Unmanaged stress isn’t just a killer of health, it’s a killer of joy, happiness, motivation, performance, productivity, even careers. And too often we just accept it as one of the unavoidable byproducts of life.
Hacking Stress shows what can happen when you approach stress management from a risk management mindset, a hacker mindset, viewing it like a cyber attack, and little more than a collection of risks that needs to be explored, understood, and managed.
Triaging a Global Health Crisis
According to the World Health Organisation, stress is now a global health crisis and a central feature in the top six causes of death globally.
It’s also a killer of performance, productivity, and motivation and could be costing the US more than $1 trillion every year in productivity losses, absenteeism, performance, and healthcare costs.
And yet in most cases stress is a disease of thinking and a failure to properly manage the way we think about the things we think are causing us stress.
Has the human race ever been more stressed?
Global uncertainty and disruption, wars and conflicts, discord and division, AI and job insecurity, financial and economic worries, access to healthcare, even the future of our species.
Little wonder that stress is now chronically impacting both the mental and physical health of most Americans.
When I finally decided to finally tackle the chronic stress that had plagued my health and career for decades, and which nearly cost me my life, the principles of cybersecurity risk management, my hacker mindset, automatically kicked in.
I started to view stress as an ecosystem of threats and attackers that had to be first identified, deconstructed, and understood before I could build a defense against them. And it was an eye-opening exercise.
Not only did I realise that most of the stress in my life was all in my head and little more than the way I thought about stress abot all the stressors that I thought were worth worrying about.
And even better, that there were dozens of options available to counter these risks and live an almost stressless life.
Hacking Stress pulls those years of experience and research together to lay out the sources, the science, and the solutions of this unnecessary health burden.
What's In The Talk
When I started on the path to address my own chronic stress, I approached it from a risk management perspective.
I needed to identify all the things in life that were causing my stress, the stressors, and it turns out there were dozens of them. I realized I needed a way to categorize and compartmentalize all these stressors so I could focus on priorities.
That’s where my DAM system was born. Dismiss, Accept, Manage. Not only was the technique key in almost eliminating stress from my life, but it was a fantastic exercise in taking stock of who I was, where I was, and how I got here in the first place.
