A high stress week is making me reflect on what I need to do to protect myself and my mental health. Hopefully some useful tips in here!

Taking care of yourself is vital

This week has been a tough one. Work has been really busy and stressful and I've been feeling it in my body - my levels of anxiety and exhaustion have definitely been up. As a result, I've been eating whatever is on hand, not sleeping all that great and generally skipping out on the self care stuff. So I am trying to do better where I can - I cooked and baked from scratch this week even though all I wanted to do was sit and watch TV, I went for walks and I started meditating again. I feel so much better when I eat well, move and meditate. We get free Headspace with work so it's a no brainer to sit every day for ten minutes and yet it's the hardest habit to maintain for me. I notice the difference immediately when I do it though, so I'm going to try (again) to do this every day. Self care looks very different for all of us and I'd love to hear how you manage stressful times at work. Drop a comment if you feel comfortable!

Saying "no" is hard

I'm working on an urgent project at the moment, so I'm having to say no to a lot of other stuff, because I just don't have the capacity for it. If I context switch, I'll lose time that I can't afford to. I'm trying to be good at saying no, but it's not in my nature - I am very much a recovering people pleaser and while I have gotten to the point where saying "no" is no longer impossible, I still feel like I'm letting people down when I do. I'm very aware that just because I have my head in one particular area, it doesn't mean PR reviews and other things that could do with my input go away. However, it just occurred to me that I am part of a team and therefore, I should trust that these things will happen without me. When other people are overloaded and I have more time, I devote more time to PR reviews and help folks out, so why can't I expect the same? Just because I can't help unblock the team right now doesn't mean I'm failing. So yes, saying "no" is hard, but I'm doing it even thought it's making me feel somewhat uncomfortable.

My AI experiment is working

I mentioned in last Sunday's blog post that I want to take back control from Claude a bit. I have been trying to do this and though I've found myself slipping a few times, I have mostly stuck to this idea and I'm finding it less draining and more useful. I had let Claude have free reign over my unit tests last week (yes, I should have done TDD but I've been rushing) and it shows. I'd checked the unit tests themselves pretty thoroughly to make sure all edge cases were covered and the test names made sense, but the mocks were in a right state. So much so that it caused a lot of chaos when I added in a call to another endpoint to the page I was building. I had to sit there and manually comb through all the mocks and figure out what they were doing and sort them out. Now I immediately understand the whole thing better and can make better edits next time. There is something here, because getting AI to write mocks is, in my opinion, a good use of the agent's time - it knows the structure of the mocks from the types and it is much faster at creating the code required than I am. And yet, it is doing some weird stuff that makes the mocks harder to use. Eventually, I want to move the codebase on to using fixture builders because I think that'll make things much easier, but while we're in this hard-coded mocks land, AI is actually pretty useful. I just wish it would think about the readability and extensibility of its code more.