The hacker mindset is little more than applying the well-established principles of cyber risk management to managing the epidemic of stress.

 

That means:

• Approaching stress management in a more methodical and analytical and less emotional way.
• Hacking the brain to better understand why stress is a disease of thinking and how that thinking behaves like a stress virus.
• Viewing stressors as little more than a barrage of risks that need to be identified, categorized, and neutralized.
• Then applying the appropriate responses and patches for each of the risks.

We’re just not thinking right

Stress is largely a disease of thinking. More specifically of negative and repetitive over thinking and is a condition almost unique to humans. Challenging and processing stressful circumstances so that they don’t become stress (or distress) is the key to taming stress. But it must be methodical or it just won’t work.

And with stress now considered a global health crisis by the World Health Organization, solutions have to move beyond breathing and mindfulness.

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.

Step 1, hack your brain

The first step in hacking stress is to hack your brain. Just like the hackers of old, we need break in, learn more about it, figure out how it works, and learn 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 us is good for the brain because they’re both the very same thing.

Step 3, apply the DAM System

Once I’d hacked my brain and 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 quickly dismiss because they were nonsensical, unimportant, 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 forced me to take a good hard look at everything in and around my life. You can learn more about the DAM system here.

And finally, apply 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 defenses (in the case of managing stress relying simply on breathing and mindfulness), successful defense comes from applying multiple layers of different types of security so that if one fails, the threats still won’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 even think much about stress management either.

And that’s because so many of the stress management techniques I tried actually worked, and quickly, because 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? Brain health and brain capital

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.

The Final Word

We all need to learn to hack our own brains. And that’s not just because we need to better understand that 3 pounds or so of mainly fat and water that is everything about us.

We need to better understand the connections between thinking and mental health, thinking and physical health, thinking and life success. That one advantage – thinking – that has separated us from every other species can also be our greatest weakness if not properly managed.