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3x3: Three Habits for Mental Hygiene

Summary

In this episode of Developer Tea, host Jonathan Cottrell introduces the concept of mental hygiene as a proactive, regular practice for maintaining mental clarity and effectiveness, particularly for developers. He emphasizes that mental hygiene isn’t about quick fixes or hacks, but about developing disciplined patterns for long-term mental health and improved thinking processes.

The episode presents three key habits for mental hygiene. The first is to “clean your room,” which extends beyond physical clutter to managing mental to-do lists. Cottrell discusses the Zeigarnik effect, where unfinished tasks weigh on the mind, and suggests writing tasks down and proactively completing or removing items to reduce cognitive load and anxiety.

The second habit is to “get out of your mind.” This involves externalizing thoughts through writing, whether they are tasks, emotions, or memories, to process them more effectively. Cottrell also recommends counseling as a proactive tool and highlights exercise as a powerful method to connect with the present moment and combat anxiety, noting its particular importance for developers with sedentary jobs.

The third and final habit is “questioning yourself.” This requires adopting humility and applying the same critical thought to one’s own perceptions and motivations as one would when giving advice to others. Cottrell explains that this is difficult because it challenges the ego and requires honesty to avoid self-deception, but it is essential for breaking negative thought patterns and behaviors.

Recommendations

Products

  • Mad Monk Tea — A loose-leaf tea provider recommended by the host, offering a discount code for listeners of the podcast.

Tools

  • WooCommerce — Sponsored e-commerce solution mentioned as a flexible, open-source platform for building online stores, with a promo code for listeners.

Topic Timeline

  • 00:00:00 — Introduction to Mental Hygiene — Jonathan Cottrell introduces the episode’s topic: mental hygiene. He compares it to physical hygiene, framing it as a proactive, regular practice rather than an emergency response. He gives a disclaimer that he is not a mental health professional and advises listeners to seek professional help for serious issues. He explains the episode is part of a ‘3x3’ series offering three practical takeaways.
  • 00:08:04 — Habit 1: Clean Your Room — Cottrell presents the first habit: cleaning your physical and mental space. He explains that visual clutter can distract, but the deeper issue is the cognitive burden of undone tasks (the Zeigarnik effect). The key takeaway is to manage your to-do list by writing tasks down and proactively finishing or removing items to declutter your mind and reduce anxiety about future commitments.
  • 00:14:07 — Habit 2: Get Out of Your Mind — The second habit is to externalize your thoughts. Cottrell suggests writing down not just tasks, but also emotions and memories to process them. This helps prevent the day from ‘running you’ by allowing for proactive prioritization. He also recommends counseling as a proactive measure and emphasizes exercise as a highly effective way to get out of your head and into your body, especially for developers.
  • 00:18:19 — Habit 3: Question Yourself — The third habit is to question your own perceptions with humility. Cottrell argues we often judge others while rarely inspecting our own beliefs. This requires laying down your ego, accepting you may be wrong, and being honest about your true motivations. It’s a difficult but crucial step to break self-deception and negative thought-behavior cycles, applying the same critical advice to yourself that you would give to others.
  • 00:22:03 — Conclusion and Call to Action — Cottrell concludes this ‘heavy’ episode by encouraging listeners to reflect on their own thought patterns, accept reality, and find mental space to work on these hygiene habits. He thanks the sponsor, WooCommerce, and asks listeners who find value in the show to leave a review on iTunes to help other developers discover it.

Episode Info

  • Podcast: Developer Tea
  • Author: Jonathan Cutrell
  • Category: Technology Business Careers Society & Culture
  • Published: 2018-03-23T09:00:00Z
  • Duration: 00:23:55

References

Podcast Info

Transcript

[00:00:00] Most of us grow up learning skills about how to take care of things. We take care of our homes,

[00:00:11] we take care of our cars, we take care of, well, even our bodies. We brush our teeth,

[00:00:17] we bathe often, we try to keep our clothes ironed, and ultimately, we try to keep things clean.

[00:00:28] Unfortunately, we are not often taught about how to keep our minds clear. In today’s episode,

[00:00:36] we’re talking about mental hygiene. My name is Jonathan Cottrell, and you’re listening to

[00:00:40] Developer Tea. My goal on this show is to help you uncover your career purpose as a driven developer

[00:00:46] so that you can have a positive impact on the people you have influence over. And how can you

[00:00:53] find your purpose when your mind is cluttered? I call it mental hygiene.

[00:00:58] Because the concept of hygiene is a proactive thing. You don’t practice hygiene in an emergency

[00:01:05] scenario. That’s not really the common understanding of that word. Instead, it is

[00:01:11] regular. It is consistent. It’s something that we take on in order to live better rather than

[00:01:20] address an acute problem. And so what we’re talking about in today’s episode is ways of

[00:01:28] managing anxiety, inspecting and cleaning out, or perhaps preventing buildup of poor thought

[00:01:35] patterns of stress, anxiety. Of course, it’s necessary for me to remind you that I’m not a

[00:01:42] mental health professional. Not by a long stretch, actually. And if you’re seeking advice for mental

[00:01:48] health, then this podcast is purely for your entertainment and your pondering. So if you are

[00:01:56] dealing with a mental health issue, then this podcast is purely for your entertainment and your

[00:01:58] pondering. So if you are dealing with a mental health issue, then by all means, seek the help of

[00:02:00] a professional that you trust. Because everyone’s situation is different. Please do not take what I

[00:02:08] say here on this podcast for face value. We’ve said this from the very beginning. Remember,

[00:02:13] everything we say on this episode and on this podcast in general should be taken with a grain

[00:02:18] of salt. And you should consider it for yourself and decide if it applies. Decide if it works for

[00:02:24] you. Now, with that very clear disclaimer,

[00:02:28] I do want to dive in and talk about these. This is a three by three episode, by the way. We’ve done

[00:02:33] three of these this week. This is the three practical takeaways for the week. We have three

[00:02:40] episodes and each episode has three of those practical takeaways. So this is a three by three

[00:02:44] episode. We’re ending the week out with this topic of mental hygiene. But really, this is a bigger

[00:02:49] topic. This isn’t just a way of hacking your way to mental hygiene. Hopefully you know this about

[00:02:55] this show. We don’t really like taking shortcuts. We don’t really like taking shortcuts. We don’t

[00:02:58] really like taking shortcuts with things that are supposed to be hard fought. And in mental health

[00:03:03] and taking care of your mind, that’s not something that you can flip a switch and accomplish. Of

[00:03:10] course, if you’re like most people, you will have moments of breakthrough. You will have experiences,

[00:03:16] you’ll have memories, you’ll have even conversations that you can look back and point to and say,

[00:03:21] that was a moment of breakthrough for my mental state, for my mental health. That moment was a

[00:03:27] key.

[00:03:28] That was a kind of turning point moment. But overall, we’re not trying to hack our mental

[00:03:32] health. This is a regular and arduous process of staying healthy. In the same way that a good

[00:03:40] nutritionist is not going to find a way to hack your way around eating really bad food for you,

[00:03:47] right? They’re going to teach you how to develop the patterns of discipline for healthy eating.

[00:03:54] And that’s the kind of thing that I want to help you do

[00:03:56] with your mental health.

[00:03:58] And not only your mental health, but your thinking processes beyond just getting back to baseline

[00:04:04] beyond being able to function, which is so often the topic of mental health discussions. Everyone

[00:04:11] who’s listening to this podcast has a reason to be invested in your positive mental health,

[00:04:19] not just preventing these things from happening, whether you’re dealing with stress or anxiety or

[00:04:25] depression or anything else. You know, we’re, we’re not, we’re not, we’re not, we’re not, we’re not

[00:04:28] just trying to prevent these. We’re trying to also increase the effectiveness of our minds. We want

[00:04:35] to think better. We want to have more productive uses for our minds. So that’s what this episode

[00:04:43] is about. It’s not just about finding the quick ways to clean out the clutter and the cobwebs in

[00:04:49] your brain. As soon as I finish recording this episode, I’m going to go downstairs and I’m going

[00:04:54] to boil some water and I’m making loose leaf tea. I’m going to boil some water and I’m making loose leaf tea.

[00:04:58] And if you haven’t had loose leaf tea, I highly encourage you to check it out.

[00:05:02] Mad Monk tea is offering you 15% off. This is one of my picks that I like to tell people about

[00:05:11] whenever they’re asking, well, when they ask me about developer tea, do we have any tea

[00:05:16] providers? We haven’t had tea providers for the history of the show until Mad Monk and Mad Monk

[00:05:22] has loose leaf teas from all over the world. If you haven’t had loose leaf tea, this is the one

[00:05:27] to try.

[00:05:28] Go to madmonkt.com and use the code developer tea. And that’s with a space when you check out

[00:05:34] for that 15% off. So we’re going to talk about mental hygiene in just a moment. But first I want

[00:05:41] to talk about one way that you can actually kind of de-stress yourself. If you have a common problem,

[00:05:48] something that you are constantly needing to solve, then one of the ways that you can de-stress

[00:05:55] is by creating your

[00:05:57] automatic go-to and giving yourself a good default, a way of offloading that decision

[00:06:05] making and offloading the stress of having to weigh the options and having an immediate

[00:06:10] option available. WooCommerce is that option for you for commerce. And here’s why WooCommerce

[00:06:18] powers 30% of all online stores. So it has a great track record. That’s thing number one.

[00:06:25] Thing number two is that if

[00:06:27] you choose WooCommerce, you get to keep all of your data forever. It’s built on top of an

[00:06:33] open source platform, which means that it’s totally hackable. And if you’re a developer

[00:06:38] and you have the chops, you can integrate it with anything that you want to integrate it with

[00:06:42] any external service. However, even if you’re not a developer, WooCommerce has over 140 services

[00:06:50] that you can integrate with. Now, if you’re listening carefully and you’re a developer and

[00:06:54] you don’t really have an e-commerce,

[00:06:57] a problem that you need to solve regularly, you probably do have the chops to build one of these

[00:07:05] integrations. And you can actually now, this is brand new, you can actually go and sell this in

[00:07:11] the WooCommerce store. Head over to spec.fm slash WooCommerce to get started today. Now, listen up

[00:07:18] to this part. This is very important, especially if you’re listening to this episode on the day

[00:07:22] that it aired. You can use the code developer T at checkout to get 20% off your WooCommerce store.

[00:07:27] But you have to do that by the end of this month, by the end of March, 2018. So you’ve got about a

[00:07:33] week left before you really need to have used that promo code to buy in. And you really have

[00:07:39] nothing to lose here. WooCommerce is not going to wall your data in. You have the ability to

[00:07:47] export at any time. So it’s an excellent option. It’s an excellent default option because it is so

[00:07:52] flexible for the average developer. I encourage you to go check it out. Once again,

[00:07:57] spec.fm slash WooCommerce. Thank you again to WooCommerce for being today’s sponsor. So we’re

[00:08:04] talking about mental hygiene, and I promise you, I’m going to give you these three things

[00:08:08] that I believe you should do to maintain and proactively maintain your mental hygiene.

[00:08:13] But here’s the reality. There’s so much more to this discussion that we can’t finish in a single

[00:08:18] episode. So if you’re interested in these kinds of discussions, creating better thought patterns

[00:08:25] as a developer, so that you’re still able to do what you’re doing, and you’re still able to do

[00:08:27] solving problems in a more effective way, this is the biggest lever you have in your career,

[00:08:34] is bettering your mind. If you’re interested in this kind of stuff, I encourage you to subscribe.

[00:08:40] And I’m not just giving you that line. I’m telling you, this is the kind of thing that we talk about

[00:08:45] on this podcast all the time. So this is a constant topic. It’s something that I’m very

[00:08:50] interested in studying, and I bring that to you through this podcast. So if you are interested in

[00:08:56] that, that’s a great way to get started. So if you’re interested in this kind of stuff, I encourage

[00:08:57] you to go ahead and subscribe. So let’s get into this three by three, these three habits to adopt

[00:09:05] for brain hygiene. Number one, clean your room. Clean your room. Your mother probably told you

[00:09:13] this as a child, or maybe your father or another authority figure. Certainly, if you went to school,

[00:09:19] you had to keep your desks clean. You probably couldn’t go to recess unless you cleaned your

[00:09:24] desks. And there’s a real reason for that. There’s a real reason for that. There’s a real reason for

[00:09:27] research behind why you should do this. The reality is clutter. First of all, there’s there’s

[00:09:34] research behind clutter and how clutter can create a lack of focus, no matter what environment you’re

[00:09:41] in. Sometimes it is quite literally at the visual level. Having clutter disallows you from having

[00:09:47] clear thoughts because you are visually distracted. So that’s a very simple and good reason to clean

[00:09:53] your room. But what about cleaning your room? Why can’t you just close it? Why can’t you just

[00:09:57] close the door? And you get the same benefit, right? You’re not having to look at your room.

[00:10:02] You’re not having to look at your house. If you go to an office, perhaps you can shove everything

[00:10:06] into a closet. But as it turns out, shoving everything into a closet doesn’t really take

[00:10:13] this away from your brain. And this is something that you can Google. It’s called the Zignerik

[00:10:16] effect or the Zignerik effect. I’m not really sure how to pronounce it. But it’s Z-E-I-G-N-A-R-I-K

[00:10:24] effect. And essentially, this is the effect that

[00:10:27] undone tasks weigh on our minds more heavily than done tasks. Now this may seem obvious, but

[00:10:36] the idea of having an unfinished list actually makes you less effective. Having a list of things

[00:10:43] that you have left undone makes you less effective. So if you have a closet at home

[00:10:50] that you’re supposed to clean and it’s on your to-do list to do that, then it’s very

[00:10:57] reasonable that you are, unfortunately, cluttering your mind with that particular task. Now it’s not

[00:11:04] cut and dry. Unfortunately, the research isn’t perfect on this because what you may view as

[00:11:11] undone, I very well may view as done. And this is very much a perception and person-by-person

[00:11:18] kind of thing. But most of the time, especially if it is obviously cluttered, we all view a dirty

[00:11:27] room the same way. So the real takeaway isn’t necessarily about picking up the clothes off your

[00:11:32] floor, although that’s probably a good idea. What the real takeaway here is managing your to-do list

[00:11:40] in a way that limits the number of things you leave undone on a regular basis. So what does

[00:11:46] that mean? Well, there’s also some research that says that simply writing down your tasks, the

[00:11:53] things that you have in your mind that you know need, you need to do, you need to do, you need to

[00:11:57] do, simply writing those down may relieve some of that cognitive overhead, some of that load that

[00:12:04] you’re carrying around, trying to remember all of the things that you need to do. And this is kind

[00:12:08] of intuitive, right? If we write down our list, then we can kind of put it in our pocket. If

[00:12:13] you’re going to the grocery store, you don’t have to remember everything that you’re going to buy.

[00:12:18] However, nothing is as effective as completing that item except one specific exception.

[00:12:26] And that’s not how you do the math in a typical practice, right? You don’t have to do everything

[00:12:27] going into a form, so you don’t have to expect anything out of the other ways of doing things.

[00:12:27] There’s a kind of theory that it’s possible to do this, but there’s a kind of paper everybody is

[00:12:27] is removing the item from the list altogether. So the takeaway that I want you to have for today

[00:12:33] is to examine your to-do list. Examine the number of things that you have in your mind and get them

[00:12:40] out onto that paper. Examine them and decide, can I resolve this without any further action?

[00:12:48] Can I go ahead and mark this off of the list for today or remove it entirely and decommit yourself

[00:12:55] to some of those actions? What you’ll tend to find is that decluttering the things that you

[00:13:02] are responsible for, whether that’s your room or your to-do list, that’s going to have a positive

[00:13:07] effect on the level of clutter that you’re actually carrying around in your brain. So this

[00:13:13] is Brain Hygiene 101, understanding the things that you need to be doing on a day-to-day basis.

[00:13:20] This is the source of a lot of anxiety and it’s the source of a lot of that kind of future

[00:13:25] planning.

[00:13:25] And worry, and am I going to be able to finish all the things that I’ve committed to finishing?

[00:13:30] Some of this can be managed by simply shrinking that to-do list and being very proactive at

[00:13:37] finishing the things that are most important on that list. Now this isn’t groundbreaking stuff.

[00:13:43] Hopefully you’re not listening to this podcast and for the very first time you’re considering

[00:13:47] that there’s going to be positive effects of making your to-do list smaller. So this isn’t

[00:13:52] rocket science, but as it turns out,

[00:13:55] it can also be very difficult to remember that our mental health is not decoupled from our daily

[00:14:01] activities. In fact, it’s very tightly coupled to our daily activities. And that really leads us

[00:14:07] into the second point here, and that is to get out of your mind. You know, we already mentioned

[00:14:11] getting the twos that you have out of your mind and onto paper kind of deloads your brain a little

[00:14:18] bit. It takes some of the cognitive load off of your brain and puts it into a format that you can

[00:14:24] manage.

[00:14:25] And you can kind of pass around. But there’s more to this idea of getting out of your head

[00:14:30] that needs to be discussed. Specifically, getting your thoughts onto paper, no matter what they are,

[00:14:36] whether it’s a to-do list, or even if it’s just an emotional thought, or maybe a good memory that

[00:14:42] you had. Getting these thoughts expressed onto paper, it can help you kind of process through

[00:14:49] what is going on in your head. And this is very important, because if we don’t process what’s

[00:14:55] going on in our head, we’re not going to be able to process what’s going on in our head.

[00:14:55] Very often, it gets kind of repressed, or it gets moved around into places that we don’t really

[00:15:01] want it to be, or perhaps it doesn’t get the attention that we feel it needs. This is an

[00:15:08] additional moment that you can take to look at that list that we talked about in point number one

[00:15:13] and prioritize it and decide today what you’re going to do. Too often, the result of this

[00:15:20] cluttered mind, the result of this chaotic and kind of

[00:15:25] cobwebby mind, is that we go through our day, and we get to the end of it, and we realize that the

[00:15:31] day kind of ran us, right? That we didn’t really decide to do anything, that we were told what to

[00:15:37] do, it seems, from the moment we woke up until the time that we went to sleep. Because we weren’t

[00:15:43] proactive about deciding and prioritizing, this is what I’m going to do with the time that I have

[00:15:49] available today. So it’s very important to get out of your head, because you may have those

[00:15:55] intentions available to you. You may have those, even those priorities available in your mind,

[00:16:00] and you may even set those in your mind. But so often, they get lost in the midst of other

[00:16:06] kind of mental chatter and mental traffic that’s incoming from other people, perhaps incoming from

[00:16:12] all of the stimuli that we use on a daily basis, like email or social media, and it’s incoming from

[00:16:19] your own processing of the external world. And additionally, if you’re looking for other

[00:16:25] ways to kind of get out of your mind, to bring things that are inside, take them out. You can

[00:16:31] think of this kind of like taking everything out of the garage so that you can reorganize it and

[00:16:37] put the things back in that should be in the garage, right? Another very effective option

[00:16:44] for many people is to seek counseling. Of course, we already mentioned this earlier in the show,

[00:16:49] that I’m not a health professional, but beyond me not being a health professional,

[00:16:55] taking counseling is not just something for people who have identified that they have a mental

[00:17:00] health problem, an issue that they want to resolve. That’s not the only people who can benefit from

[00:17:07] counseling. And in fact, this proactive type of counseling is incredibly effective and important

[00:17:14] for many people. Another way you can get out of your head and into the present moment, into your

[00:17:20] body, paying attention to what’s around you is through exercise. And in fact, if you’re a health

[00:17:25] a lot of studies support the idea that exercise is as important and as effective of a treatment for

[00:17:34] certain mental health issues, like for example, anxiety, as other remedies, other treatment

[00:17:40] options are. And exercise is something that has shown benefits in pretty much every area of life,

[00:17:47] if you look into it. So this isn’t the only soapbox that we have on the show. Certainly,

[00:17:53] we’ve talked about exercise.

[00:17:55] The importance of exercise. This is particularly a hot button issue for developers because our

[00:18:00] jobs, very often the patterns that we create because of our jobs can be detrimental unless

[00:18:07] we’re very intentional about incorporating exercise and activity, regular activity into

[00:18:13] our day-to-day. The third and final habit that I want to encourage you to participate in

[00:18:19] is questioning yourself. Questioning yourself.

[00:18:25] Now, this seems very broad, but as it turns out, really all this means is applying the same level

[00:18:31] of thought to your own situation as you would to someone you were giving advice to. We spend very

[00:18:40] little time questioning our own perceptions, our own beliefs, and we spend a lot of time judging

[00:18:47] others’ perceptions. And this can clog up our brain, right? This gives us poor thought patterns.

[00:18:54] And it can clog up our brain. And it can clog up our brain. And it can clog up our brain. And it can

[00:18:55] kind of self-feeding because those poor thought patterns ultimately produce bad behavior, bad

[00:19:01] ways of interacting with the world. And then this feeds back into our poor thought patterns

[00:19:08] because when we interact with the world poorly, when we interact with other people poorly, then

[00:19:14] we tend to reinforce those bad perceptions. And it ends up being kind of a downward spiral.

[00:19:20] Now, this requires you, this particular point is extremely,

[00:19:25] extremely difficult because it requires that you lay down your ego and that you adopt a true

[00:19:30] perspective of humility. This is embodying the idea that you very well may be wrong and really

[00:19:39] wrong about anything, right? So it requires that you lay down your ego. Ask yourself if you’re

[00:19:46] being honest. And it’s very easy to fool ourselves into believing what we want others to believe

[00:19:52] about us. We start to believe it.

[00:19:55] So that we can project that for others so they can believe it. And unfortunately,

[00:20:00] this leads us to really believing lies about ourself, believing lies that we’re telling

[00:20:05] ourselves about ourselves. Even when we have all of the information available, even when we feel

[00:20:11] like we are being self-aware, if we’re not being honest and if we’re not laying down our ego,

[00:20:18] if we’re not identifying our true motivations, for example, then we very often, again,

[00:20:25] we’re going to fill that void with the story that we want rather than the story that is true.

[00:20:31] The parameters that we desire rather than the real parameters. So it’s important to take a moment

[00:20:38] in any given decision, any given scenario, to take a moment and remind yourself

[00:20:43] that you are observing your own actions like you observe others. In other words,

[00:20:50] if you’re going to provide advice for another person,

[00:20:54] can you not just say,

[00:20:55] can you not also provide advice to yourself to process your own reactions, your own perceptions

[00:21:01] through the lens of healthy and critical inspection? This is incredibly difficult because

[00:21:08] we are afraid of change and we don’t want to identify a problem that we caused.

[00:21:16] It’s very difficult to come to terms, especially with something that is long running,

[00:21:21] something that we’ve accepted for many years. For example, we don’t

[00:21:24] really want to identify a problem that we caused. We don’t want to identify a problem that we

[00:21:25] like coming to terms with the idea that we have been wrong for so long. And so instead we choose

[00:21:32] to stay in that denial state or we choose not to inspect ourselves because we believe this lie that

[00:21:39] we have figured out everything, that we’re judging other people by our own standard rather than by

[00:21:46] something else. Adopting a true perspective of humility and questioning yourself is the first

[00:21:53] step to setting up proper thought.

[00:21:55] Thank you so much for listening to today’s episode of Developer Tea. This has been kind of a heavy

[00:22:03] episode, but I encourage you to give yourself a moment to reflect on your own life and on your

[00:22:09] own thought patterns and to accept things for the way they are. To take a moment to quiet your mind

[00:22:16] a little bit, find some space and kind of mentally create that blank slate mind and really just

[00:22:25] soak in the day. Soak in the opportunity that lays before you and then take some time to start

[00:22:32] working through these brain hygiene items. Thank you so much for listening to today’s episode. Thank

[00:22:37] you again to WooCommerce. If you are looking for your default go-to e-commerce solution,

[00:22:44] then I encourage you to check out WooCommerce. You can get 20% off until the end of this month,

[00:22:49] the end of March, 2018. Head over to spec.fm slash WooCommerce and use the

[00:22:55] code developer tea at checkout for 20% off. Thank you again to WooCommerce for sponsoring

[00:23:00] today’s episode. Thank you so much for listening to Developer Tea. This show exists because you

[00:23:05] listen to it. And we are so thankful for the people who are listening to it. If you believe

[00:23:10] other developers should hear about this show, if you think it’s an effective thing, if it’s making

[00:23:15] you a little bit better every day as a developer, then I encourage you to go and share that in

[00:23:22] iTunes. Give us a review on iTunes.

[00:23:25] This is kind of the central location for people to go and find out about podcasts

[00:23:29] and for other apps and services that try to pull relevant podcasts that they believe people are

[00:23:35] going to listen to and find value in. So if you believe that this is a valuable podcast and leave

[00:23:41] us a rating and a review in iTunes, that’s going to help other people find the show.

[00:23:45] Thank you so much for listening. And until next time, enjoy your tea.

[00:23:55] Thank you.

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