How to Relieve Stress 🧑🚒
Understanding the sources of stress, monitoring your state effectively, and tips and strategies to defuse burnout.
For almost 10 years, I have been CTO and co-founder of a VC-backed startup.
We often worked long hours and weekends. There have been tough times, and I may have experienced burnout.
I say “may” because, really, how do you know?
Recognizing stress has never been easy for me — especially by living and working in a fast-paced environment where it’s hard to find room for self-reflection.
Fast forward today, in the last four years I have worked almost exclusively by myself, on the newsletter.
I spend most of my days reading, writing, engaging (async) with the community, and developing product improvements for Refactoring and Hybrid Hacker. I have almost zero calls and very few distractions.
In such an environment, I became much more sensitive to how I feel, how productive I am, and my relationship with work.
Mind you, it’s not all rainbows and unicorns.
The work as a creator, or solopreneur, brings its own set of challenges and worries, which I would love to cover in another article. But the point is, for the first time, I managed to develop my own process to keep myself in check.
This article sums up what I learned, and is organized into three main blocks:
🔥 What causes stress and burnout — the six main areas of your work life.
🔍 How you can monitor your state — systems and tactics to keep yourself in check.
🧘♂️ How you can relieve stress — real-world routines that help your mind, your body, and your relationships.
Let’s go 👇
🔥 What causes stress and burnout
In 2019, the WHO declared burnout an official medical condition. It defined it as a syndrome that results from “chronic workplace stress that has not been successfully managed”.
According to the handbook, doctors can diagnose someone with burnout if they meet the following symptoms:
Feeling of energy depletion or exhaustion
Increased mental distance from their job, or feelings of negativism or cynicism related to it
Reduced professional efficacy
Now, the condition only became official in 2019, but burnout has been studied extensively for decades, with research dating back to the 80s.
Christina Maslach has studied burnout for her whole career, and has identified the six main areas of the work life that contribute to your stress. Let’s go through them.
1) Workload 🏋️♂️
The amount of work that you perform should match your capacity, in a way that you are able to:
Get things done
Find time to rest and recover
Find time for professional growth
When you are overloaded, you lose balance and you need to sacrifice some of these items. This in turn develops stress.
2) Control 👑
Control and autonomy have long been identified as key for motivation. Conversely, their lack takes a toll on your wellbeing.
Lack of control takes many shapes and forms. You might feel any of these:
Your boss micromanages your work and takes away ownership from you.
You don’t have access to the skills / resources to do a good job.
You feel you are constantly in reactive mode, rather than proactive.
3) Reward 🎁
The amount of effort you put into your work should be matched by the reward you get for it. There are two main kinds of rewards:
➡️ Intrinsic — elements that drive your internal motivation. Professional growth; your sense of purpose, and impact.
⬅️ Extrinsic — financial (money), and social (status, reputation) rewards.
In my experience, the value of intrinsic rewards largely trumps that of extrinsic ones, even if we may not always feel that way.
4) Community 🍻
Maslach’s research shows that a lack of social support and trusted relationships at work are strong predictors of exhaustion.
This is something that remote made worse.
I know many engineers who genuinely like to go to the office, if not full-time, at least a few days a week. When I ask them why, most often what they mention is not productivity, but gathering with people.
5) Fairness ⚖️
Fairness is about your feeling of receiving equitable treatment.
In part, it is the result of the other elements working well. An adequate workload, a sense of control, being rewarded properly, and support from (e.g.) your manager, all contribute to the feeling of being treated fairly.
But fairness is also judged in comparison to others. Even if our workload is ok, we may stress over other peers who seem to work very little. We may be happy about our compensation, and suddenly become upset when we discover that others earn more than we do, and undeservedly so.
6) Values 🥇
Finally, we work best when our personal values match those of our job / company.
It would be hard, of course, for an animal rights activist to work for a fur coat company. But many cases are more subtle. You may be a person who finds joy in designing things carefully, trapped in a company that moves fast and breaks things.
Value mismatch can bring a considerable amount of stress, and it is also among the hardest problems to solve.
🔍 How to monitor your state
Knowing what may cause stress is a good starting point for reflecting on how you feel. But that’s not enough. Here are a few strategies to become more aware of your state: