I have been thinking about writing this note for a long time. I went through busy times, writer’s block, and some sort of impostor syndrome which told me “why would people read it and would they consider it useful?”.
Yeah, I am definitely no psychologist. But I have been around for some time, and I went through stellar highs and frightening lows. I have questioned myself several times, I was about to give up on so many things that I would have regretted for the rest of my life.
But I am lucky. I am an optimist, so I persisted.
I didn’t realize how lucky I have been until later in my life.
When I started supporting people, moving from engineering to management, I started to see how stress and burnout can be common, and what they can lead to. To do my job in the best possible way, detecting burnout before it happens, and by being able to give good advice, I started researching these topics.
I stumbled upon a couple of great books. So, I learned that some of the things I have been doing in my life were, incidentally, good to manage stress and avoid burnout. I have also discovered that thinking rationally about stress, stressors, and ways to manage them, helps recognize burnout and helps prevent it.
With this note, I would like to share some of my learnings, in the humblest possible way. With the hope that they will be useful in these challenging times and later, when things will get back to the “normal”, challenging, life.
Table of contents
- Stress and burnout
Stress and burnout
Stressors vs stress
You probably have heard of good and bad stress. Good stress is beneficial and motivating. Bad stress can cause anxiety and can lead to burnout and even severe health issues, when underestimated.
It’s important to mention that our cognitive resources and our energy are limited, so even good stress can be overwhelming and can mutate into bad stress without us noticing. Everyone has a limit, unfortunately we generally don’t know it. But our body knows when it’s surpassed.
One big lesson I learned is that when it comes to stress, it’s of uttermost importance to separate stress itself from the stressors.
Stressors are the cause of stress, but most of the time are not the first thing we need to tackle. This may sound strange, but let me explain.
One reason is that managing stress first will make us more lucid, and will allow us to be better at identifying the root causes for it.
Another reason is that sometimes stressors cannot be eliminated. We might be just stuck in stress-activating situations.
Think about your work, where you have recurrent challenges: presentations, performance reviews, some hard cross-functional relationships. I’m pretty sure all of that adds to the stress we face outside the office. Trying to adjust to a post-pandemic lockdown, or having a baby to raise, come immediately to my mind.
First, deal with stress itself
We are the product of many years of evolution, yet our brain and our body still preserve an ancestral substrate we no longer “talk” to. Not surprisingly, your body doesn’t know about performance reviews, hard meetings, or traffic jams, but it knows well about stress.
In the past, not even that far, our body used to react in a primordial way to stress caused by primordial situations. You saw a treat, you ran, or maybe you fought. Simple as that.
Today, we cannot run from meetings or fight random people on a bad day.
So, we ignore the stress. Leaving incomplete what the expert calls the stress-response cycle. Your body, your brain, is not designed for that, so stress piles up. Until it’s overwhelming. Until you burn out.
Fortunately, there are several ways we can fight stress, keeping it under control.
Physical activity is the most effective way
OK, you probably heard that “physical activity helps” far too many times.
But think about this: your body has no idea what “resolving an interpersonal conflict through rational problem-solving” means. But it knows what a run, a swim or a bike ride mean.
Engaging in physical activity is the most straightforward and effective way to complete the stress-response cycle and, thus, reduce your stress level.
When physical activity doesn’t cut it
Sure, running helps. But not everyone likes doing physical activity. Or maybe, for someone, it’s genuinely hard to have enough of it.
Experts say there are a few ways we can use to reduce stress that work well together or alone. Some examples are:
- Breathing - you know the thing you have on your Apple Watch and you always thought it was BS? Focusing on deep, long, breathes sends to your brain a “message” to calm down and relax;
- Social Interactions - friendly, casual, social interaction is the first external sign that the world is a safe place;
- Laughter - genuine, deep, helpless laughter triggers a primordial system that mammals have evolved to make and maintain social bonds and regulate emotions;
- Cultivate affections - this is another way to tell your body that it is safe now, that you can relax. Physical contact with your loved ones, or even your pet, can be of great help.
- Crying - “crying solves nothing” is a lie. It might not eliminate the stressors, but it does help to complete the stress-response cycle;
- Creative Expressions - creativity can unleash big emotions. In turn, those emotions release a physical, chemical, response in your body which helps lower the stress level.
How do I know when to stop?
That is the easiest part. You don’t have to stop any of the above activities, of course, but your body and your mind will know when they had a positive effect. It’s easier for some people to recognize than others.
It could manifest itself as a mood shift or physical tension going away. Your thoughts are more lucid, and you are now ready to deal with stressors.
Dealing with stressors
One epiphany I had about stress was when I learned about the “technical” reason why stress is created.
Scientists call it the discrepancy-reducing/-increasing feedback loop, but Emily and Amelia Nagosky [1], who wrote a great book about burnout, call it the monitor.
In short, the monitor is a mechanism in your brain that is involved every time you engage in an activity. It could be a diff you are trying to get approved, some work through others that you are pushing for, a promotion or a rating you are trying to get, or an emergency “situation” that needs solving and then something else happens interrupting you.
“The Monitor knows (1) what your goal is; (2) how much effort you’re investing in that goal; and (3) how much progress you’re making. It keeps a running tally of your effort-to-progress ratio, and it has a strong opinion about what that ratio should be”.
When things don’t work as per your expectations, “Monitor switches its assessment of your goal from ‘attainable’ to ‘unattainable’, and it pushes you off an emotional cliff into a pit of despair.”
Dealing with stressor you can control: Planful Problem-Solving
Of course not all sources of stress can be controlled, but when you can, you are in luck.
The trick here is to detect rationally when lots of effort won’t lead to progress we thought we could or would make. When that happens, we can re-focus our effort, trying different strategies. Substantially, we analyze the problem, we plan, and we execute on that plan.
This doesn’t have to be formal or written down in steps to follow, although sometimes that does help.
There are trivial cases. For instance:
- Do you keep procrastinating an important task? Take a look at the 20 minutes rule. It really works.
- Do you get distracted easily while programming? For me, personally, classical music helps.
- You spent hours trying to find that f*%$ing bug? Use the rubber duck debugging.
For non-trivial cases, introspection and rationalization help. But, most of the time, the plan you develop must include completing the stress-response cycle, because we rarely make good decisions when we are “upset” or stressed.
Dealing with stressor you can’t control: Positive Reframing
Story time: my first couple of years at Facebook (now Meta) were painful.
The main reason was that the expectation I had about my career progression was skewed, and nobody told me how hard it would be to get great ratings and get promoted. After all, in my previous jobs I was looked up as “the guy who can do magic”. But at Facebook, I was a “regular” engineer. And although I was convinced I could accept that and work on it, I was not ready for it.
I had been “banged in the head” several times, and most importantly, I wasn’t making any progress.
I didn’t feel in control.
My monitor kicked in, telling my unconscious self that my efforts-to-progress ratio was shit and producing stress to get me ready to either fight or flee.
Since I am an optimist, I nevertheless started to see value even in my failures to progress. I, unconsciously, reframed difficulties as opportunities for growth and learning.
Anyway, guess what? I worked for that company 7 years. Promotions came, ratings came, when I grew enough to deserve them. I am nowhere near where I wanted to be. Life goals are moving targets anyway. But I learned to appreciate every milestone reached. Once I cracked my own stressors and refined my stress detectors, I am more confident in taking bigger challenges, and the stress coming with them.
Of course, not everyone is a natural optimist. Pessimists tend to view bad situations as signs of larger-scale problems that could have lasting impact. For them, as for the optimists, my best advice is to think rationally about stressful situations, close the stress-response cycle to get lucidity, and reframe failures as opportunities.
This is not the usual BS about “looking at the bright side”. It’s absolutely legit to feel frustrated by the gaps between what is and what, in your mind, could or should be. It also doesn’t mean you should pretend there is no problem.
We need to acknowledge when things are hard. Then, we acknowledge that the difficulty is worth it.
You might think that there is something wrong with you. That you are a failure.
In reality, you unconsciously just set a wrong, ruthless, unrealistic, expectation for yourself.
Keep in mind that “a smooth sea never makes a skillful sailor”. Human nature is so that we grow and become better when we survive struggles. You just need to hit some additional milestones before getting where you want to be, while growing and becoming a better version of yourself.
Building Purpose
Another huge lesson I learned in my life is that you do not find purpose. You build it.
I have been so lucky to have this lesson taught to me at a young age. I have been trying to translate this “concept” from Italian, but it doesn’t really sound right… Anyway, when I was ten or so, my mother explained to me that even when performing unappealing tasks, we can “trick our brain” into thinking that we like it. There is always a good bit, something you can grab and use, to turn it around.
She, of course, didn’t explain how. I would not have understood it anyway, back then. But every time in my life I faced hard situations, those words came back to me, and helped me think rationally about the circumstances.
If nothing, everything that doesn’t kill you makes you stronger…
Redefining failing
So far, we talked about redefining winning. Sometimes we are aiming for specific, concrete, goals that can’t be redefined. We did all we could, everything we were supposed to do, without getting there.
The reframing in this case is focused on what you have been able to achieve while trying. Many times we end up somewhere else than where we originally planned, and this place could be absolutely spectacular.
You might have heard that Post-It notes have been invented accidentally while experimenting with a strong glue (which the inventor never managed to develop). Or that X-rays were discovered by chance while testing whether cathode rays could pass through glass.
“This sort of reframing makes failing almost impossible, since it acknowledges that there’s more to success than winning.”
This kind of positive reframing is by far the hardest, and we rarely can take away the pain of failure or loss. It often requires a recovery, during which you can endure by completing the stress-response cycle and, most importantly, using kindness and compassion for yourself.
References
- [1] Burnout: The Secret to Unlocking the Stress Cycle - Emily and Amelia Nagoski - ISBN 1785042084