Why drawing helps with coding

Developing while drawing

I always have a notebook near me while i am developing and i regularly take drawing breaks. Drawing is a great stress release and i believe it helps with coding.   

How the brains work

While i am not a psychologist i do have a rudimentary understanding of how the brain works. Whenever you perform an action, different parts of your brain get activated. For example driving a car or cooking a meal activate different parts of your brain. This process can be visualized with an FMRI scan. Coding and drawing also activate different parts of your brain.

How this ties into coding?

Common sense tells us that the more parts of your brain are active the more efficient it  is. Drawing and coding activate different parts of your brain. Since programming is largely problem solving. The more parts of your brain that are active, the more efficiently you can solve problems. Please note that i am not a psychologist and i don't have any data to back up my claims. I am simply a guy with an interest in the matter.

Weapons analogy

While you are shooting a machine gun, it's eventually gonna overheat. That's why it's important to have a secondary weapon ready. This same war mentality can applied to coding as well.

While you are solving problems the brain is also going to overheat at some point. That's when it's time to do something else. I personally like to writing a blog or drawing. It's important that the secondary activity is still bringing some kind of value. Video games are a great secondary activity as well, but be careful. They will quickly suck off all of your time.



"Dr. Jupemon" recommends

Coding is mostly about solving problems, which is very taxing for the brain. It's important to pair it up with a secondary activity that is relaxing. I recommend everyone to find some kind of secondary hobby along with coding. The activity should be something quick, relaxing and something which doesn't use the same parts of your brain as coding.