The taste of stress, mental exhaustion and the alike

Swedish daily newspaper Svenska Dagbladet have been running a series of articles on the topic of stress and mental exhaustion. As I have been reading them, I have reflected over my own taste of it and my assumptions about stress before and after this experience. My idea of what causes stress, and in the long run mental exhaustion, was flawed and the cause of triggering my own problems. It was correct to assume that stress comes from working a lot, but incorrect to overlook other potential causes for stress. Yesterday’s article at SVD discusses this, saying that the trigger can be how you relate to the hours of work, not the quantity of hours.

I decided to try and write a short version of what happened to me, as it wasn’t until a year or so after getting better that I realized what had actually happened. Hopefully it could be of use to others. Here it goes!

This will be a compressed version of nine years. The first five were the good years, I was working 16 hours a day, 7 days a week. Loved my work and could keep at it indefinitely. I was running my own company, with employees and a partner, and never experienced any type of stress.

As the company had success an opportunity presented itself to work less. This was about seven-eight years ago and in Sweden, as well as the rest of the world I assume, the 2000s had an increasing focus on the causes of stress and getting burnt out. I was feeling clever and figured that I should take the opportunity to scale back on hours. If I work less, I’ll make sure that I’ll stay free from stress and can continue doing what I enjoy for a long time. Right? Right.

At first it went according to plan. Working eight hours, having weekends off and taking proper vacation time. Kept the mind free of work when out of office and, if running out of time during one workday, remembering that there is a new workday tomorrow.

But, slowly things started to become stressful and mentally tearing. With less work hours, I kept falling behind and started to experience stress. The more you are behind, the less it can wait for tomorrow. I fell into old habits, worked extra hours and thought about work when not meant to. I felt stress from not having enough work time and I felt stress from not relaxing when I should. Quickly it got worse and worse. I worked more to catch up and worried about working more.

It is clear that I should have planned better. You can’t just turn down the hours you work, you need a proper plan. If I scale down, what will I have time for? Who will do the work that I am not doing anymore? How will I evaluate? What can go wrong? There was a plan, but the time spent on planning was not proportionally correct for a life changing decision. When trouble appeared there was no plan for how to deal with it, only ad hoc fixes as I went along.

To get more time I removed, simplified and scaled down bits of the company. It got leaner and meaner, which is a good thing for a company. For me, some engaging projects and work was removed in order to concentrate on the needed tasks. In hindsight this started killing the enjoyment of work and further added to the negative feels.

As the company had a distributed workforce, it was (or at least felt) easier to find people that could work on the projects, instead of finding people that would work with running the company. Because of this I worked less with the projects and more with administration of an ever growing company. Again, in hindsight… While I enjoyed running a company that I administered and worked in, I did not enjoy being employed as the sole administrator with no other type of work. Engaging work was replaced with work I was capable of doing, but did not find fulfilling. More negative feels.

At the time I did not understand why I kept feeling worse and worse, not only mentally but also physically with increasing back/neck pain. I kept assuming it was only about feeling stress from too little work time and not sticking to the plan of relaxing and working less. Completely overlooking the changes made to the type of work I spent my days doing.

By then, a year had passed since originally scaling down the work time. I spent the following year trying to get back on track, back to how good it was at the beginning. Increasingly pressuring to relax and to find a healthy approach to work. Didn’t work and it kept getting worse. Eventually, I came to the conclusion that it was not possible to get back in shape while staying at the company. I was not capable of changing, I had tried and failed over and over the past year.

It was decided that I was to leave when appropriate for the company. After two years from that decision, I could leave. In a sense it was good that it took two years until I left, it erased any doubt of making the right decision. When I made my decision to leave I had tried to think of all possible situations that could occur. One was what would it be like to try and work less at a company when everyone else starts to work more? Even if companies try to minimize the chance of it occurring, projects tend to have a period when everyone starts to work more. I got to experience this first hand, I was meant to only administer, but eventually I was back doing project work as well. Getting drawn back was partly my own fault, partly the fault of others. It is a very difficult situation. I (we all) tend to say yes when asked to help out, in particular if having the extra time needed to do it. It is easy to forget that you are no longer at the same level as others or your own past self. If not asked, you offer to help as you want to contribute to the efforts of others.

Leaving was what I needed to be able to reboot properly. Fixing myself had a variety of components, not only about relaxing and how I spend my time. For example, finally had the sense to fix my office… It was functional before, but nothing more. Further functional improvements, such as a work desk where I can stand up and work, were made. But also to actually decorate the place, making it a room I like to be in. Lights, armchair, paintings, air quality and lots of instruments and audio gear that my past used a lot, my present not so much, but are contributing to a good atmosphere. Other example, enjoying the task I am currently doing and not thinking about just to be done with it. Not so much work tasks, but general everyday tasks.

In conclusion. If feeling fine with working many hours, great. Finding and being allowed to spend lots of time with something that really engages you, is a luxury not everyone gets to have. Even so, you might want to scale back at one point, when you do, think it through properly. At least do it in steps! Don’t scale down and take it as you go. Decide one first step, how to do it and then execute, evaluate and let it take time before taking the next step.

In a worst case scenario, is the work worth getting back to (not an option for everyone and every situation)? Changing line of work, or changing something else in your life, might be something that contributes greatly towards getting back into shape. It is a long process, with hard to measure progress to a better health. Measurable progress? Five-six years ago, I found myself with a complete lack of interest in playing games, something I had previously enjoyed my whole life. This was strange, but even more strange is that out of nowhere the enjoyment came back this year.