Meditation for Devs: Maintaining Your Sanity for Crunch and Beyond

[Music] alright let's get started hello and happy Friday of GDC I have today I'm so glad that this talk is on a Friday because after a wild week you know I think we all need to decompress a little bit so I think the timing was great and thank you all for being here because it's still kind of early and the GDC parties go all night so I'm honored that you're even here thank you so so much for coming I've been asked to remind you to make sure you fill out your surveys and turn your phone's off so this is meditation for devs maintaining your sanity for crunch and beyond so let's get started I'm Amanda Gardner and that really encapsulates my insane life I am a yoga and meditation teacher I'm a mindfulness speaker I travel around the country talking about mindfulness I also am the co-founder of the deep end games where I

wrote perception which came out last year it is a first-person thriller about a blind woman exploring a haunted mansion using echolocation the way a bat sees and it's out on ps4 and Xbox one steam and it just came out on switch this fall I'm also a mom of four I have two babies and two bigger kids and so my life I really need the meditation and the mindfulness but a couple of years ago my life was completely different I was an English teacher in my home town for about over 10 years I only had two kids that's our Smash Brothers Halloween we thought we were pretty cool I still think we're pretty cool and I spent some time as a stay-at-home mom and my husband was a really cool Triple A veteran that was my only link to the industry my husband was the lead designer on Bioshock and the design director on BioShock Infinite bill Gardner some of you know him so how did I get here things got really interesting when a

rational closed bill decided that we were going to make a game from our basement and I said okay so a year ago today we had one game in crunch a toddler a newborn and we both got mono like we're adults like how to adults even get mono we got mono and it's because we were so rundown our bodies were just like a garbage fire it was it was pretty pretty brutal and we just shut down like our brains weren't working right we couldn't take care of ourselves we couldn't take care of our kids and our game was in crunch and it was it was us in our basement and so I I sort of learned to resuscitate us and that's what this is about if I can impart any of what I learned to you then it'll be worth it for for me so I really want to teach you to be present and relaxed and in crunch and Beyond in life these are sort of the two things that can really make or break development so

when you're present at work you make less mistakes less iteration you're not multitasking your uni tasking and you are in the now we actually spend 80 percent of our head space in the past and in the future if you checked in with your brain say every hour or so 80% of the time you'd be dwelling on something that already happened and thinking about rewriting it or you would be perseverating on something that's going to happen or probably never going to happen when it when you really think about it only 20% of the time are we really here where we are right now and so with these tactics I'd love to teach you to expand your 20% hey even if you can get it to 30% it's an improvement right and be relaxed bill and I really shut down our bodies shut down because we were constantly crunching on something whether it was the the babies and not sleeping or eating poorly because we couldn't even take care of ourselves when you get your body to cooperate it's

much much easier to be relaxed and be intentional with what you do so a lot of my slides have JP Sears memes and I know that he makes a bun of mindfulness and meditation but he's so funny and I feel like it brings some levity to the presentation and if you've never seen his spiritual AF videos they're so funny so the easiest way to become present is to notice your own body what's really funny is that we spend all day up in our heads and we don't notice our bodies until they hurt think about it you have ankles you have probably not even thought about your ankles unless they're bothering you so if you can sort of the first thing that mindfulness experts say can can get you into the present moment like this is you just notice your own body so put your feet on the floor and this is what's great about all these tips is these are sort of designed for you to be able to do at your desk or at work without people I mean I'm not having you sit on your desk in lotus position and you know floating you know I'll meditate and destroy you know it's gonna be much much more

accessible so put your feet on the floor feel your toes feel your feet and start to scan upward notice notice your legs you know notice your your button your seat in the back in your chair notice if you're holding tension anywhere like for me I have all tension like in my chest and behind my shoulders and scan all the way up do you have any discomfort do you need a drink do you have a headache you know and just notice your body and the next thing to do if you find yourself holding a lot of pressure is to take a breath and imagine your breath being directed into that spot where you're holding tension so for me it's right here and I imagine taking that breath and just sort of making some room around the tension and you can sort of imagine that tension loosening up and getting getting a little bit more open and that's that's kind of like the intro level easiest sort of meditation mindfulness trick the next one does also have to do with breath and it's funny we most of the

time breathe wrong and I know that that sounds a little bit ridiculous but we breathe in a very shallow manner and a lot of times when you see people take a deep breath they go and suck in and that's actually the opposite of what you should be doing because imagine your lungs are like balloons and they inflate and your diaphragm goes down so when you inhale really inhale you want to imagine bringing the breath out and down and really breathing deep and then when you exhale you should feel it contract and suck in so another thing that mindfulness experts say other than being in your body is being in your breath noticing your breath you don't have even change your breath to be mindful just notice that it's there bring your attention to it suddenly you're grounded in your body and you're in the present moment but what's really awesome about breathwork is that it can change your energy it can bring your energy up and it can bring your energy down if you're on our sixteen at the office and you can't drink another redbull let me just suggest this so if everybody

can put their hand on their abdomen so that you can feel it move in and out you're gonna take a three-part breath in it's gonna be inhale one-third inhale two-thirds inhale all the way in one exhale so everybody with me then exhale one more time inhale exhale and what that does and it brings this really richly oxygenated blood right to your brain and it wakes you up it's almost instantaneous and it's really really awesome if you do this for a few minutes you could be you know towards the end of the day on a Friday during crunch doing push-ups on your desk it's awesome that's an exaggeration but what's also cool about this try part breath is that it can also be used to chill out and bring your energy down so say you get a message from your producer and it's just okay period and that period makes you like oh god here's how to use your breath to come a little bit so you're gonna take a one-part inhale and then a three-part exhale so and when you do

that you can honestly like feel those nice juicy good like serotonin and melatonin and oxytocin all the good chemicals that make you chill out you can like feel them start to just flow so taking a couple minutes and doing that kind of breath and it doesn't have to be super loud like people don't need to know you're doing it doesn't have to be like Lamaze breath it can just be like quiet nose or mouth breathing this is perfectly fine for that okay when you're at the office it's often hard to be present because if you're in crunch you may things may just blend together I mean how many crunch veterans do we have here like days blended two weeks which blend in two months and at this point like I'm from New England like I'm in Boston like it's still snowy I don't know what month it is it's just brutal so taking things that you've never noticed before this helps the neuroplasticity in your brain and that means that your brain isn't static it can change and it

doesn't get stuck so if you know walking by like oh I never noticed that you know our environment artists her desk smells like oranges because she eats clementines every day or oh I never noticed that poster behind the bathroom door you know just try to take in new details to make it feel fresh because it's not right take different routes I can't say enough about this what scientists say really really really helps our brain is make things different if you're stuck in a routine that you can't change that routine change little things within the routine eat different kinds of breakfasts drive a different way to work sit somewhere else if you can hang out with new people make an effort to talk to different people at lunch time I personally diffuse a lot of essential oils and that really changes my mood citrus wakes you up florals help you chill and woodsy smells help you focus so that's something that if you want to talk about me later you can email me and I can give you specifics or we can talk about it in the overflow

room across the hall whatever you do try to do whatever you can to keep it fresh so introductory mindfulness so a lot of people when they they say like oh you meditate I try it I can't I try to explain it's a practice you know I as a yoga teacher the first time I did yoga I couldn't you know get on my hands and get into crow and it's because I try a little bit more every time and I balance a little bit more every time and I get a little bit better every time it's the same with with practicing meditation I don't expect you to be able to hold your attention on one thing for twenty minutes I don't think I've ever done that in my life on anything but then again I have four kids so the first thing that I really found to be helpful is an exercise you can either call it leaves on a stream or like cars on a highway whichever is more calming to you I'll take the leaves but if you just observe your thoughts just just watch them you don't even have to clear your mind you just literally watch your

thoughts and if they get stuck if you get stuck online one thing and you can't stop thinking about it pull it out of the stream redirect to the stream so I say if your thoughts are leaves on the stream of consciousness and they get stuck on a branch you pull the branch out right or if there's cars on the highway and you get a little traffic pull that car over so literally all you need to do to start meditating is take a minute 60 seconds and watch your thoughts observe them and if they get stuck pull it out that's it and there's a great app called headspace that sort of has this watch your thoughts Ness about it and it's really good and you can customize the time that you meditate and you can add a little bit more every day maybe challenge yourself it takes 21 days to make a habit and 40 days to make like a lifelong habit so if you want to try just increments of 30 seconds every day see just see what works for you the Silent Witness so there's something

about observing your own thoughts and sort of perceiving them is not your own that's really really good for your brain if you can say that that's my ego that is my monkey mind that is my chatter I am the Silent Witness that's who I really am and it's kind of a Buddhist thing it's kind of a yogi thing but it really really helps you calm down and helps you realize that that's just the chatter of your brain that's what your brain does your brain makes ridiculous scenarios and that's okay like that's not you and the Silent Witness there's a lot of reading you can do about it but it really does help you detach from those little paranoia is that you know everybody has corrected the puppy so I explained teaching mindfulness like this so imagine in your mind a cute little puppy it can be any kind of puppy I personally picture a Welsh Corgi so when you're teaching a puppy how to sit you put it down you say sit and then it'll look at you and it'll get up like a second later you don't go what an puppy are you know you like take the puppy no no no no honey and you redirect the puppy and it'll sit for

another second longer and then when it gets up you're just no honey right there that's how you train your brain with mindfulness and meditation in little increments and without judgment just correct the puppy like no no puppy doesn't know how to sit yeah let me teach it how to say your brain doesn't know how to sit yet teach your brain how to sit be like the puppy how to relax and still be productive so a lot of people think that like oh I can't relax at work I won't be productive that's actually not true when you multitask you don't do things as well or as thoroughly and you're going to need so much more iteration and oddly enough your relaxation can start first thing they say the first 17 seconds of your day sets the tone for your entire day and I read this really great book called the slight edge which implies that every micro decision you make either brings your life in an upswing or a downswing and eventually it takes off exponentially things are either going to get drastically better for you because these little little decisions add up or

things are going to go downhill to the point where like oh my god what's happening I know how both of those work so in the first 17 seconds of your day if you wake up and go oh deadlines that's probably gonna start you on the downward spiral of your day and what mindfulness experts and scientists have found in their research is that gratitude is the number one thing that makes people happy so if you can try to wake up and just be thankful for like one or two things I am so thankful that there was ice cream in the freezer last night because I totally muted that or like oh I'm so grateful for my mom for watching the kids later so that I can actually get out of the house take a tiny fraction of your day and be thankful for something and your day will start out on the right foot it'll be much better so apps I've already talked about headspace but my favorite meditation app is Ananda Deepak Chopra's app there is a small subscription feed but it's a hundred percent worth it it's a great great app so Ananda Deepak Chopra comes on and he's got this great relaxing

voice that's amazing he talks a little bit about like a theme of the day or something to think about like oh your creativity and where it could bring you just some nice stuff and then he gives you a mantra and then in a few minutes because it's customizable however long you want he rings a bell and it's over and that's it it's very simple and now a lot of you may be a little bit skeptical about mantras and think that it's too hippie-dippy let me tell you which I love by the way I mean look at me but let me tell you the science behind why mantras actually work for meditation so imagine that cute little puppy is right next to you and it's pawing at you and it wants your attention that's your monkey mind that's your ego it always wants to distract you right but imagine you have some treats in your hand and when you drop a treat to the dog it quiets for just a little bit and you get just a moment to relax and then it starts out to you again and then you drop another little treat that is what doing mantra meditation does the mantra essentially it's like throwing you know juggling balls to your monkey mind and

having it juggle while the rest of your brain relaxes so I use Sanskrit mantras because I do a lot of yoga and that's the kind that Deepak Chopra doesn't is app my favorite mantra is so hum it just means I am and it really helps me sort of Center myself it's really nice so I inhale so and exhale hum mentally I'm not even saying it I could do this at my desk again nobody knows I used to write for Huffington Post and I wrote this article called I meditate at the grocery store and nobody even knows because I have these kids with me 24/7 and I just put them in the cart give him a banana and I just meditated it's glorious anyway those are mantras they're great and you should try it so how to relax on a chemical or cellular level this is interesting so I in my research I found a lot about cortisol and cortisol is what our adrenals fire when we are in trouble now these were originally evolved for when you know we encountered a bear and the cortisol

would fire and we would either punch the bear in the snoot or run away now that same reaction happens when your lead comes up to you and says can we talk at 3:00 it still fires as though there's a bear that's not good for us especially when we are in crunch and we are working long hours our cortisol is firing up like Annie Oakley just shoot and shoot and shooting and that causes adrenal fatigue which is really really really it makes you run down and makes you unhappy it makes you miserable it's really really difficult and why cortisol is bad for you is it constricts your blood vessels really tight because it's trying to get you ready for a fight but your heart has to be so pumps so much harder to get the blood through because your like this cortisol is bad we want to sort of use it only when we really need it cortisol also tells your body don't digest that food cuz you're gonna be in a big fight with the bear and that's why you often hang on to extra weight when you're stressed so a way to fight cortisol is with adaptogens and these are just herbs or mushrooms you can find

them they're natural supplements and they give you a little bit of time between stimulus and response on a chemical level so that you're not just shooting at every little thing that might make you stress hell watch the news and watch what happens to your cortisol boom boom boom right so I take ashwagandha it's my favorite I also take cordyceps and reishi mushrooms antioxidants are great for another reason but I want to make sure that I keep this talk tight and get to everything that I can but basically the the space between stimulus and response is really the key to everything in life the ability to be able to have that moment to reason and realize that you should not panic or you should not say something hasty or do something hasty it's amazing and with adaptogens that happens to your body on a chemical level and with meditation it happens on a mental level it's like adding memory you're you just your thoughts have more room to run around and you have more time to reason things out right how to relax on a physical level so yoga I'm not telling everybody out there to get

into downward dog with me okay there are types of yoga that a lot of people don't know about that are unbelievably helpful for game devs in particular restorative yoga looks like a nap sesh you get on the floor like with a bunch of pillows and blankets and they put you in these weird positions but what those positions are designed for is a lymphatic system rinse of rinse of your sympathetic nervous system your parasympathetic nervous system your your pineal gland the the poses are meant to sort of stimulate certain certain responses in your body and to get rid of stress so it's not just I'm lied down for an hour with a pillow and it was awesome it was it's very strategic if you can find a yoga studio that does restorative yoga it's 90 minutes of like a cuddle session that's just amazing Yoga Nidra everybody write this one down this helps you get into a sleep state without being asleep and you can do this if you can't sleep at night if you're coming home from the office and you want

more quality sleep but physically can't get it because of time constraints or if you need a 20 minute boost and cannot nap the office yoga nidra so let me just explain your brainwaves so when you're awake you have alpha waves and beta waves and those are they're great they help keep you awake and that's how you think when you're awake but the problem is they create little toxins in your brain that only sleep which is beta Delta and theta waves can clean away it's like a janitorial crew comes in at night and cleans those away and you have 110 to 90 minute to 110 sleep cycles at night and that's what it does it cleans everything out but if you're not getting enough sleep you're not getting rid of the toxins Yoga Nidra it's a it's like a guided meditation it actually can put your brain into the theta and delta waves so that you can clear away some of those toxins without getting a full night's sleep a lot of Yogi's only sleep for 4 hours a night a lot of the time where my babies were keeping me up at night I would do some

yoga nidra and it would really help reset my body because I physically couldn't get the amount of sleep that my body needed so I already talked about the depth of sleep don't hit snooze I just found this out like a month ago and it was completely shocking so as I mentioned you have those 90 to 110 minutes sleep cycles when and it takes your body two hours naturally to rise out of sleep and to wake you up properly when you hit snooze your body instantly resets to a 90 to 110 minute cycle and say you wake up 10 minutes later it can take up to four hours for your body to get back to the level of energy that you would have had if you just woke up without the snooze so snooze is super detrimental to your to your health and your energy lastly I'm gonna go pretty quickly through this one because I feel like I may not be people's favorite person anymore so I love this because JP Sierra's if you can't see the picture

he's got a turkey made out of tofu and legs and carrot and it's really funny but part of the reason why bills body and my body was run down is because we were eating horrible things because in crunch a lot of the time you just eat whatever is available a lot of times studios will just bring in a bunch of food and you just eat what's there and it's really really easy and bill and I had so much eggs and pans I actually had chronic back pain I was at a chiropractor three times a week and what I ended up you know after a number of doctor's visits I realized that my body was just inflamed by all of the things that I was consuming now this is not me saying you need to cut these things to be happy I'm saying if you can reduce or even eliminate some of these things your body's gonna be more cooperative when you're in crunch you are go go go go go and you need your body to keep you up you need your body to be able to sleep when you want to be able to you know bike to work when you want which is obviously great cuz it helps get you a little exercise your body needs to keep up with your mind and so these are the things that cause inflammation in your

body and your diet and I'm sorry yeah so meat dairy sugar caffeine alcohol so I actually became vegan and it completely changed my house entirely it's not as expensive as people say if you use a lot of things like beans and lentils and rice and it's actually remarkably delicious if you find the right cookbooks and whatnot I'm happy happy happy to talk to anybody who's considering it we can talk across the hall or we you can just email me because I'm really passionate about it and yes there is good vegan cheese but most of it is terrible so pocket meditations so here I'm gonna give you a couple of really short meditations that you can just try to remember and do on the go these are not things that you need to be in a quiet place for these are things that you can sort of just visualize anywhere okay so I think I'm gonna start with sensory meditation is great because you can actually do it while you're eating

and it makes eating more enjoyable so the way my my yoga teacher taught this to us but she gave everybody a small piece of gourmet dark chocolate it was vegan it was really good so she had us look at it she had us open the paper and listen to the crinkles she had a smell of chocolate she had us use all of our senses and then by the time we were eating it we're like oh I've never eaten but if you can do things and try to incorporate all your senses that is a form of meditation and it's actually really great for for your mind to engage in all your senses so go get some chocolate after right even though I just told you don't eat sugar so the guided meditations go on YouTube type in guided meditations there are so many amazing visual guided meditations and and these are nice if you can close your eyes but it's just somebody walking you through something mentally and it's just sort of like a really peaceful little story that can totally help you calm down deescalate popping your ear

buds and just take five minutes and listen to a really beautiful guided visualization the golden bucket so this one is really nice when you've got something that's troubling you so I think we're gonna do it right now because we have a little bit of time so if everybody if you'd like to close your eyes and I'll lead you through it a little bit so imagine you're at your favorite place on earth say it's you know the camp you used to go to as a child or a bench in your backyard or at your favorite beach and there's a golden bucket next to you and it's it's illuminated from the bottom and you have this instinct to put all your worries in there so imagine that your worries are heavy heavy chains inside your chest or your mind and you start to just pull them out and drop them into the bucket so you know your your cat's been a little sick put that worry in the book it you have a really really really big milestone coming up drop it in the bucket you have had a strained relationship with your mother take it

out put it in the bucket and just slowly one by mine imagine giving away all of the things that are burdening you and start to imagine your body to just feel physically lighter and after a moment you feel the hand on your shoulder and a stranger says I'll take this now and somebody just picks up the bucket and walks away with it open your eyes it's the kind of thing that just helps you make make you feel a little bit lighter when things are weighing you down another really great visualization when you a little bit of a toxic workplace is the breeze in Gold's meditation so a lot of times when you're crunched things can get contentious and people he really loved before crunch may not be your favorite people during crunch because you see them 24/7 and they're really really getting on your nerves and also gossip is a thing I like the number-one thing I say is like be the light be the person in the office who doesn't gossip because then people it'll have a ripple effect and I just read this book judgment detox and its really really helpful for that but this is nice

if you have a work environment that's slightly unpleasant it's a really great guided visualization so you imagine that you're breathing in this gold liquid and filling your lungs with it and when you exhale it's diffusing through the room and calming everybody down even if it's not affecting other people if you can imagine them being calmer and imagine yourself being calmer it's actually a really really nice exercise the rainbow elevator is fun and I think I do have time to do it very cool so there's there's sort of a guided meditation that goes through all the colors and like it goes up your up your spine and you know I actually think that we probably don't have time but I do have time for like one or two questions if anybody has them I should probably go to this page recommended reading or listening these are books so I found that it really helped me to listen to audiobooks because then it was sort of spare time that was wasted in my day so these are

really really really good the power of now is literally about present moment awareness the universe has your back it's it's a little bit on the loose side but it really really really just makes you happy it's wonderful The Four Agreements I love the the advice Don Miguel Ruiz gives in this one of the agreements is don't take anything personally because it's not about you chances are and also um yeah that's kind of a big one the slight edge was the one where your life goes up or down the desire map is amazing because she sort of talks to you about reverse engineering your goals like oh I want to have five ship titles by the time I'm 35 well okay why because it'll make me feel accomplished well what else can you do to feel accomplished and you sort of go backwards desire map a really really good book how not to die this is about diet fascinating the five-second rule by Mel Robbins talks about how you can talk yourself into doing anything by counting backwards from five it's fascinating and she's a Boston girl like me love it and

the way of the seal is sort of like a cool Zen book by a guy who was a Navy SEAL and it's about mental toughness and it's awesome so one minute left do we have a question anyone hi hi hi when I get back from GDC I'm gonna be doing more waking up and working out on time but I kind of had an idea of having one day to sleep in do you think this is conducive or do you think maybe I should just still get up and maybe be lazy but awake so I think those are those are good things for you in different ways you need the sleep and you also need the exercise so I mean whatever serves your body try try it the way you set up for a week but if you feel like your body's run down maybe one more day of the sleep so yeah just like pay attention to what your body is telling you we are remarkably remarkably intuitive but we don't pay attention to it enough so yeah listen to your body definitely okay anymore I think we got time for like wine No well please please

please stay in touch because I love talking about this stuff I'm on Twitter you can email me there's the timer and I'll be probably across the way in the little overlook totally is it the Overlook like the hotel really or over watches across the way either way it's cool if anybody has questions or want to chat please please please stay in touch I don't even care if you email me about vegan cheese or essential oils like it's all good okay please fill out your surveys I hope you guys took something away from this and enjoy the rest of your GDC in your trip home [Applause]