So here’s a system I developed a while back from managing my own stress, something based on my background in cyber risk assessment, that I eventually ended up simply calling the DAM system.

 

It’s all based on my approach to managing cyber risk, something I first learned decades ago, I call it the dam system, and it’s pretty simple, and I’ll get to it in just a moment.

But first, the reality is that we humans are not naturally supposed to be constantly stressed. We’re not hardwired for that state, the brain doesn’t know how to deal with all that chaos and cortisol.

And it’s also such a contradiction. The stress is all in our head, yet most of the things that cause that stress, the stressors, are outside our head. And yet the best solution is back inside our head.

Stress Vs Stressors

Managing stress is all about managing stressors, maybe dozens of them, and that statement is critical in understanding and coping with stress.

Stressors are all the things going on around you – in your personal life, your professional life, your health, financial worries, political and social unrest, climate change, you name it, all the things that have the potential to make you stressed.

Stress is the sum total of all that stuff happening around you that you allow into your mind, allow to take root, allow to circulate and ruminate and simmer and fester and ultimately, corrode.

Stress is simply what happens if you let the stressors in. So what if they never got in, if we didn’t allow stressors into our minds, would we be free of stress. The answer could very realistically be yes.

And not only does good stress management help you mentally and physically, help to improve your mental and physical health, but it’s also great for your job, your career, even your business.

Managing stress, getting a grip on it, can help with some of the most essential tools in any career or workplace. It can improve focus, attention, memory, engagement, alertness, make you more present.

It can make it much easier to show up for work each day, to engage with coworkers, to want to be there, be still in the fight. It can make you a much calmer and happier person, even more likeable and popular, which can be helpful in so many different ways.

So when I started investigating and analyzing stress, hacking it, I found that the easiest way to conquer was to divide. To start by naming and categorizing all the stressors, all those things around me, that I might allow to cause the stress.

I started in a very analytical way, going back to my cybersecurity roots and thinking of my stress in terms of risk management.

I started building a list of all the stressors I could think of, the risks to my mental health, identifying my potential attackers, the intruders, the hackers, categorizing all those things that I thought were causing me stress.

 

Then I separated them into three lists.

 

List number one is for personal stressors. Those are all the things that are going on in around your personal life that might be causing the stress. It could be relationships, financial worries, health matters, travel, relocation, you name it. They all go in that personal bucket.

The second list is for professional stressors, stuff that might be happening at work. And we all know that there are dozens of things in the security life that can be stressful.

Whether it’s the fear of failure, blame, constantly waiting for something to go wrong, worries over budget, manpower issues, vendors, technologies, products, training, even being worried about being laid off.

And the third and final list is for self-imposed stressors. The things that we force upon ourselves, things like impatience, impossibly high standards, intolerance of others, setting unreasonable goals, all those things we beat ourselves up with.

Now you have the three lists, maybe full of stressors, it’s time to DAM them all

DAM meaning Dismiss, Accept, or Manage.

Again, like with any risk assessment, you take each list of stressors and assign a risk category to each stressor.

Into the DISMISS bucket are all the stressors that having looked at them, studied them, you quickly realize they’re just plain silly. They’re not really real, they don’t matter, they’re all just in your head, they’re just not worth your time or brain power to worry about at all any more.

You can strike them off the list.

For all the stressors that are real but that you think you can accept, deal with, without worrying about them too much, you assign them the risk category of ACCEPT.

So stuff that is real, that’s really there, but you can easily deal with without any real effort or thought.

And the third risk category, or response, is MANAGE. Looking at all the remaining stressors that you simply can’t dismiss, because they are real, they do exist, and you can’t accept them because they’re too toxic or urgent to simply ignore.

Maybe you have a toxic boss or coworker, someone who’s not going to change, someone you have to deal with every day. Maybe your real worry is financial security and it’s a very real and urgent worry.

You might be worried about a promotion, relocation, commute, or maybe layoffs. Maybe it all boils down to health issues, something’s not right, you really need to stop putting off that visit to the doctor. Or maybe you’re just tired of that job or industry and it’s time to reinvent yourself.

So at least now you know what to focus on. That simple exercise does three really important things:

It’s like a complete life assessment

Done right, done thoroughly, it can help you to list everything you can think of that’s stressing you, big and small, and then narrow down to the smallest group possible the only stressors that are real, not imaginary, the ones and only the ones that you really need to focus any time and energy on.

It’s simply making the task of managing stress, by managing stressors, much more focused and manageable.

It forces you to think and to focus

The second benefit is that the exercise forces you to think about all the things in life that have been causing you stress, that are currently causing you stress, and think about them in much more detail than you probably ever have before.

You’re facing and addressing your stressors and worries head on. That exercise alone can be very therapeutic and cathartic.

It can be uplifting and motivational

It can be very uplifting not only to understand that it’s not the stress that’s killing or bothering you but the way that you handle it, how you manage all those stressors. And that you really have incredible control over this crazy little thing called stress.

How it changed me

In my case, after going through the exercise a few times I realized that I had an awful lot of stressors, dozens of them, and most of them were all in my head. They weren’t real, they didn’t matter, I was trying too hard to do too many things, I just wasn’t being realistic about my very human limitations.

And the exercise helped me to narrow my focus, on what was really bothering me, to make sense of all the chaos, and come to something or somewhere that I kind of suspected but didn’t want to address because the options weren’t much better,

But in truth, when I’d pulled the thread right to the end, after nearly 40 years in cybersecurity I just hated the job. I hated the industry and the discipline and mainly because I had just lost all the passion for it.

The industry had changed, and I had changed, and just 40 years doing more or less the same things and always trying to stop bad things, a constant battle against really bad people, it was enough. It was time to fold up my tent and slip away. I needed new challenges, new battles, new passions.

But that entirely made-up exercise gave me the incredibly important clarity to come to that realization. And it’s a realization I was very comfortable with because, well, the exercise was thorough and honest.

So that’s my DAM system and now it’s your DAM system and I hope you’ll use it and with success.

And obviously if you go through this process and narrow down your stressors to just a handful, you still have to deal with them and I talk about all the different ways you can do that in other articles.

I’m not suggesting that the end result of your own DAM exercise is to simply quit your job and find something else. In most cases, that’s probably just not necessary.

But you might not know the answer until you go through that process. Good luck on your DAM journey.