At 2 a.m., staring at a stack trace that refused to make sense, I only ever had one move as an engineer: keep tracing the error backward until I found the actual line of code that broke, not the symptom that showed up on the screen three functions later. That habit has a name in engineering circles. First principles thinking. You break a problem down to its most basic, verifiable component, then build back up from there instead of patching whatever is visible on the surface. It is how I solved most of my hardest problems at work. It is also, I eventually learned, the only thing that ever actually worked on my own stress relief, years after I had left the keyboard behind and was sitting on a meditation cushion wondering why nothing was changing.
The Habit I Almost Didn’t Apply to Myself
In Silicon Valley I built a career on getting to the lowest level thing. If a system was slow, you did not add more caching on top of a slow query, you fixed the slow query. If a service kept crashing, you did not restart it and hope, you found the memory leak. I carried a kind of intellectual pride in refusing quick patches. Then I hit a wall no amount of engineering could route around: my own nervous system, running hot for years, carrying what physiologists call allostatic load, the accumulated wear of chronic stress that never gets the chance to fully discharge. And here is the part that still makes me laugh at my past self. I did not apply the same standard to myself that I applied to code. I patched. More coffee, more workouts, more willpower, more apps that promised to fix my focus. I never once asked what the actual root cause was. Some of that is probably just how I am wired. I have always been something of a minimalist, more interested in the smallest working version of a thing than the most elaborate one, and first principles thinking is really just minimalism applied to problem solving. Strip away everything that is not the actual mechanism, and see what is left.
Why “Stress Relief” Kept Failing the First Principles Test
Most stress relief advice is not built on first principles. It is built on symptom management: breathe deeper, sleep more, unplug for the weekend. Useful, sometimes. But none of it asks the actual root-cause question an engineer asks by instinct, which is what is the lowest-level variable actually driving this output. I do not manage a memory leak by restarting the server more often, and I eventually stopped trying to manage my stress the same hollow way. I wanted to find where it was actually stored in me and go there directly, not smooth over the surface of it.
Why Meditation Didn’t Work for Me, No Matter How Long I Sat
I spent hours, sometimes what felt like entire weekends, trying to meditate my way out of a stress response that would not quit, especially once a string of personal events piled emotional weight on top of professional burnout. Meditation asks you to observe your thoughts and let them pass, which is a fine practice as far as it goes. It never touched the thing sitting underneath the thoughts: energy and tension that was trapped in my actual tissue, not just circulating through my head. I was debugging the wrong layer of the stack, and no amount of sitting quietly was going to fix a problem one level down from where I was looking.
The Lowest-Level Variable Turned Out to Be Attention Itself
What I eventually found, working through somatic energy work and later training under Dr. John Amaral, was that my own attention and awareness could actually influence the trapped stress held in my body. Written out like that, it sounds strange. It sounded stranger to me at the time, because I was the guy who dismissed anything that could not be measured. But almost nobody tests this, because their attention and awareness are already spoken for. It goes to the phone, the show, the doom scroll, the second drink, the argument still replaying in their head from three days ago. Attention turned out to be the actual lowest-level resource underneath every other stress relief tactic I had tried, and almost nobody spends it on purpose.
What Somatic Energy Work Does Differently
This is not mysticism, and there is no belief required for it to work. Somatic energy work treats trapped stress as something physical, held in tissue and nervous system patterning, not just something to talk through or think your way out of. Talk therapy works at the level of narrative and meaning, which matters. It does not always reach tissue. Willpower works at the level of behavior, which is useful right up until the tank is empty by 3 p.m. Somatic work goes underneath both of those layers, to the actual hardwiring, and that is closer to first principles than almost anything else I tried before it.
How This Actually Applies, However You Want to Work
These days I teach the same first-principles approach in two different formats, depending on how someone wants to work with it. Mindworx is the self-guided version, a daily method for directing your own attention at the trapped stress your body is carrying, no incense or mantras required. Table Work is the in-person version, where I do that work with you directly during a session. Neither one requires you to believe anything going in. Both work at the same lowest-level variable: attention, applied on purpose instead of given away by default.
If you want the fuller history of how a software engineer ended up doing this for a living, career collapse and all, I wrote about that whole arc in Debugging Burnout: A Software Engineer’s Story.
Frequently Asked Questions
- Is this the same thing as meditation? No. Meditation generally trains you to notice your thoughts and let them pass without engaging them. This approach works directly with the trapped stress your body is already holding, using directed attention as the tool, which is a different mechanism entirely. Mindworx was built specifically as an alternative to meditation, not a form of it.
- Does this require me to believe in energy work for it to work? No belief is required. The starting point is attention, which is a resource you already have and already spend somewhere every day. This method simply asks you to spend a portion of it on purpose, directed at a specific place, rather than assuming anything about how or why it works before you try it.
- How is this different from therapy or willpower-based stress management? Therapy works primarily at the level of narrative, examining what happened and what it means, which has real value. Willpower-based approaches work at the level of daily behavior, like forcing yourself to exercise or unplug. This work goes underneath both of those layers, to the trapped tension itself, which is why people who have already done years of therapy or built strong willpower habits sometimes still feel something unresolved underneath.
There are two ways to actually put this to work. If you want to start applying first-principles attention on your own, on your own schedule, Mindworx is the self-guided method built for exactly that. If you would rather have someone find the root cause with you directly, Table Work is the in-person option. Either way, the stress can be undone. It is just a matter of where you want to start.