Hacking Stress: The Talk
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.
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 most stress is little more than a disease of thinking and a failure to manage and filter our reaction to external stressors.
Has the human race ever been more stressed?
Global uncertainty and disruption, wars and conflicts, AI and job insecurity, financial and economic worries, health and wellness, even the future of our species.
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When I finally decided to finally tackle the chronic stress that had plagued my health and career for decades, principles of cybersecurity risk management, my hacker mindset, automatically kicked in.
I started to view stress as an ecosystem of threats 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.
