How I feel when reading an article about how bad stress is for you:
What Stress Does to the Brain
111–120 of 132 posts
Re: What Stress Does to the Brain
#112Earlier quoted context omitted.
I find my stress reactions are still coloured by a long past sustained period of stress, about twenty years ago. That's despite a life fairly free of it in the intervening period, and no remaining symptoms of that time. With hindsight I should have walked away long before I started questioning my situation.
Approaching age 50, there are a lot more "I should have walked away sooners" than "I should have stuck with thats" in the rear view mirror. But I can't say it's generally good advice to walk away frequently because I'm not sure what the outcome of so much walking away would have been.
This. I can't tell you how many jobs I had that were un-salvageable early on and I knew that and still stayed there because "it would look bad on my resume." I'm doing it right now in a lot of ways!
What I have also realized is that every developer job is a shit show of some proportion and the only smart move is to soon not be a developer anymore. Except, you know, the whole loss of income thing that goes with that decision.
My kids won't be writing code for a living.
Re: What Stress Does to the Brain
#113Earlier quoted context omitted.
> It takes a long pause from stress for you mind and body to stop over-producing stress hormones. I can vouch for this, I feel like I have been permanently damaged from a multi-year stressful job. Speaking of stress hormones, does anyone in this thread know if there's some quantitative way to measure stress hormone levels, even if it's only somewhat accurate? The best real relief I've managed to find is microdosing p…
Yes, stress levels are tied to cortisol levels in the bloodstream. This is especially bad for your physical health as it will cause you to store fat and crave sugary foods. The single best thing you can do is exercise 5 times a week for at least 45 minutes. It will retrain your brain to embrace stress because of the endorphin reward you get after. I promise you, the gym is never as hard as people make it out to be in…
Thanks for the advice.
And not to be argumentative, but I think it's fair to say that neither you nor anyone else on the planet knows with certainty the full range of possible benefits and detriments to exercise, psilocybin (particularly, in no small part because it is illegal to even formally study for the most part), or anything else for that matter.
Re: What Stress Does to the Brain
#114Earlier quoted context omitted.
Not OP, but thanks for this advice. I left a similar situation, and relaxation and re-normalization has been slow to arrive.
I was stressed out for almost five years, due to work and personal tragedies. I was sad and lost my personality. What helped me get back was exercise and meditation. Exercise made me relaxed, and meditation improved my sleep. It was hard, since being depressed means you have no interest to exercise or meditate either.
Consider tricking your brain with chocolate!
After a long break, or perhaps if this will be your first experience doing regular exercise, you might not get the rewarding endorphines after exercising the first couple of times. Consider buying a chocolate bar (darker means more chocolate means less sugar and is better for you) and tell yourself that this chocolate bar is for exercise. Now, after coming back from your exercise, drink a big glass of water and eat a piece of chocolate. You want to eventually eat just a small piece of chocolate after each exercise, but be forgiving to yourself when you end up eating half the chocolate bar after your first exercise despite your good intentions :-)
Do this for a couple of weeks and suddenly you will find yourself forgetting about the chocolate and you are now "hooked" on the endorphines. Be careful not to let your new addiction make yourself break your body. Fx when running it takes up to half a year before your body gets robust enough for doing long and regular stretches. Most importantly: do what it takes to make it a joyful habit!
Re: What Stress Does to the Brain
#115Earlier quoted context omitted.
I am in such a period and have been for months. Stupid company demands we ship something no matter what, even though there is insufficient time to do all the work, and they keep adding more on top of it. I work 7 days a week, no vacations, hardly even a weekend day off much less a vacation. I even lost my temper at work and yelled a lot, something I never do. This is no way to do proper work either. At least what lit…
I support you and hope you can reclaim yourself. A lot of good advice has been given here. One thing I realized when I stepped out of Ops is that lots of the life-and-death situations we felt were, to a certain extent, self-imposed. We always thought the world was going to end if $bigcustomer became dissastisfied that the site was down (or whatever). In the end, it turned out (as long as we did our best), it didn't r…
Very good advice. Keep yourself separated as much as possible from what others want of you (not too much so that you lose what you wanted to do in the first place)
Re: What Stress Does to the Brain
#116Earlier quoted context omitted.
The worst thng about that, at least for me, was that I actually liked it. I felt alert, productive, full of energy. Things moved gast and I felt on top of them, it was just great. When things changed, arguably forvthe better, I kind of wanted the previous status back. Took me quite a while to cool down again, yet I still prefer high pressure high speed environments. Funn thing is, my body felt good too. I was healthy…
Where there any negative consequences?
Physically and medically, no, thank god. Personality wise, well, let's say my acquired habbit of pushing for a better solution constantly and focus on efficiency didn't sit well with a lot of people. But it's getting better now, still struggling to be as patient as I, somtimes pretending, am now two years later.
Re: What Stress Does to the Brain
#117I've been thinking lately about the line between feeling "stimulated" and feeling "stressed" by intellectual work. I certainly crave challenging problems but I feel sometimes like that inherently brushes up against stress -- thinking hard about a problem and hitting frustrating roadblocks along the way is more stressful than laying on the beach, but also to me feels much more meaningful. I worry if the type of person…
Check out the book "The Upside of Stress" by Kelly McGonigal (or watch her TED talk - https://www.ted.com/talks/kelly_mcgonigal_how_to_make_stress...). It helped me understand how different sources of stress were affecting me and how I was framing those situations.
There are multiple ways stress can affect you, and only some of them should be viewed negatively when they pop up at inappropriate times. In many cases, stress can be viewed positively as the body warming itself up to take on a challenge, rather than a response to a threat. Those things feel physiologically similar, so your brain doesn't always interpret them correctly. The goal is removing/reframing the stressors that make you feel threatened, and selecting for the ones that make you feel challenged.
Re: What Stress Does to the Brain
#118Earlier quoted context omitted.
I am in such a period and have been for months. Stupid company demands we ship something no matter what, even though there is insufficient time to do all the work, and they keep adding more on top of it. I work 7 days a week, no vacations, hardly even a weekend day off much less a vacation. I even lost my temper at work and yelled a lot, something I never do. This is no way to do proper work either. At least what lit…
I support you and hope you can reclaim yourself. A lot of good advice has been given here. One thing I realized when I stepped out of Ops is that lots of the life-and-death situations we felt were, to a certain extent, self-imposed. We always thought the world was going to end if $bigcustomer became dissastisfied that the site was down (or whatever). In the end, it turned out (as long as we did our best), it didn't r…
Also worked in ops my whole life and can definitely understand that stress when downtime hits and people are counting on you. Minutes begin to feel like hours.
Seeing more of these large companies (Google, Facebook, Cloudflare) have significant outages has helped my confidence a ton. We are all human and make mistakes and can’t always figure out the fix immediately.
I’m just glad that as far as I know, none of the outages I was responsible for we’re life and death situations. That is stress I don’t want.
Re: What Stress Does to the Brain
#119Earlier quoted context omitted.
>I think this is the most difficult part to get back to normal: The brain brings you in stress mode for no obvious reason. Then you have to reason about it so the stress goes away and you will slowly reset your brain. But I doubt the paths in the brain will ever go away. It will be like a overgrown path in the end but it is still there. I had this. Try square breathing every time you have a stress trigger. It was alm…
> I would say I did this for 2-4mweeks Every time you had a trigger you did this, and symptoms lifted after 2-4 weeks? https://www.healthline.com/health/box-breathing
I should note that it seemed to help very quickly. I could feel the stress stimulus, but then it was blocked. Eventually my stress stimulus reactions adjusted, within 2-3 weeks.
If it doesn’t feel right from the early days, it may not be the thing to solve your problem.
Re: What Stress Does to the Brain
#120Some time ago I had a long period of intense stress. It is amazing how much it changes your mind and body. Muscles contract causing all kinds of insuline problems, your hormones become a mess, and all this is raising stress levels more because you don't know what is going on in your body. And then an anxiety disorder is right around the corner. And when everything is ok again your brain produces stress hormones when…
I am in such a period and have been for months. Stupid company demands we ship something no matter what, even though there is insufficient time to do all the work, and they keep adding more on top of it. I work 7 days a week, no vacations, hardly even a weekend day off much less a vacation. I even lost my temper at work and yelled a lot, something I never do. This is no way to do proper work either. At least what lit…
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