Stress & Work: A Deadly Combo

A few years ago when I was at State Street my manager called me over and said “Mark you look awful. Go home right now. Come back when you don’t look like you’re going to die on me.”

Here’s what caused this:

I had just purchased a house. The sellers left the country and I discovered over $150,000 in structural damage. Many loans later the house was being worked on.

With debt piling up I still had to pay rent while the house was being worked on.

This all while we were having another child. ScriptUni was just going live so I had no idea what to expect income-wise.

Because of the whole fiasco I estimated that I was going to be nearly $5,000 short a month on payments.

To add to this, my job was all over the place and State Street was trying to decide how to break our division down.

The stress started building up rapidly.

I had a few nights where I got 0 hours of sleep. I will never forget those nights. 1AM. 2AM. 3AM. I try to push the fear of mounting debt and stress of work out of my head but I can’t. It’s sticking at the forefront of my mind.

Then I have to “wake up”, go to work, and perform a 10 hour workday on 0 sleep.

Having been very sick in the past I can tell you two things:

1.      No sickness in the world feels as bad as this level of stress

2.      I’ve never felt so close to death

Yeah, it may sound crazy but after some weeks with as little as 12 hours of sleep I felt my brain fighting with my body to a point where I thought it was going to give up.

I did discover that if I hit the 2AM point I could try a hot bath with some light music and sometimes that would relax me enough that I could manage to fall asleep, but this didn’t always work.

I lucked into a solution to this: LinkedIn & Career Coach.

I started my coaching service on ScriptUni around the time that I began posting on LinkedIn. Both accomplished the same thing. I was helping other people. Individuals were reaching out to me saying “Mark I can’t thank you enough. You have changed my life!”.

Little by little my brain started filling up with good feelings.

Yes of course, my income increased but stress is a stubborn chap. Once you become a stressed out person it is incredible difficult to change your mental state.

But this worked.

The more my mind filled with feelings of satisfaction and happiness the less I was focused on all the awful things I was enduring.

Stress is very real and very dangerous. My first bit of advice (this is a two-part article) is just this: If you focus 100% on beating your cause of stress I think you will be fighting an uphill battle. You definitely need to solve the inherent problem but I also strongly advise you to find “your happy”.

What makes you smile? What makes you chuckle to yourself when no one is watching. Engage more in these activities.

Side note: Video games and TV shows do not make anyone happy. They are a means of escape from the real world but I have yet to meet someone who is joyous after watching a show. They will not relieve stress.

Find what makes your face light up in the real world and start filling your mind with positive memories and feelings.

Part II of this article will cover how to survive the stress and how to tackle it head-on.