Finish the Stress Cycle to Avoid Burnout

Being an adult involves dealing with stress. Regardless of whether you are working a career job, or are a stay at home parent - there are cycles to adult life, and part of that cycle includes times of stress.

For years I've seen articles that discuss tactics of dealing with stressful situations - tactics such as sticking to a routine, setting limits and boundaries, taking breaks, and getting adequate sleep. Those suggestions are great for dealing with stress in the moment, but they don't always translate to completing the stress cycle. Recently, though, I've started to see information about completing the stress cycle in an appropriate way - meaning, in a way that helps avoid the physiological and mental effects of chronic stress.

Here's an example. Let's say you have a few major projects at work that require a large amount of your attention. Anything that requires a large amount of attention is going to have a draining effect, and therefore contribute to stress. This is not a bad thing - stress is, and always has been, a part of life - but it does have to be managed. So in our example, you do all the things to manage the day to day stress. You get outside, you have an exercise routine, you eat well, etc. Throughout the execution of your projects, you feel pretty good, you are rolling with the punches, and things are progressing. Then, one of the projects completes successfully. What do you do?

Too many times, people jump right back into the fray and continue working on the other projects - they are on a roll, and they don't want to lose momentum. While there is logic to this approach, there is also a hidden downside - by not completing the stress cycle, we carry stress from the previous incident over to the next one. In the short term, this is potentially manageable, but if this happens too often, it is very easy to end up in a scenario of chronic stress. Chances are, new projects are going to be added to your plate as the current batch winds down, and it is tempting to simply keep rolling from one project to the next.

Finishing a big project feels good - there is a sense of overcoming obstacles, and there is a sense of building camaraderie with your teammates. It is critical to allow time to celebrate and decompress after a major stressful event.

Here's a simple analogy to illustrate that point. An ancient hunter gather gets chased by a lion, and runs back to the village. This person obviously has the fight or flight response going on, their system is flooded with adrenaline, cortisol and other stress hormones. The village muscle comes out and kills the lion, and that evening the village holds a great feast and celebration for overcoming the threat. The moment the lion was killed, the person who was chased is relieved, but their body still has to process the hormones created during the chase. They may go into a state of shock, where their body shivers uncontrollably for a while, as their body processes what has happened. But it's the celebration with the rest of the village where that person fully completes the stress cycle - it now becomes a shared experience, and the celebration is a release of built up tension.

It's the same with modern stressors. Uncontrollable shivering is a common occurrence when coming out of general anesthesia. People celebrate after a political victory not because they want to stick it to the other side, but because they are going through the process of completing a cycle of stress. Soldiers form incredibly tight bonds with their brothers in arms because it provides an outlet for dealing with the stresses of war. Big projects at work demand a lot of cognitive cycles, where we are under stress to make a good impression and not fumble. Subsequent celebrations where the team goes out to dinner, or goes to the bar for a few drinks, are not just good for morale, but are also necessary to complete the stress cycle and avoid long term burnout for the team members.

We are humans, not machines. We can handle stress, but it is just as important to know how to complete the stress cycle as it is knowing how to handle stress in the moment.

Thinking - the Unheralded Productivity Secret

It seems counter-intuitive - if we look at someone's schedule and see it crammed full of meetings and appointments, we could be forgiven for automatically assuming that that person is productive. Somehow, we tend to associate 'busy' with 'highly productive' - but in my experience, that is not necessarily the case.

Instead, what I find happens with a busy schedule is that relatively few cognitive cycles are spent on any one thing. Moving from one topic to the next is not conducive to entering a productive state of concentration where we can think deeply about the most complex issues we are trying to resolve. If attention is a resource more valuable than time, then time dedicated to deep and productive thought is even more valuable.

This may seem to be a bit at odds with a previous post, where I made the argument that days filled with meetings and otherwise seemingly 'busy' tasks that do not feel productive are actually worthwhile. Yet this post and that previous post are actually two sides of the same coin. In that post, I mentioned that the time in between meetings can be highly effective when one takes the opportunity to step back and think (deeply) of the big picture, because it maximizes efficacy of days when there are large chunks of uninterrupted time.

What I'm trying to do in this post is to expand on that last point and highlight the fact that the most beneficial and internally rewarding work we do is often cerebral, and that it is OK to dedicate significant blocks of time on our schedule to deep thinking.

Here is an example that helps illustrate the point of how thinking is rewarding: as of the time I am writing this post, most people are working from home, and thus most people have gone through some sort of trial of learning to work from home effectively. Whether it's dedicating a room as an office to insulate ones' self from the kids running around in the living room, or working with a partner to give each other dedicated time and space for work - most people have, by now, gone through some sort of exercise in improving their ability to concentrate on their work. In the process, most people have inevitably had days filled with interruptions, leaving them feeling drained, demoralized, and/or frustrated at the end of the day. Now - compare how you felt at the end of one of those days vs a day when you were able to concentrate and make progress on resolving some sort of (reasonably complex) issue on your plate. The latter most likely left you with a feeling of accomplishment at the end of the day.

Going back to my point above about how valuable time dedicated to deep and productive thought is - lets start with the assumption that everyone has 8 hours a day to dedicate to work. Lets also assume that you have two types of days on your schedule - a typical one at your desk where you have a handful of meetings and tasks to get to, and a day where you are going to some sort of professional training that: 1) you take seriously, and 2) are looking to expand your professional skillset in some meaningful way. Which of those two days leaves you more mentally worked, where at the end you say 'my brain is full' and need some sort of mental decompression? Chances are, it's the day of professional training. Both the day in the office and the day of training are 8 hours long, but the training required more deep and productive thought, and was more cognitively demanding. Yes, getting ones' attention during an 8 hour workday is challenging enough, but the number of hours we have available for concentration are even more scarce.

The reason I bring this up is that we all work 8-ish hour days, but are not at peak productivity during all of those 8 hours. There are times of the day when we are better able to engage in deep work then others, and thus we can be more productive by scheduling our most cognitively demanding tasks during those times. Lets say someone is most productive between 9-11am (which is actually pretty commonplace). If that person rolls into the office at 9, spends 30 minutes getting coffee and catching up with other coworkers to talk about the game last night, and then spends an hour going through their inbox - they've just gone through 90 minutes of their most productive hours of the day doing things that didn't demand high levels of attention. Then, at 10:30, they try to engage in a complex issue they are working on, and only get an hour in before they start to think about lunch. Then, after lunch, they try to re-engage, but are interrupted by emails and susceptible to post-lunch drowsiness. I think you get the idea - had they been effective at doing work that requires significant cognitive cycles during the hours they are most productive, and shifted more menial tasks to other times of the day, they could have been more productive overall.

This has been something that I've slowly discovered over the course of my career, and is something I am still working on - so I know it's not always the easiest thing to do. The allure of 'productivity' by having many items on a to-do list that can easily be crossed off is very strong. This is especially true in situations where I've had to report on a timesheet the things I've done over a period of time - having 12 things on that list vs 3 just looks more impressive. But over time, when I've allowed myself to be ok with just the 3 items, my ability to execute cleanly on complex job tasks has improved, yielding higher long term productivity.