Full Stack Developer existence can be a roller coaster of deadlines, debugging, and learning. I once lived for the madness, the all-night coding sprees on coffee highs and the thrill of solving those pesky problems. But behind the scenes, another kind of complexity was brewing: a slow, creeping anxiety that started eating away at my concentration, my sleep pattern, and eventually, my equilibrium.

It's not a new tale in the technology industry, is it? The need to keep innovating, the pressure of being constantly switched on, constantly having to learn the new thing. We build wonderful systems, calibrate algorithms, and streamline processes, and yet how many of us ever apply the same analytical rigor to our own internal systems, our own mental health?

For me, the solution was: not even close. My mind was a mess of half-thoughts, a thousand tabs open in my head, all competing for attention. I tried the usual recommendations: meditation apps, journaling, even getting myself "unplugged." Some of them worked, but none of them lasted. I was trying to debug a difficult bug with a Band-aid solution, a quick print() statement -- not a deep fix.

And then, quite by mistake, I chanced upon a novel path to relaxation, one that utilised the very activity most likely to make me stressed: coding. Not the time-sensitive, high-stress kind, but a slow, contemplative type of coding exercise.