[want2know]

Some time ago I had a long period of intense stress. It is amazing how much it changes your mind and body.

Muscles contract causing all kinds of insuline problems, your hormones become a mess, and all this is raising stress levels more because you don't know what is going on in your body.

And then an anxiety disorder is right around the corner.

And when everything is ok again your brain produces stress hormones when you hear a sound that would trigger you earlier or just a smell or a color.

I think this is the most difficult part to get back to normal:

The brain brings you in stress mode for no obvious reason. Then you have to reason about it so the stress goes away and you will slowly reset your brain.

But I doubt the paths in the brain will ever go away. It will be like a overgrown path in the end but it is still there.

[coldcode]

I am in such a period and have been for months. Stupid company demands we ship something no matter what, even though there is insufficient time to do all the work, and they keep adding more on top of it. I work 7 days a week, no vacations, hardly even a weekend day off much less a vacation. I even lost my temper at work and yelled a lot, something I never do. This is no way to do proper work either. At least what little time I have away from this nightmare I do art which helps somewhat.

[rconti]

I support you and hope you can reclaim yourself. A lot of good advice has been given here. One thing I realized when I stepped out of Ops is that lots of the life-and-death situations we felt were, to a certain extent, self-imposed. We always thought the world was going to end if $bigcustomer became dissastisfied that the site was down (or whatever).

In the end, it turned out (as long as we did our best), it didn't really matter. The business was constantly making best guesses at allocation of resources (human, equipment, etc) and hedging that against the customer experience. 100% reliability was never the goal. Violating SLAs and potentially having to give the customer a service credit was just part of the calculus. We were taking it upon ourselves as the most important thing in the world to keep the service up, because that's how it was presented to us, but to the business it was not nearly as important.

If you can de-couple yourself from these stresors somewhat, keep them at arm's length, you'll be doing yourself a great service.

[eeeeeeeeeeeee]

Also worked in ops my whole life and can definitely understand that stress when downtime hits and people are counting on you. Minutes begin to feel like hours.

Seeing more of these large companies (Google, Facebook, Cloudflare) have significant outages has helped my confidence a ton. We are all human and make mistakes and can’t always figure out the fix immediately.

I’m just glad that as far as I know, none of the outages I was responsible for we’re life and death situations. That is stress I don’t want.

[rntksi]

Very good advice. Keep yourself separated as much as possible from what others want of you (not too much so that you lose what you wanted to do in the first place)

[bitexploder]

I just want to say I support your freedom. We all have bills and it isn’t possible to change jobs quickly, but please never work for a company that does that after you get through this and try to set yourself up so you never have to again. Sorry your employer has put you in this situation. I am older and have been around the block and it is never worth it, even for your own startup.

Edit: never worth it when you are experiencing it as stress. Some, rare, people can do this and they may even like it, but it isn’t typical and unless you stand to gain more than a salary, quite questionable.

[want2know]

Your stress is the result of responsibilities or the feeling of responsibilities you can't control.

First step is to figure pout what you feel you are responsible for but are not. You can quit that part immediately because that responsibility only exists in your head.

Then there are responsibilities you have, but can't control.

Then there are multiple options. For example:

Stop having that responsibility. For example tell that you can't take it anymore (not always possible).

Ask for help so you can fullfil the responsibility with someone (not always possible).

Take responsibility. Change your life if your way of living is holding you back from taking responsibility (not always possible).

It helped me a lot to think about it because there are a lot of responsibilities in your head that don't exist. A demanding company with an unrealistic and unreasonable planning is not your responsibility. Your well being is.

[jaymzcampbell]

What helped me a ton to disconnect from some of this sort of stress is building up a bit of a savings buffer. Once I had a few months of savings around I suddenly started to give much less of a shit about day to day work as I could, if I really wanted, just walk away. I am "lucky" in that I have no real dependants and my partner and I have decided against kids so there's none of that to consider.

Ever since I entered my thirties I've been increasingly "selfish" when it comes to my time. No job is worth it.

[hutzlibu]

Since I am a unplanned father for some months now, I would advise you to reconsider the baby thing. It totally changed all my plans and rhythm, but we never regretted aborting the abortion ...

[potta_coffee]

I am in the same boat, except we just launched our broken website. CEO and Marketing people: "I think it's ready!" Me: "It's not ready, we need more time." They're eating crow now, the entire "release" has been complete shitshow and suddenly everyone is very nice. I'm taking the day off.

[wodenokoto]

Not to add another load on your mind, but the long-term issue here is that - assuming this is a crunch that ends - you will still be heavily affected for a long time during normal, non-stress periods.

It takes a long pause from stress for you mind and body to stop over-producing stress hormones.

I hope you situation changes for the better soon, and when it does, remember to be mindfull of yourself and accept that everything won't go back to normal right away, just because the external stress-factor stops.

[blackflame7000]

In my experience, the best cure for this is exercise especially running or weight lifting. It trains your brain to endure difficult and strenuous tasks. Furthermore, the endorphins that are released subconsciously start to build the association between feeling good after facing a stressful situation. You begin to look at stressful situations, not as something to be feared but something to be conquered. I used to be the biggest introvert because social interactions stressed me out. Now I thrive for that feeling of, "Man this isn't as hard as I thought it would be"

[mistermann]

> It takes a long pause from stress for you mind and body to stop over-producing stress hormones.

I can vouch for this, I feel like I have been permanently damaged from a multi-year stressful job.

Speaking of stress hormones, does anyone in this thread know if there's some quantitative way to measure stress hormone levels, even if it's only somewhat accurate?

The best real relief I've managed to find is microdosing psilocybin combined with meditation, this seems to allow me to see right through my negative beliefs & perceptions, but also largely eliminate the ongoing ~unavoidable mental/emotional (eventually manifesting in physical) reactions to them. It feels like it allows me to mostly not give a fuck about things like normal people. Perhaps something the grandparent should look into.

[blackflame7000]

Yes, stress levels are tied to cortisol levels in the bloodstream. This is especially bad for your physical health as it will cause you to store fat and crave sugary foods. The single best thing you can do is exercise 5 times a week for at least 45 minutes. It will retrain your brain to embrace stress because of the endorphin reward you get after. I promise you, the gym is never as hard as people make it out to be in their mind. 90% is just showing up. Don't take shrooms, you're just messing up your brain chemistry even more with a temporary bandaid. Furthermore, you're treating yourself with a drugs side-effect. If anything the drug you are looking for is Ativan or Xanax. I'm someone who used to be majorly overweight, overworked and stressed to no end, but exercise changed my life.

[sharadov]

I totally agree, too little is known about drugs and how they react with each individual's bio- chemistry. Exercise in any form can only be beneficial, I've been through some really stressful periods and nothing like it ( if you can play a sport even better..it will give you a sense of accomplishment that is probably missing from your job). Eat healthy , have someone who can listen to you and support you. And have a plan to get out, could be a year out , but it will give you a sense of purpose.

[o-__-o]

>If anything the drug you are looking for is Ativan or Xanax

be very careful, these drugs don't fix the problem but rather solve panic attack type situations. if you can breathe, you do not need these medicines. there are lots of other medicines that are not benzos that treat the anxiety at the source.

i am speaking from experience, i was taking ativan "as needed" and ended up in an overnight psych hold as my stress outbursts kept getting worse until my family feared for my safety. stopped all medication for a month, switched to an anti-depressant to sleep temporarily, switched to less agitated medicine, 10 months later i feel like i'm on top of the world and have started taking back ownership of activities in my business.

ativan and xanax wont' stop the stress, it masks it.

[throwawayxyz51c]

> If anything the drug you are looking for is Ativan or Xanax.

No it really isn't, even if it might seem that way in the short term.

Source: Personal. Xanax for occasional stress turned into Xanax for sleep sometimes turned into Xanax every night or insomnia. Kicking the habit now and it really sucks.

Stick to exercise and meditation. Actually agree with grandparent about the benefits of psilocybin, but you probably shouldn't listen to a stranger on the internet about that anyway.

Throwaway for obvious reasons.

[throwaway344534]

https://pbs.twimg.com/profile_images/378800000485764460/e2e5...

[mistermann]

Not that you and I disagree, but some important additional details on the matter:

> Actually agree with grandparent about the benefits of psilocybin, but you probably shouldn't listen to a stranger on the internet about that anyway.

You certainly shouldn't base your opinion on one comment on the internet. What you should do they is consider it a possibility and do your own research, at which time you will discover there is significant discussion on the internet among both layman and professionals about not just the observed benefits (sometimes bordering on the profoundly amazing [1]), but also increasing detailed, science-based theories about the underlying physiological and neurological causes for the observed successes.

You will also realize the ratio of successful outcomes to unsuccessful (no result or harmful) are heavily skewed towards successful stories. Is this ratio driven by a bunch of drug-addled delusional lunatics, or might there be something interesting going on here?

[1] https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2015/02/09/trip-treatment

-------------------------------------------------

As I chatted with Tony Bossis and Stephen Ross in the treatment room at N.Y.U., their excitement about the results was evident. According to Ross, cancer patients receiving just a single dose of psilocybin experienced immediate and dramatic reductions in anxiety and depression, improvements that were sustained for at least six months. The data are still being analyzed and have not yet been submitted to a journal for peer review, but the researchers expect to publish later this year.

“I thought the first ten or twenty people were plants—that they must be faking it,” Ross told me. “They were saying things like ‘I understand love is the most powerful force on the planet,’ or ‘I had an encounter with my cancer, this black cloud of smoke.’ People who had been palpably scared of death—they lost their fear. The fact that a drug given once can have such an effect for so long is an unprecedented finding. We have never had anything like it in the psychiatric field.”

-------------------------------------------------

"But this can't possibly be true", one might semi-reasonably propose, "because if it was we would surely know about it!"

Incorrect. That is an logical/epistemic error, something that is at the foundation of a large portion of any common disagreement in society, from politics to finance to personal relationships.

As the saying goes: "It Ain’t What You Don’t Know That Gets You Into Trouble. It’s What You Know for Sure That Just Ain’t So"."

One reason "because if it was we would surely know about it" should not be taken for granted is in the same article:

-------------------------------------------------

“I felt a little like an archeologist unearthing a completely buried body of knowledge,” he said. Beginning in the nineteen-fifties, psychedelics had been used to treat a wide variety of conditions, including alcoholism and end-of-life anxiety. The American Psychiatric Association held meetings centered on LSD. “Some of the best minds in psychiatry had seriously studied these compounds in therapeutic models, with government funding,” Ross said.

Between 1953 and 1973, the federal government spent four million dollars to fund a hundred and sixteen studies of LSD, involving more than seventeen hundred subjects. (These figures don’t include classified research.) Through the mid-nineteen-sixties, psilocybin and LSD were legal and remarkably easy to obtain. Sandoz, the Swiss chemical company where, in 1938, Albert Hofmann first synthesized LSD, gave away large quantities of Delysid—LSD—to any researcher who requested it, in the hope that someone would discover a marketable application. Psychedelics were tested on alcoholics, people struggling with obsessive-compulsive disorder, depressives, autistic children, schizophrenics, terminal cancer patients, and convicts, as well as on perfectly healthy artists and scientists (to study creativity) and divinity students (to study spirituality). The results reported were frequently positive. But many of the studies were, by modern standards, poorly designed and seldom well controlled, if at all. When there were controls, it was difficult to blind the researchers—that is, hide from them which volunteers had taken the actual drug. (This remains a problem.)

By the mid-nineteen-sixties, LSD had escaped from the laboratory and swept through the counterculture. In 1970, Richard Nixon signed the Controlled Substances Act and put most psychedelics on Schedule 1, prohibiting their use for any purpose. Research soon came to a halt, and what had been learned was all but erased from the field of psychiatry. “By the time I got to medical school, no one even talked about it,” Ross said.

-------------------------------------------------

[mistermann]

Thanks for the advice.

And not to be argumentative, but I think it's fair to say that neither you nor anyone else on the planet knows with certainty the full range of possible benefits and detriments to exercise, psilocybin (particularly, in no small part because it is illegal to even formally study for the most part), or anything else for that matter.

[blackflame7000]

Human's might not have a full understanding but there's an entire branch of science (pharmacology) dedicated to studying these things. We know that Alcohol has a detrimental effect on your coordination just like we know Psilocybin has a detrimental effect on your perception of reality. Frankly, I think it's far less strange for someone to show up to work high than tripping.

[NeedMoreTea]

I find my stress reactions are still coloured by a long past sustained period of stress, about twenty years ago. That's despite a life fairly free of it in the intervening period, and no remaining symptoms of that time.

With hindsight I should have walked away long before I started questioning my situation.

[mythrwy]

Approaching age 50, there are a lot more "I should have walked away sooners" than "I should have stuck with thats" in the rear view mirror.

But I can't say it's generally good advice to walk away frequently because I'm not sure what the outcome of so much walking away would have been.

[NeedMoreTea]

That's very true. From my mid 50s perspective there's been a couple of big, "I really should have stuck with thats", but mainly "life's too short to put up with that garbage". Which of course makes it really hard to generalise into advice.

[o-__-o]

what do you do?

[meowface]

I'm roughly half your age, and this has already been my experience. If you want to quit something, you shouldn't put it off.

[everdrive]

Not OP, but thanks for this advice. I left a similar situation, and relaxation and re-normalization has been slow to arrive.

[seesaw]

I was stressed out for almost five years, due to work and personal tragedies. I was sad and lost my personality. What helped me get back was exercise and meditation. Exercise made me relaxed, and meditation improved my sleep. It was hard, since being depressed means you have no interest to exercise or meditate either.

[throwaway10928]

Consider tricking your brain with chocolate!

After a long break, or perhaps if this will be your first experience doing regular exercise, you might not get the rewarding endorphines after exercising the first couple of times. Consider buying a chocolate bar (darker means more chocolate means less sugar and is better for you) and tell yourself that this chocolate bar is for exercise. Now, after coming back from your exercise, drink a big glass of water and eat a piece of chocolate. You want to eventually eat just a small piece of chocolate after each exercise, but be forgiving to yourself when you end up eating half the chocolate bar after your first exercise despite your good intentions :-)

Do this for a couple of weeks and suddenly you will find yourself forgetting about the chocolate and you are now "hooked" on the endorphines. Be careful not to let your new addiction make yourself break your body. Fx when running it takes up to half a year before your body gets robust enough for doing long and regular stretches. Most importantly: do what it takes to make it a joyful habit!

[souterrain]

To this point, does anyone have links to studies or even anecdotal “I did this after a stressful period and my results were positive” write ups?

[xwdv]

But why do it man? Would it be worth it if you were found dead at your desk with some unfinished code on your screen? The project would still go on and eventually be finished.

[JustSomeNobody]

When you're in that stress, adding the stress of finding a new job seems ... overwhelming. Especially how stupid hiring practices are these days. I'm not sure many people would be successful in interviewing with all that stress.

[blackflame7000]

I was in a situation just like yours. I eventually had enough and said either pay me more or I'm leaving. The company decided to go in a different direction, which at the time was scary. It was the best thing that has ever happened to me. It gave me free time to focus on my health, develope a regular exercise routine, and refocus on what matters most in life because it certainly doesn't work. Start saving money so you are prepared, but you cannot continue to work like that. The unknown is scary, but you will come out of it stronger and better off.

[billman]

You been working hard. I give you permission to leave early today. Spend some time doing the things you love.

[photonios]

Isn't there a possibility of finding another job? Aren't we in a field where there's plenty of work and we shouldn't accept being exploited like this?

[graedus]

In theory, yes. But IMO a job search and all the accompanying tasks (resume updates, cover letter writing, studying for technical interviews, etc) takes a significant investment of time and energy that people don't typically have during a stressful crunch.

[germinalphrase]

Do consider beginning the process of finding a new job.

[president]

Happened to me last year so I can empathize. Hope you find a way out.

[hef19898]

The worst thng about that, at least for me, was that I actually liked it. I felt alert, productive, full of energy. Things moved gast and I felt on top of them, it was just great.

When things changed, arguably forvthe better, I kind of wanted the previous status back. Took me quite a while to cool down again, yet I still prefer high pressure high speed environments.

Funn thing is, my body felt good too. I was healthy as check ups showned. I even managed to trian more than today. Strange period that was indeed...

[phil21]

There is good stress and bad stress, as I'm coming to find out the hard way.

I also do very well in environments most would call "high stress" - I ran a medium-sized hosting company for many years, being the guy where the buck stopped if things went wrong. Sure there were days that were pretty terrible, but in the end I controlled the entire stack, the people working on that stack, and even which customers I took on. Yes, the work was incredibly hard, fast paced, and sometimes very stressful. But it was enjoyable because I had personal agency to effect change. We have a service going down daily causing escalations at 2am? I can put a couple guys on it and fix it, with a sane solution we all felt proud of. That sort of thing.

In another environment where I in theory had a "nice easy 9-5" with effectively zero external stressors such as customers yelling at me - I was the most stressed out I ever was. The job was entirely internal politics and jockeying for position with all the subterfuge and backstabbing that implies. Effectively being put in charge of outcomes I had practically no real agency over.

That latter time period of stress has likely damaged me long-term, and caused many forms of health problems I would not have expected. It is a long road to recovery from something like that, if it's even fully possible.

[nemonemo]

I'd say the dividing line is how much control you have. If there is short burst of stress for the amount of work you are sure to be capable of, the stress is nothing. The problem is with the duration and the uncertainty.

There is also a genetic factor: I remember there was a gene (or a base pair?) that is called "worrier or warrior", and if one has the warrior one, one performs worse without stress than with stress whereas the worrier one is the opposite.

[hef19898]

Agree on the politics part, the one thing that wears me down the fastest. Hope you recover quickly, it might take I guess so...

[photonios]

I think there's a difference between high pressure environment and experiencing anxiety and stress.

I've done months of work in a high pressure environment where my job and the company itself was on the line and experienced the same as you. For about four months I did nothing but work. I was laser focused, sharp and extremely productive. I was fine. I worked long days, did pretty much nothing else but work and sleep.

I've been looking for that kind of focus and productiveness ever since. It's like a drug.

In case you're wondering.. The company is still around. We hit our deadline and grew from three people to almost 40 since. Still there.

[sjg007]

Where there any negative consequences?

[hef19898]

Physically and medically, no, thank god. Personality wise, well, let's say my acquired habbit of pushing for a better solution constantly and focus on efficiency didn't sit well with a lot of people. But it's getting better now, still struggling to be as patient as I, somtimes pretending, am now two years later.

[graeme]

>I think this is the most difficult part to get back to normal: The brain brings you in stress mode for no obvious reason. Then you have to reason about it so the stress goes away and you will slowly reset your brain. But I doubt the paths in the brain will ever go away. It will be like a overgrown path in the end but it is still there.

I had this. Try square breathing every time you have a stress trigger. It was almost magical in how quickly it stopped things. Basically telling my body “false alarm, stand down. Repeat, stand down and recalibrate”

Basically: trigger, hold breath, exhale for 4 seconds, inhale for four seconds, repeat if necessary, focus on breath and counting while doing it.

I would say I did this for 2-4mweeks, then didn’t have to anymore. I was well into the “everything is ok s]again” phase when I did this, had done other correctives prior. This was the finishing touch.

[mistermann]

> I would say I did this for 2-4mweeks

Every time you had a trigger you did this, and symptoms lifted after 2-4 weeks?

https://www.healthline.com/health/box-breathing

[graeme]

Yup, pretty much exactly that. YMMV of course. For me my triggers were linked to breath anyway. I would have them, and then when I exhaled get tension in my neck and shoulders. Doing the box breathing with an exhale short circuited that. I think it gave my mind a thing to focus on, and helped train my stress response.

For sake of completeness, I did do one other thing. I had periodic worries about financial certainty in my business. But as with stress, I was past the point where this was a realistic concern. Problems could arise, but it would never be instant, total destruction of my business.

So, I wrote down all the things I was worrying about, how realistic they were, how much harm it would cause, and what my responses would be. I then kept thinking about this for a few days. Did a lot to remove worry. Then the breathing combined well with that.

I also found out fodmaps caused me digestive trouble + stress feeling, but the breathing had had its day to day impact before I discovered that.

[graeme]

I should note that it seemed to help very quickly. I could feel the stress stimulus, but then it was blocked. Eventually my stress stimulus reactions adjusted, within 2-3 weeks.

If it doesn’t feel right from the early days, it may not be the thing to solve your problem.

[mistermann]

Thanks for this useful additional detail. Debugging medical issues like this is extremely complicated, in no small part because a lack of organized anecdotal stories.

It's unfortunate that we have this widespread mentality of believing something is only true if it is measured and published by "authorities in the field". This belief rests on the axiom that that everything that can be known, is. Axioms like this are not just false but dangerous, and thousands to millions of them are present in humanities' "understanding" of reality, both at the high level "expert" level, as well as at the every day person level.

[newsgremlin]

This is why holiday is so needed. I had a week and a half off work recently and made a conscious effort to just keep myself focused on the holiday and did whatever I felt like at the time, and even though it was fairly active (the drinking bit mainly), I felt like all the small things I kept stressing over didn't matter because I wasn't at home. Having this shift of perception can help you work on ways and identify what is causing stress.

[sjg007]

This is kind of what CBT and also exposure therapy is about.. recognizing the pathway and then providing an alternate resolution. At some point you should be able to reduce the stress response to specific triggers to a distant memory. You can certainly treat a phobia and anxiety this way.

[kekebo]

>But I doubt the paths in the brain will ever go away. It will be like a overgrown path in the end but it is still there.

While this aligns with current knowledge of neuroscience, provided the 'healthy' paths overgrow the stress-pathways over time (maybe using methods described in CBT or MBSR for example), theoretically the latter ones should become a non-issue over time. Picture a road being built over a footpath. Notwithstanding building that road requires a lot of conscious effort. But it seems doable, both based on scientific data and anecdotal evidence in myself and people around me.

[grep_name]

Could you share any resources that helped you get past this? This is basically what my life is like all the time

[rdco]

The meditation app Calm was helpful for me. Meditation has common misconceptions around it, but it's really a tool that helps a person observe their self. That has a calming effect (resets current stress level) and a preventive effect (helps me understand when I'm getting stressed).

There's lots of other meditation apps, so shop around as needed.

[SolaceQuantum]

Talk therapy is helpful, since it forces you to address the underlying thought processes behind the stress response in an environment that is outside of said process, with someone who can point you to alternate thoughts and beliefs.

In the pure physical response, you can practice breathing exercises or distract the body with another stimulus. A friend of mine who has very high general anxiety uses their phone. Another friend will grab a handful of ice (in a bag to avoid mess) and hold it in their hands until it melts.

[want2know]

I have a comment in this thread about stress that might help you.

About anxiety: talk to a psychologist and keep doing things you like.