘shedding some load’ (luckily even though we’re in midterm season we did all of our exams early so we kind of have an extended break between the semesters) I’ll take the rest of this week and the next one to breathe a little and also build and configure my new PC (after the rest of the parts come in).

Does that mean I’ll be sitting idly? No, not really, I’ll most likely even end up doing some lite work for Demersus or just some other side things that I wanted to do for ages but never had the time, though overall the point of all of this is to simply take a breather, so I might just play some video games or watch a movie for once.

After that I’m coming back with full force.