Developing Resilience in Tech

How many of us have had those days when we don’t know which way to start work, because there is just so much to understand, handle, everyone wants something from us, and at the end of the day we just sit in front of the tv for hours, binge-watching shows to numb our minds, then have poor quality sleep and wake up thinking about work?

Sometimes it feels like the only thing we do is try to catch up.

What is it that we tell our friends?

“You’re doing everything you can, which means you’re giving it 100%, even if this is your 40% on that day. You’re giving it all, so that’s what matters.”

“It’s not your duty to fix everything, just focus on what you can do, the things that are not in your control are not things that you can change, so there is no point stressing out about them.”

And many others. And while they are valid, and they momentarily help, it is hard for just these items to solve the problem, because when we are stressed and tired, some basic beliefs pop up and shape our emotions and reactions.

While some stress is good, too much can trigger a loop of anxiety, tiredness, and the feeling of lacking (more on this here). It is an important exercise to understand what exactly is creating the stress in our lives, and to build different rapports with those people and elements in order to challenge our reactions. This can lead to acting more compassionately and reduce the stress we feel.

Approach

When we are in the stress loop there are things we can do.

1. Redefine success and failure. Do we consider that failing once means that we are not good at something? Do we consider that being successful means things need to go perfectly on an ongoing basis?
2. Understand the core beliefs that make us feel this is stressful. What is it that we are afraid will happen? Is it the worst thing that can happen?
3. Understand why it is taking such a high toll on us. Is it just our own emotions that we are dealing with in this situation, or are we also allowing others to impact us through their emotions and reactions, reaching higher levels of anxiety and stress?
4. Are we making assumptions about why others are reacting or behaving a certain way? Could there be other reasons for this? If their intentions were different, would we be able to act with more kindness and compassion in order to diffuse the situation and make it less stressful for ourselves?
5. Identify our beliefs and challenge them in a conscious manner. Rather than being a victim of our circumstances, we can work on creating challenges for ourselves which are set up as experiments to disprove our beliefs and help us grow.

Resilience

Resilience is our body’s ability to adapt to stress. In order to ensure that we can handle stress it is important to get constant exposure to various types of stress, so that we can develop resilience.

Stressors can be an intense workout, a challenging task, doing something we don’t want to do but is good for us, or constantly dealing with a repetitive, frustrating situation.

We learn stress, and how to be stressed. I encourage everyone to think back on when we learned that things will break if we don’t act right away, and how we learned that lesson.

To discuss how to identify and challenge beliefs, and the way they impact day-to-day experiences including stress, schedule a session here:

Basic CBT session: https://calendly.com/carminb/cbt-session

CBT & Coaching for people working in Tech: https://calendly.com/carminb/cbt-coaching-session-tech