Coming from someone who's lived and breathed programming, and excelled at it by most standards (topping national competitive programming competitions, graduatin

Coming from someone who's lived and breathed programming, and excelled at it by most standards (topping national competitive programming competitions, graduating among the top 1% in college, having built compilers, OSes, an OpenGL game engine), then worked for about 4 years at a bigcorp and subsequently burnt out, and has been struggling to get back on his feet for the last two years, I can tell you it's not going to be easy. Last year I picked up haskell, seeing that it was very different from what I was used to up to that point, and built some stuff with it, some web apps built on warp+wai, and quite enjoyed it. But it was short lived. I developed an attention problem like the one you mentioned. I've had call ups from places like Google, following codejam results, also invited to interview by MS, Amazon. But I was and still am a wreck, and seeing the hole in my CV, they turn my down if I answer them at all. Funnily enough, I got most jobs I applied for, the last one being just after quitting my first job. They told me I was the best candidate they've interviewed ... But I started having panic attacks, and quit after a few days. So the takeaway from all of this? It's not programming. It's mental health. And having spent the last couple of years devouring medical research and throwing my every last ounce of energy at the problem (I started suffering from chronic fatigue, so it wasn't really a lot), discovering autoimmune diseases (celiac) which were causing sleep problems, blood tests indicating significant hormonal imbalances, experimenting with paleo, keto, exercise variations ... The takeaway is that the state of mental health treatment is horrendous. Most of my recent readings and research has taken me into the direction of childhood trauma as being the most likely cause of most instances of mental health problems and a lot of chronic health conditions. Some pointers would be the ACE study, and start by reading works by Alice Miller, Bessel van der Kolk, Laurence Heller. Now, the medical consensus is quite different from what I've stated here, so I should back this up with some significant evidence, which I won't. The evidence is fractal-like, and there is huge predictive power in understanding this (that unmet developmental needs during childhood lead to coping strategies that are maladaptive in adulthood, and those are the cause of things like ADHD, chronic fatigue etc). Is there a solution? I don't know, I certainly haven't solved my issues, but I've started to understand them. You'll probably have a hard time doing the research yourself, given the attention problems. In any case, there are risks associated with this path ... But if it truly is possible to solve this issue, you'll not only be able to focus on coding. YOU'LL START LIVING.