Welcome to Hacking Stress!

 

Stress is one of the most prevalent and under treated aliments of the modern world. It can significantly harm mental, brain, and physical health, as well as relationships, workplace performance, and life success. More worrying it can contribute to dementia and Alzheimer’s and even a shorter life.

 

And yet it’s also one of the few sicknesses that can be largely cured simply by thinking about it. And the best way to approach that is by hacking it. Literally using the hacker mindset to view it as a manageable risk that can easily be contained if only better understood.

Most importantly, that stress is not about our circumstances but our reaction to our circumstances. If we can manage that reaction, stress can be tamed.

 

First, the Bad News

• Stress has been described by the World Health Organization is one of the world’s biggest health crisis.
• It’s been linked to the top six causes of death in the world.
• Chronic stress can kill brain cells and even shrink certain parts of the brain which is why it can harm work performance through its impact on decision making, memory, focus, and engagement.
• And it’s estimated to cost workplaces more than $1 trillion every year in lost productivity, absenteeism, presenteeism, and healthcare costs.

Lots To Be Stressed About

It’s always important to acknowledge how real stress is and that employees have a right to feel and be stressed. In addition to traditional stressors like finances, relationships, health, and job security, the last five years has seen a surge in even bigger stressors that are now being experienced by most humans.

That includes the very visible impact of climate change, food and housing insecurity, increased conflict and political instability, growing societal divisions, anger and frustration, and even existential worries around AI.

Challenging Stress like it’s a Cyber Risk

When my chronic stress eventually led to complete burnout and nearly cost me my life, I credit my hacker mindset for turning everything around. And giving me a life that today is almost completely stress free. In spite of the fact that all the things that caused the stress in the first place are not just still there but added to and made worse.

I just hacked my brain, my thinking, and my stress, and it worked.

The Hacker Mindset

Hacker doesn’t mean criminal, that’s simply a popular hijacking by the media. Hackers were originally just curious technologists who “broke in” to computers and networks to learn more about them and see if they could fix, change, or improve them.

Just like the most famous line from the original Hacker Manifesto published in 1985 “I am a hacker. My crime is curiosity.” Bills Gates and Steve Jobs are just some of the world’s most successful technologists to describe themselves as the original hackers.

Unthinking Stress by Thinking like a Hacker

Stress is often described as simply a disease of thinking. That it’s not the stress that is harming us but the way that we react to and think about stress.

The first step in hacking stress is to hack your brain. Just like the hackers of old, break in, learn more, figure out how it works, and why it often doesn’t work properly or seems to work against us.

The brain is not unlike an advanced computer network and is the most important thing about we humans. It’s also the core source of stress and all its ripple effects. If we want to hack stress, we have to start by hacking the brain. And it wants to be hacked. Because what’s good for you is good for the brain because they’re both the very same thing.

A Unique and Human Disease

As experts have pointed out for decades, stress has very little to do with our circumstances and almost everything to do with how we think about our circumstances. It’s not about what’s happening to us, around us, in our lives, but how we react to all of that.

No other species experiences stress the way humans do because no other species thinks the way we do. But we know was humans that we’re not our thoughts. We not what we think but very much how we think. Stress becomes distress when we fail to properly process how we think and feel about all those stressors that float around us every single day.

If we can figure out the thinking part, we can solve the feeling part.

My Own DAM System

Once I’d figured out what my stress was and where it was coming from (hint – the inside), and also recognizing the relationship between stress, thinking, brain health, and physical health, I was confident this was a risk I could manage.

My hacker mindset kicked in again and I started to organize my stressors. Listing them all, turns out there were dozens, dividing them into groups, and then selecting the ones that I could dismiss because they were nonsensical, irrelevant, and all in my head.

Then, accepting the ones that were very real, not nonsensical, but that I could easily learn to live with, and finally narrowing it down to what really turned out to be just a handful of key stressors that I knew I had to manage because I couldn’t dismiss or accept.

And it was a very eye opening, cathartic, and even empowering process because not only did it help me to figure out what was really at the core of my stress but force me to take a good hard look at everything in and around my life. You can learn more about the DAM system here.

Defense in Depth

One of the most important principles of cybersecurity, the hacker mindset, and which also became instantly relevant to managing stress, is the concept of defense in depth.

Instead of relying just on one or two defences (in the case of managing stress rely simply on breathing and mindfulness) successful defense comes applying multiple layers of different types of security so that if one failed, the threats still didn’t make it through.

In the case of stress, I picked apart thousands of studies some of which went back decades and identified more than a dozen scientifically supported ways to calm stress. I explored a dozen different breathing techniques, mindfulness and mediation, diet and exercise choices, along with things like gratitude, purpose, kindness, volunteering, spirituality, nature and perhaps most important of all, metacognition. Thinking about thinking.

And then I started to try them on myself.

The Result?

Much in my life has changed since I started that journey nearly a decade ago. The stress has changed too, but not in a good way. All the old stressors are still there – finances, health, career and so on – some of them made worse and all added to by anger and frustration at all the bad things that seem to be happening around the world.

And yet. I’ve never been less stressed. Not only do I not allow my thinking to become stressful, but I don’t think much about stress management.

And that’s because so many of the stress management techniques I tired actually worked, and quickly, my brain remembers.

Our brains want the very best for us, and when if feels a stress response working, it not only remembers it but it wants more of it. And rewards us for it.

So I no longer have to think about finding time to breathe, pause and reflect, be more grateful, embrace nature, search for happy things, or regulate my thinking. It all kicks in automatically.

The Extra Bonus

Stress could be a superpower hiding in plain sight. Not just because it can provide relief from anxiety and worry, but because most of the science-backed treatments for stress can make almost everything else in life better too.

Proven stress busters like metacognition, mindfulness, gratitude, purpose, and even learning have also been shown to lead to a better, happier, and even a more successful life. And that includes financial success to. Learn more.