The big 5-0! And just like any other 50th birthday I celebrated it with a mental breakdown and crisis!
Due to not getting sleep and generally hitting the wall on my part of the project my brain decided to turn into mush almost as soon as I got out of bed. So I knew going into class that it was going to be a rough day. Didn't expect to have to ask for help with the project 4 times in the first hour, with 3 of those times being for the same problem. If I said I literally could not think it would be true. At one point I honestly could not put thoughts together.
The last time that happened was a few weeks ago. My instructor's advice then was to go take a walk and take the day off from coding. But working on the final project, every minute counts. So I trudged through the entire day and tried to be as helpful as possible in whatever way possible. But I'm sure there were a few moments where I was doing more harm than good.
So never underestimate the importance of getting good quality sleep. Getting 8 hours of sleep every night will help your brain to physically recover. It is easy to forget that what you are doing is very stressful for your mind. So you need actual time to bounce back from that. And that 8 hours needs to be of good quality too. Going to bed stressing about code probably means that you will have dreams of for-loops and callback functions and wake up feeling worse than before. So do whatever you need to do to set a nice environment for yourself before bed. Don't eat, don't drink, don't surf 4Chan for an hour before bed. Whatever it takes for you, make sure you stick to that routine and it will help you get through your 12 weeks.
Also let your friends and family know what you are going through. Once I started my bootcamp I cut back on all my social life. In the past few weeks, now that things are getting very stressful, I've pretty much disappeared from the entire city except for my home and campus. Those people are your support network and can be there for you when things get very rough. And they will be your loudest cheerleaders when things are going great. And they might want to see all the cool stuff you are building too.
It is interesting to see how much I've picked up in the last week or so. I am now able to teach other people about how to use the Google Maps API in React and in HTML. I can explain how state flows through a set of components and follow the trail from the back-end to the front-end. This is the depth of knowledge that I'd been hoping for all summer, and it only took two mental breakdowns to get it.
