In the book Flow by Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi (pronounced “Me-high Cheek-sent-me-high”), the author dives into the joy we find from achieving “flow” while engaging in an activity. I think this is one of the main reasons why coding is so satisfying: we can dive into creative, puzzle-like tasks that we can solve in small chunks while getting immediate feedback on the results. And as we get better at programming you start to see your own progress.

This feedback loop can be addicting. Have you ever been grinding through work items and suddenly find that the sun has gone down? Ever thought to yourself “Maybe just one more ticket, I’m on a roll here,” even though the office has closed an hour ago? That’s the joy of flow. And largely, it’s a good thing. It is such a gift to be paid to do something that can bring you such satisfaction.

But when you hit a roadblock, your flow state starts to go away. And not unlike a drug addiction, you may find that your mind and body begins to spiral as you try to chase that high.

A few days ago I found this happening to me. I had very few meetings so I could focus on working on numerous work items and soon found myself in that “flow” state. The causes of bugs were becoming obvious, my code was working after only a few tries, and the way everything flowed in the application just seemed to make sense. Another developer reached out to me asking me why something wouldn’t load in a Visualforce page and in the splendor of the flow state I thought “I will solve this in a few minutes, for I am Flow.”

4 hours later I had made no progress out what was wrong. I was enraged and angry thoughts filled me head.

My wife brought me back to earth, we sat down for dinner, and half an hour later I figured out the problem in 15 minutes.

What happened? My flow state had turned into tilt. Tilt is a termed used to describe the frustration felt from doing an activity over and over again and only getting negative results.

The problem with the flow state is that it doesn’t leave much room for reflection. I found myself reading the same documentation over and over again, even though my answer wasn’t in there the first time. I kept repeating the same steps in the application, even though it wasn’t producing the outcome I needed. I would write the same methods, read the same debug logs. And when you’re working in Salesforce, there’s also all that loading time between compile and execution. Without any progress, all of that adds up and gets infuriating. But I was too stubborn, too arrogant to stop for to reflect.

I kept thinking, “If I just work harder, I will figure this out. I am smarter than this.” I wanted to stay in that flow state, but the truth is that was gone about an hour into it. I was quickly losing perspective, slowly becoming enraged, and no closer to a solution. I was chasing that flow high. I was tilted.

It was only after I had a chance to reset was I able to figure it out. When I returned, I outlined what I had done already and tried a different approach. I wrote down what went wrong, took notes, and basically took my time. Without resetting, I wouldn’t have been able to reflect on what I was doing and probably would have spent a few more hours before going to sleep frustrated, too angry to even learn from what I already did.

Looking back on this, it seems so obvious and childish. “Calm the hell down, Sean, it’s just code.” But we’ve all been there, we’ve all found ourselves in that headspace of frustration, screaming internally “WHY CAN’T I FIGURE THIS OUT.” And so I wanted to share this story to encourage you, and also to remind myself, to walk away. When you start to get tilted, your brain is basically inhibited and can’t perform at the level you need. Walk away and you’ll probably save yourself many many hours of frustration.