Stress. Anxiety. Sleep issues. Burnout. Addiction. Most of us have experienced at least some of these over the past year, with varying degrees of intensity. The COVID-19 crisis has put a strain on mental health, making professionals wonder whether another pandemic will follow. A mental health one.
Still, some of us have managed these uncertain times better than others. And while we can argue that they have simply been luckier, we can all aim to be more self-aware and model our behaviour to build emotional resilience and manage stress more effectively.
I’ve decided to write this article following a conversation I’ve recently had with my friends, who were eager to understand how come I have so much peace of mind when faced with adverse circumstances, when the entire world seems to be turned upside down with no “back to normal” in sight.
The hard truth is that I’ve been there before. I’ve struggled with anxiety for way too long. Uncertainty and the stress that comes along are no strangers to me. I’ve had my fair share of sleepless nights. I’ve been through burnout. Twice. What makes a difference in how I react now is that I’m committed to not get back there again. I took this decision a while back and I’ve worked really hard to build the emotional resilience that I have today.
Disclaimer
I don’t mean in any way to minimise the struggles of anyone. I know it’s painful. The lack of real human connection. Health concerns. Job insecurity. Working from home in an overcrowded apartment or all by yourself. Cancelled plans. Lots of them. Everything seems hectic and there’s no end in sight. It’s normal to be distraught. It’s still in our power though to do something about how we are feeling and work to build our own coping mechanisms.
This is not meant to be a scholarly article, nor a step-by-step guide: follow these steps and you’ll get rid of stress in no time. If you stumble upon those on the world wide web, beware: they are all lies. Instead, I’d like to share with you my personal journey and how I learnt to manage stress more effectively. Spoiler alert: it’s a journey, it takes time & commitment, and the work on yourself never stops. If you’re looking for a quick win, you’d better stop reading now – you’ll definitely be disappointed until the end.
The tactics I’ll share below are what worked for me, and I’ll do my best to deep-dive into how I got there instead of simply stating the obvious. Some of them might work for you as well. Some simply won’t. We are different, and that’s the beauty of it. But let’s start with the beginning.
1. Share your struggles
We all feel overwhelmed every once in a while. More and more often now, when our entire world seems to have turned upside down. Carrying the burden all by yourself makes the load of it heavier than it should be. I found that sharing your struggles with others is the first step towards feeling better. Never shy away to ask for help. You can work proactively to build a support ecosystem to help you get through difficult times.
While I’m an extrovert and it came quite easy for me to open up, I understand that it might be difficult for people with different types of personalities to do this. There are several ways you could start sharing your struggles and hence release the stress you’re building up inside. Call your close friend(s) and talk to them about how you’re feeling. Join a community / group of like-minded people who’ve been through what you’re going through right now. Communicate with your partner. Be open, direct and transparent with your manager, at work.
It might not come easy at first, but people might not be aware of what you’re going through, unless you speak up and ask for help. Sometimes it works, sometimes it doesn’t. One thing is certain: you’ll never know until you try. And you’ll never get what you want, unless you ask for it. Build your village and every struggle will be more manageable than it is today.
2. Get professional help
Fresh out of University, I was overly emotional. I worried endlessly about everything, personal and professional, past, present and future. Stress was my middle name. Then I started to struggle with anxiety attacks. I knew I hit rock bottom when I got home after an event one day and I simply couldn’t stop crying and get out of bed. I couldn’t sleep. I was completely burnt out, overworked and anxious, on the verge of depression.
It’s then when I realised that I needed professional help. And while your family, friends, partner or manager might have the best intentions and might be willing to listen and support, they are not mental health professionals (and even if some of them might be, it wouldn’t be ethical for them to treat you). I couldn’t stress this enough: get professional help when you need it. Looking back now, this was the best decision I’ve ever taken and the years of psychotherapy that followed made a difference and shaped the professional that I am today.
After carefully evaluating my options, I chose Cognitive Behavioural Therapy (CBT) and a mental health professional I resonated with (I worked with Dr. Radu Florescu from The MIND – sharing this here since I received this question time and time again). This is how I realised that the exaggerated thoughts that were making me feel miserable are called cognitive distortions and there are various techniques you can use to build your own coping mechanisms.
3. The ABC Model
Developed by Dr. Albert Ellis, the ABC Model is a technique that you can use to identify your cognitive distortions and change the way you respond to adversity. The letters in the name of the model stand for:
- Activating event: the situation that triggers a particular response from you;
- Belief: your interpretation of the activating event;
- Consequences:
- Emotional: how you feel about the activating event;
- Behavioural: what you do / how you react to the activating event.
In order to be able to identify my cognitive distortions, I agreed with my therapist to keep an ABC journal – a simple GSheet with 5 columns:
- What happened (activating event)
- What does it mean for me (belief)
- How do I feel (emotional consequences)
- What do I do (behavioural consequences)
- What were the results / what really happened (I wrote this part in the journal after the fact, when I got more clarity)
I kept my ABC journal for a couple of months and from the very first days I had a very powerful insight: what I did and how I felt were not the direct results of the activating event, but of my interpretation of the activating event. Repeat after me: how you feel and what you do is the direct result of your interpretation of facts! For me, this was an Eureka moment.
Oftentimes, my interpretation of facts was either pessimistic or based on an incomplete understanding of what happened. And while this insight was powerful, it was just the first step in a very long journey to correct my cognitive distortions. By keeping the journal, I learnt in a couple of months time to model my beliefs, which helped me feel better and stop overreacting.
This helped me both personally and professionally since I started asking all the right questions to make sure that I have a complete understanding of the facts before jumping to conclusions. As a consequence, I became a better problem-solver and a less emotional person, I mitigated several conflicts that might have occurred due to the misinterpretation of facts, and I learnt to be a much better manager.
One of the books that helped me in this process was Albert Ellis’s “How to Stubbornly Refuse To Make Yourself Miserable About Anything (Yes, Anything!)” and I recommend it wholeheartedly.
4. Make informed choices & stop complaining
“Choices, choices everywhere”. This is the title of a book that teaches kids how to make responsible choices. And while most of us haven’t been lucky to learn this from a very young age, it’s never too late to learn something new.
Decision making it’s no easy job. We make choices everyday starting from the most basic ones of what to wear, what to eat, which series to watch, what book to read, how and with whom to spend our time. Professional choices. And then we make the life-altering choices: what career to choose, who to spend your life with, whether you want kids and how many of them, what house to buy, where to live. The good thing is that most of the decisions we take are reversible. Some of them easily reversible, some of them more difficult to change. But reversible, nonetheless.
The problem was that I used to complain. A lot. This was making me miserable. And nobody likes a complainer. Decision making was too much of a hassle for me, I would have sometimes preferred to have somebody else decide for me. At least this way I would have had someone to blame when things went south. But life doesn’t work this way.
I started working on making informed choices in therapy. I was just evaluating every decision on a piece of paper, with pros and cons. I weighed the benefits and the drawbacks and then I decided how to move forward. And so did I. Every once in a while during therapy I started complaining about the drawbacks of the decisions I’ve recently taken. I’ll never forget the reaction of my therapist:
“You were aware of the drawbacks when you made the decision. We’re simply not talking about this. If you can’t take it anymore, you change it. Complaining is not an option and you’re not paying me to pity you. It’s in your power and your power only to change something”
At the moment, this reaction annoyed me terribly. I think I mentally took the decision (a couple of times) to change therapist. I wanted to hit him in the face. Looking back now, his approach was fantastic – harsh and direct, but incredibly effective. I learnt to pay more attention, make better decisions and I stopped complaining and started acting instead.
5. Stop multitasking
You’re not a machine! None of us is! Our brains are not cut out to handle multiple things simultaneously, no matter how good you think you are at multitasking. Studies have shown that multitasking is worsening your anxiety and can even lead to chronic stress (here’s a good article that summarises the findings of a study on the topic).
Compartmentalisation will help you feel more at ease and release some of the stress you are feeling. Single tasking is key for your mental sanity. One thing at a time. One problem at a time. One day at a time. Forget about answering that email while being in a call or trying to spend time with your kid while answering a Slack message. These only make things worse.
Easier said than done, though. Question is how you can actually switch to single tasking? When I first started addressing this issue, I was doing a brain dump in the beginning of the day. I basically wrote everything I had to do during the day on a piece of paper. To avoid going into multitasking, I grouped the tasks into categories: all tasks related to one particular project, all non-essential work tasks, catching up with email, personal things to do such as shopping online, time with my loved ones. Last but not least, I blocked uninterrupted chunks of time in my calendar for each category and started taking them one by one.
It didn’t work at first, since it takes time to perfect your methodology and plan realistically. It also takes time to get accustomed to not jumping from one thing to another chaotically. Once I mastered this process, it really made a difference and gave me more focus, better productivity and more mental bandwidth. I’m still doing this today and I’m using Asana for efficient planning and task management, both at work and at home.
6. Focus on things that are in your control
I was lucky to work with a fantastic manager back at Uber, a woman that changed my life for the better and helped me become a better professional and a better human being. I have to admit I didn’t like her at first. Not at all, I might say. I thought she was insensitive. She was never stressing out. Never emotional. Always rational.
I suspected she didn’t care about her work as much as I did. I mean, how could she be so composed with so many fires burning around? Oh boy, was I wrong. She was just more effective than I used to be, only focusing her efforts on things in her control and never wasting a breath on anything else. A couple of months into the role, during our 1:1, I asked her how she’s doing it. Her words stick with me to this date and I’ve internalised them in the meantime.
Do we have a problem? Ok. What’s the solution? If we don’t have a solution and we cannot change things, then we don’t have a problem. It’s just the status quo and we’ll learn to live with it. Stressing out won’t make things better – it will just make you feel miserable and you’re not going to be able to focus on what really matters. And that’s the problems that you can actually solve and the things that you have the power to change.
Easier said than done, though. Internalising this takes work and lots of practice. And I did that by consistently asking myself the questions above: if I could do something about the situation, I just did it. Otherwise, I just forced myself to stop worrying about it.
It took me a while, but I eventually learnt to focus on things that are in my control and stop worrying about everything else. This got me to living in the present, without thinking about the mistakes of the past or the uncertainty that the future holds.
7. You’re not as important as you think you are
This is quite a hard one to acknowledge and internalise and it also comes from my former Uber manager. The more entrepreneurial a person is & the more they care, the higher the chances they believe their input is required 24/7 for the organisation or their projects to move forward.
I remember it was my wedding day. I woke up and checked my email over coffee. There were a couple of things I had to address. I then called my manager, reminding her that I will be on holiday for the next week, but I will keep checking everything out in the mornings and the evenings to make sure things go as planned. Her answer came as a shock to me.
“Just don’t! She said. “Things will move forward anyway. You’re not as important as you think you are!”.
I was speechless. I found it very hard not to take her answer personally. Fortunately at that point I already had the ABC model practice so, instead of stressing out, I asked her what does she mean by this. She kindly explained to me:
“It’s not about you. Nobody is as important as they think they are. Uber will still be here after your 1-week holiday. There are very little things that could actually require your attention while your away. You’ve built a strong team and they know what to do. Just disconnect and relax. Everything will still be here once you return”.
Truth be told, no matter how impactful your work is, irrespective of how indispensable you see yourself, the Earth keeps spinning around. With or without you. Chances are your projects will move ahead without you. Everyone will survive. Once I acknowledged this at face value, I learnt to be more connected to myself and unplug whenever required, at work and at home.
8. Pick the battles to fight. Wisely
I know way too well the feeling that everything is burning around and you have to enter firefighter mode to put the fires out. The key here though is to understand which fires to put out first to make sure you don’t get burnt. And which you can just let burn, as Reid Hoffman advises.
One of the ways that blitzscaling entrepreneurs can stay alive is by deciding to let certain fires burn so they can focus on the fires that, if allowed to rage unchecked, really will destroy the company.
Reid Hoffman in “Blitzscaling. The Lightning Fast Path to Build Massively Valueable Companies”
To give an example I read online (I don’t remember where), our lives nowadays feel a lot like juggling with multiple balls. Some of them are made of glass, while the rest are made of plastic. Trying to keep everything in the air will be exhausting and most likely not worth the effort. However, the plastic balls won’t break if you let them fall, so the mastery here lies in knowing which balls to keep up and which to just drop.
This is prioritisation 101 and it takes a good understanding of your objectives and a good degree of self-awareness to do this right. What helped me prioritise correctly was to always ask myself a set of questions before engaging in any activity:
- Does spending time on this bring me closer to my goal? Personal or professional, it works wonders every time. If the answer is no, just don’t;
- Can I do something else to help me reach my goal faster or more effective? If yes, than do that instead;
- Last, but definitely not least, does it bring you joy? And yes, this is very important, because if it does, it’s definitely worth doing – it’s something you do for yourself.
Picking the battles to fight helped me break the vicious circle where I felt like a hamster in a wheel, busy with being busy, suffocating myself with irrelevant work, and steadily burning me out.
9. Respect yourself and your time
If you don’t respect yourself and your time, nobody else will. It was very difficult for me to learn this lesson. Everyone wants a piece of you. It’s your choice though if you give it to them or not. If you answer that email. Or that message. If you take that phone call. If you accept that meeting.
The opportunity cost for everything you accept is high. It’s everything that you don’t get to do because you don’t have time. It’s that meaningful project at work that you didn’t get to work on. The missed family dinner. The course you wanted to take. The book you wanted to read or the movie you wanted to see.
There are so many ways you can choose to spend your time. Choosing wisely will help reduce stress and reduce the anxiety that comes along with improper time management. One thing that helped me be more effective here is the Eisenhower prioritisation matrix, that I consistently used to decide how to best spend my time. I used this both personally and professionally, with very good results.
In short, you can use the matrix to divide all your commitments into 4 different buckets, based on their importance and urgency:
- Do now – things that are both important and urgent: that work project with a very tight deadline, the doctor appointment, calling your mom on her birthday;
- Plan ahead – things that are important, but don’t require your immediate attention: the work projects that are not as time sensitive, planning your next vacation;
- Delegate – urgent issues that are not that important. These can be easily done by someone else: projects that could be tackled by someone in your team with more bandwidth, cleaning your house, cooking;
- Don’t do. Never – issues that are neither urgent, nor important, like taking that sales call for a product you’re not interested in buying or meeting over coffee with a person you have nothing to talk about. Spending time on things in this category will only waste your time and leave you exhausted at the end of the day, anxious and stressed because you didn’t get to go through the things you should have really paid attention to.
If you’re not managing your time properly, you’ll end up being exhausted, frustrated and anxious. I’ve been there myself and seen this at work time and time again. The good news is that it’s in your power to change this. And, while time management is an important building block here, the truth is that it starts with self-respect and acknowledging that you can’t do everything and you just have to choose what makes sense for you.
10. Put things in perspective
A couple of days ago, a friend of mine was complaining about working from home. He was telling me that he misses the office and the vibe that comes with it, that he’s all by himself and he’s really struggling. Plenty of people can relate to this nowadays.
One thing that I found useful whenever I felt overwhelmed and helpless, was to put things in perspective. How you feel depends on the angle you’re looking at things from. Feeling bad about working from home also means that you have both a job and a home. And this puts you in a much better position that millions of people out there that don’t have this luxury. This is not meant in any way to minimise your struggles and the stress you are rightfully feeling. It’s just an attempt to change perspective and look at the part of the glass that’s half full, instead of analysing the empty one.
This was a very powerful technique for me. I started what I like to call practicing gratefulness. It’s the opposite of complaining. Every night, before I go to sleep, I think about three things that happened that day that I am grateful for (or three things in my life, at the end of very shitty days).
It’s not an easy thing to do, particularly when you’re down and things are not going well. This might sound like BS – why should you care that others are in more difficult situations than yourself? No matter how empathic we are, we all feel our pains and sorrows much more intense than others’.
Empathy is a keyword here. Practicing it wasn’t easy at first. What helped me on this journey is the passion I have for reading. Biographies and life stories helped me change the lens through which I was seeing my life and the world. I accidentally started out on this journey by stumbling upon this article on the internet 9 years ago. This powerful story got me thinking about the strength some people have in front of adversity, and the power that lies within each and everyone of us. I realised the transformational power of well-told stories and I am, to this date, a big fan of the work DoR is doing (don’t have enough words to recommend them – if you’re not a native Romanian, you can still check out some of their work here).
If there’s one book that I strongly recommend should you decide to go on the gratefulness journey, that’s Dr Edith Eger’s “The Choice”, the life story of a Holocaust survivor who found meaning in helping others heal and managed to find hope by focusing on what she had, instead of what she’d lost.
It’s the powerful life stories that I’ve read over the years that helped me become more empathic and more grateful for everything and everyone I have in my life. I’ve learnt to put things in perspective and change my own perspective as a result, from grim to hopeful and more optimistic.
11. Sleep
At some point in my life, I was so dumb naive to actually believe that sleep is for the weak. Back then, there was no work backlog that an all-nighter couldn’t solve. Or more. Consecutive ones. I took a lot of pride in saying out loud that I only have a life, and I’m not going to sleep it out. Sleep deprivation is what got me through burn out. Twice.
The lack of sleep affected me in ways that I couldn’t have imagined when I was feeling young and powerful. My productivity plunged. I was inefficient. I was working all around the clock with no results. I became emotionally unstable. Irritable. Anxious. Up until the moment when I simply couldn’t get out of bed, nor get the sleep that I so desperately needed. And it took me a lot of time to recover.
If you still doubt the impact that sleep has on your overall health, I strongly recommend you Matthew Walkers’ “Why We Sleep”. It offers scientific insights into why sleep matters and why it can make a difference for the better in your life.
I remember that when I was in school my father used to tease me whenever I was learning late at night. While I took this as a joke back then, I only acknowledged this valuable advice later on. He used to tell me that:
“A well-rested fool it’s always going to perform much better than a sleep-deprived one. And you’re not going to enlighten yourself the night before the exam, so you’d better go to sleep now. At least tomorrow you’ll remember the things that you already know.”
Fast forward to today, through very intense times, burnout and exhaustion, I am fully aware of the importance of sleep, particularly since I am now still recovering after the sleep deprivation that comes along with motherhood. If you’re not convinced yet, I highly recommend Arianna Huffington’s “The Sleep Revolution”, which was a game-changer for me.
But what if you are convinced, but you still can’t get a good night sleep? I was there too, and I am fully aware that stress can cause insomnia and you end up being in a vicious circle that’s very hard to break. I was lucky that my insomnia wasn’t severe and I could tackle this on my own, with no medication. If you can’t work this out yourself, I strongly recommend you to get professional help.
What worked for me here was to follow the basic sleep hygiene rules, particularly having consistent sleep times and bedtime routines, while avoiding caffeine in the second part of the day, as well as meals and alcohol a couple of hours before sleep.
On top of that, I realised that I needed to take my mind off work and empty it before going to bed. In order to do so, I normally read for 30 minutes every night before going to bed (or I watch a movie on weekends) and I then practice gratefulness. This way I go to sleep thinking about the things I’m grateful for and I no longer have nightmares and difficulty falling asleep. Oh, and having a baby made me so much more appreciative of the power of a good night sleep 🙂
Epilogue
As I was mentioning in the beginning, I’ve written this article to share my 10 years long journey to build emotional resilience and share the techniques that helped me manage stress better.
If you’ve been reading up to this point, chances are you’re my mother :). Jokes aside, I’ve been thinking a lot whether I should get this published as a series of 10 short pills, presenting each individual technique, or a piece of long-form content to share everything at once. I’ve finally decided to go with the first, since these are not universally valid tactics and might not have the same results for everyone.
While I am proud to be emotionally resilient today and I’ve built my own coping mechanisms to tackle stress, this is and always will be a work in progress. I’d love to hear what worked for you and what you do to manage stress effectively in your day to day life. Feel free to share your personal experience in the comments section or just drop me a line