My final showdown with stress nearly cost me my life. Burned out and feeling totally defeated under the weight of decades of chronic stress made all the worse by unaddressed mental health challenges, in 2017 I sat on the edge of a bed in Wyoming Ohio and put a gun in my mouth.

The hacker mindset saved me. After pulling myself away from that edge, I realized it was well past time to hack my own brain.

Developing a Hacker Mindset

By the time I’d reached that point I’d already spent more than 35 years working in cybersecurity, and felt burned out by a thankless career with no good news and little happiness, peace, or purpose to show for it.

But what I had gained was a hacker’s approach to solving tough problems.

The word hacker was hijacked by the media more than a decade ago to mean a criminal who hacks. But the original meaning was simply a technologically curious mind. There’s the famous line from The Hacker Manifesto written in 1986 by one of the first notorious hackers who asserted that “My crime is that of curiosity.”

Hackers were just people who broke into things, usually computers and networks. They did it to learn more about how these devices worked, to explore why they didn’t work like they should or could, and to find ways to make them work better.

So to better understand my mental health and my stress, that’s what I did to myself. I hacked myself. After all, my brain was supposed to resemble both a computer and a network. How hard could it be?

Death By Stress

Stress should never be written off as an unavoidable part of modern living, the exhaust of life. It might have been a central survival strategy for our ancestors but the sabre-toothed tigers no longer lie in wait outside the cave.

• The World Health Organization has described stress as one of the leading global health crises.
• Stress has been directly connected to the top six causes of death.
• Stress harms the body, raising blood pressure, increasing the risk of heart attack and stroke, damaging the digestive system, impacting sleep and sex, and compromising the immune system.
• Stress can do long term damage to the brain. The cortisol triggered by chronic stress kills brain cells, can shrink some parts of the brain, can contribute to the early development of Alzheimer’s and dementia, and can impact reasoning, decision-making, and memory.
• Stress is a killer of happiness, optimism, motivation, work, success, and relationships.

I Hacked My Brain

In spite of living with my brain all my life, for decades, I still knew very little about it. I had an idea how big it was and how much it weighed, how many neurons it had, and to some degree which parts of the brain operated which parts of the body.

But I knew very little about the thinking and feeling parts of the brain and how they rippled out through every other part of life. About the DOSE hormones, metacognition, neuroplasticity and neurogenesis, the neuroscience of happiness and so on.

That hacking revealed an entirely new world for me, and more importantly, a world of hope. Because not only did I learn more about how my neural network worked, but why it didn’t work properly and how it could work better.

And maybe even use that newfound knowledge to help manage my mental health and tame my chronic stress.

Defense In Depth

One of the core principles in cybersecurity is called defence in depth. Rather than relying on one or two security perimeters or defenses to keep out attackers, instead introducing multiple layers, in some cases dozens, to frustrate, slow down, and divert or deter attacks.

In exploring brain health and particularly its role in stress, I identified more than a dozen different ways that are scientifically supported to help tame stress. And I also tried all of them for myself, on myself, to see if and how well they worked.

And the good news is that they all work to different degrees but will work best when they’re layered on top of each other. While things like mindfulness and breathing are excellent ways for managing stress quickly, they’re rarely enough on their own for taming long-term stress.

A Risk Management Methodology

Borrowing once more from my decades of learned skills and habits, I found myself instinctively approaching stress as little more than a collection of risks that had to be managed in an organized way.

I ended up calling it my DAM system and essentially it’s about first identifying all the things in and around us that we think are causing us stress. In my case, and typical of most humans, there are many more than we think. Usually dozens.

I then categorized them under 3 headings – personal, work, and self-imposed.

Once all the identified stressors had been placed in each of their buckets, the triaging could begin.

First, identifying the risks, the stressors, that were so minor, silly, or even nonexistent that I could instantly dismiss them. They weren’t real, or they didn’t matter, or they weren’t worth any more attention.

Then I focused on the more serious stressors that while I couldn’t dismiss them – because they did exist, they were real, and they weren’t going away – I could still find a way to accept them. To allow them to live with and in me without eating me.

You know, so what if I don’t get on with my in-laws. I rarely see them, I rarely speak to them, we’ll never see eye to eye, and I can just accept that.

That narrowed down the list of dozens to just a handful and these were the risks I realized that I couldn’t simply dismiss. I also couldn’t accept them without it costing me more. I had to find ways to manage them. And quickly.

Just going through the exercise was cathartic. It forced me for the very first time to think more deeply, more thoroughly about everything that was going on in and around my life.

It made me examine what I was thinking about every day, probably repetitively, and why I was thinking about them in certain ways.

It gave me the confidence to believe that if I only had a handful of stressors to deal with, this is a task I could manage.

And it gave me agency. For the first time in a long time I felt like I was in control. I was managing my stress and not the other way around.

In my case, the final result of the process was the realization that after nearly 40 years in cyber security, I just hated the work, the job, and the environment. It was time to find something new, something fresh and more purposeful.

Now that my stress was under control, and I understood its root cause, I needed to reinvent myself. If only make to sure that I never fell back on bad habits. Maybe not so much to be in a different place but to be a different person.

As others have pointed out:

• Stress doesn’t come from our circumstances, but from the way we think about our circumstances.
• Stress is not what happens to us. It’s our response TO what happens. And RESPONSE is something we can choose.
• It’s not stress that kills us, it’s our reaction to it.

And even better, what if stress is a gift hiding in plain sight? It turns out that the widely accepted techniques for managing stress can also make so many other parts of your life better. Improve your health, happiness, relationships, life fulfilment, career and work performance. Manage it properly and the obstacle becomes an opportunity.

Like the saying goes, we are not our thoughts. We are not what we think, but we are very much how we think.