Coding Without Pressure: How Slowing Down Helped Me Learn Faster

The Pressure We Don’t Talk About ## When Fast Learning Became Shallow Learning ## Slowing Down Wasn’t Easy (At First) ## What “Slow Learning” Looks Like in Practice ## The Confidence Shift ## Learning Faster by Moving Slower ## What I No Longer Do ## Final Thoughts (From One Developer to Another) ## Hadil Ben AbdallahFollow For a long time, I thought learning to code had to feel intense. Daily goals. Long hours. Constant progress. If I wasn’t exhausted, I felt like I wasn’t doing enough. So I pushed harder. More tutorials. More projects. More pressure. And somehow… I learned less. It took me a while to realize this simple truth... I wasn’t failing because I was slow; I was failing because I wouldn’t let myself slow down. When you’re learning to code, there’s an invisible timer in your head. “I should understand this by now.” “I’m behind everyone else.” “Why does this take me so long?” You open Dev.to, LinkedIn, Twitter. Everyone seems to be building, shipping, improving... fast. And suddenly, coding stops feeling like learning. It feels like a race you didn’t sign up for. There was a phase where I “covered” a lot of topics. JavaScript concepts. CSS tricks. Python basics. But ask me to explain them deeply? Or apply them without guidance? That’s when things fell apart. I wasn’t learning; I was consuming. Moving fast, but not moving forward. Slowing down felt wrong. Like I was being lazy. Like I was wasting time. But instead of doing more, I tried doing less, intentionally. And something unexpected happened. Things started to stick. Slowing down doesn’t mean doing nothing. It means doing things with attention. For me, it looks like: That’s when learning became calmer and deeper. Here’s the part nobody mentions: When you remove pressure, confidence quietly grows. You stop comparing. You stop rushing to “finish.” You start trusting your pace. And that trust changes everything. Bugs don’t feel personal anymore. Confusion feels temporary, not permanent. You stop asking, “Am I good enough?” And start asking, “What can I understand better?” Ironically, slowing down helped me learn faster. Not because I covered more topics... but because I retained more. Concepts connected. Patterns became familiar. Mistakes turned into lessons instead of frustration. Progress stopped being loud... but it became real. ❌ I don’t rush to finish courses ❌ I don’t force productivity on bad days ❌ I don’t measure progress by speed ❌ I don’t compare my chapter 3 to someone else’s chapter 20 Learning isn’t urgent... It’s ongoing. If coding feels heavy right now, maybe it’s not because you’re bad at it. Maybe you’re just carrying too much pressure. Slow down. Breathe. Write code at a pace you can understand, not just complete. You don’t need to be fast to be good. You need to be present. Learning to code isn’t about racing... it’s about staying long enough to grow 💻 Wishing you patience, clarity, and joy in your coding journey, friends 💙. Templates let you quickly answer FAQs or store snippets for re-use. Are you sure you want to hide this comment? It will become hidden in your post, but will still be visible via the comment's permalink. Hide child comments as well For further actions, you may consider blocking this person and/or reporting abuse - One concept instead of five - One small feature instead of a full app - One file read carefully instead of ten skimmed - Reading my own code and asking why I wrote it that way - Letting myself struggle before Googling - Writing simple solutions instead of clever ones - Taking breaks without guilt - Stopping when my brain feels tired, not when the clock says so