Do you really work for the Dark lord Sauron or is this all "in your head"? [8 min]
And 3 scientific facts about work-related anxiety that most of us don't understand
Look, you may be a resilient Ninja. You may have traveled far, crushed adversity and currently performing at the top of your game…
…but just like pro athletes you need to keep finding that edge while preventing injury.
Suppose you work in a fast-paced environment with little predictability, diminishing autonomy, and a lot of competition. In that case, you are constantly at risk of developing health issues due to stress, which if not monitored, will impact your creativity, performance, and innovative edge.
It can happen to the greatest of us.
That happened to me ten years ago, when I left medicine and it was happening to my first Bay Area client, Sathya, four years ago when he left a ~$1M+ plus in equity to save his sanity and had to take a much lower paying job after working for PayPal, Lyft and DoorDash.
It is also happening to millions of us who grew up learning to achieve everything and please everyone.
Be smart.
Here are three scientific tidbits to keep you one step ahead of the game in modern high-stress workplaces.
Scientific fact #1: Stress can be accurately measured via subjective surveys and tracked over time.
If your stress is high, and you are curious about whether you are working for the Dark lord of Sauron 🧌 or if this is all in your head and you are just being ‘dramatic’ 💁🏽♀️…then rejoice…there is a validated survey for that.
According to Christina Maslach’s research, fulfillment at work depends on Control, Reward, Workload, Fairness, Community, and Values. 1
✍🏽 Assess the following aspects of your job by drawing a Wheel of Fulfillment and see which ones are consistently low over 3 months.
Side quest: Create a radar chart for yourself here. Map out the elements above. Rank each one from 1-10. How does it look like? Share your chart with me in the comments or reply to this email. What did you learn?
💁🏽♀️ If four or more of these are consistently above 7, the stress you perceive may be exaggerated and can be controlled by healthy coping mechanisms.
🧌 However, if most of these are consistently ranked below 5, then you are in an environment in which you can only thrive so much.
If you recognize that you are in a toxic and hazardous environment, do not try to cope or internalize the organization’s stress.
Instead, your practical options are as follows:
Start saying No.Advocate and organize if needed. Learn how to do so strategically if you want to stay.
Leave or disengage. Start interviewing at other places. Detach. Disengage. It’s ok. 18% of the global work population is disengaged and more are so every year.
Take long breaks if you are tied to the company and can’t do any of the above.
Whatever you do, I repeat: do not internalize your company’s toxic culture as your own failure. It is not.
This will lead to disease on the long term, which brings me to the second fact.
Scientific fact #2: “Stress Management” or passive “Wellness” in a toxic environment is harmful.
“...the more disastrous a stressor is, the worse it is to believe you had some control over the outcome because you are inevitably led to think about how much better things would have turned out if only you had done something more.” (Sapolsky, Why Zebras Don't Get Ulcers p404)
Sapolsky’s right, here are the studies that prove this:
High-pressure, fast-paced jobs with low autonomy are associated with increased stress and ill health2
Job insecurity or fear of job loss (or lay-offs) can instigate disease, even after accounting for stress-related behaviors such as smoking, drinking, and eating.3
Many managers thrive on guilt-tripping and shaming, then they offer you an Amazon gift card or a wellness room. Most of them are unaware of it. It is part of the global capitalist game. If you are going to play it, you have to understand what game you are in. (🤫 This may apply to your romantic relationship as well 🤫)
“Stress management” techniques ONLY work when YOU are generating it through anxiety loops such as worry or learned helplessness.
However…
when the environment that you are in is full of soul-crushing corporate gangsters, then you’ll need more than meditation to protect your ass out there.
You can’t kill a million stormtroopers with your Jedi mind tricks alone. You will need to learn how to fight and say No, my dear Luke.
The first step to address anxiety is not to manage it, but to map it 4
What is triggering you? [Trigger]
Ex: Boss says hurtful comment or acts inappropriately
What are you doing to cope with it? [Response]
Ex: You repress anger to avoid confrontation
How is the coping helping you [Reward]
Ex: A sense of calm and predictability
What also happens as a consequence of that coping?[Result]
Ex: Putting oneself in the same situation over again
“Neoliberalism[…]has made the world of work far less secure and consequently more stressful and health damaging,” write two British health academics, “. . . resulting in a myriad of chronic diseases including musculoskeletal pain and cardiovascular disease.”
Maté, Gabor. The Myth of Normal: Trauma, Illness, and Healing in a Toxic Culture
So if you are in a job that does not offer an environment for thriving, forget about all this wellness stuff. Its BS. Your job is killing you. Run, Forrest, run!
There aren’t any number of yoga classes or detox diets that can keep up with being poisoned every day from 9-5 (or sometimes 7 or 8…and in many cases the weekends!).
So what am I supposed to do about it, Omar? Isn’t this just what work is supposed to be like?
I am so glad you asked…
Scientific fact #3: Personality plays a huge role and is a reversible factor for stress related diseases. Start building your Emotional Competence to keep your edge.
Realistically, many of us will end up internalizing our company’s toxic culture, because unions do not exist in most STEM jobs, and I understand - sometimes leaving is not an option due to financial responsibilities.
That is why it is important to understand the personality traits that will make us more prone to stress-mediated diseases and to start addressing that reversible factor.
A 1990 12-year observational study by Robert Sapolsky PhD showed that the stress hormone cortisol was higher in “low-ranking” baboons compared to “high-ranking” ones.5
The traits he used to define high ranking:
Had social support
Knew when they were beaten
Displaced their aggression unto others (aka bullies)
Can detect threat
These people had lower cortisol ie lower risk of developing stress-driven diseases
Conversely, the nice baboons who just went with the flow and accepted being bullied had significantly higher cortisol.
In The Body Says No, Gabor Mate MD also describes the Type C or “Stress Prone Persona” as people who:
compulsively put others’ needs before theirs
repress healthy anger
have a problem saying No
have an over-identification with a sense of duty or responsibility
These people are more prone to stress-related diseases.
How many of these traits apply to you?
The way forward is to learn emotional competence by improving:
• your capacity to feel your emotions, so that you are aware when you are experiencing stress;
• your ability to express your emotions effectively and thereby assert our needs and maintain the integrity of our emotional boundaries;
• the facility to distinguish between psychological reactions pertinent to the present situation and those that represent residues from the past.
I can help you develop that capacity and prevent the emotional injury of work while continuing to pursue your dreams. I use evidence based techniques that have helped me others like Sathya. Read my Google reviews.
" After an episode of severe burnout due to a toxic manager, I had to leave my job and tried so everything I could to get back at my previous level of performance. Fianlly, I met Omar and was he was able to help me come out of my depression and also rediscover myself like things that brought joy to me when I was a kid. I was able to figure that out and now I'm putting those things to practice and focus again on my career.”
Sathya Giri, Lead CV/ML Engineer at John Deere. Ex- Paypal, Lyft, and Doordash
To summarize today’s digest:
#1: Measuring stress and using the fulfillment wheel can help you discern whether it is in your head or due to workplace issues
#2: Coping with a toxic environment leads to disease. Learn to fight for your needs, create boundaries, or leave
#3: Personality contributes to mental health issues due to stress, learn how to build your emotional capacity and start being more assertive.
If you enjoyed this please help me spread the word.
Omar
Footnotes
https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/10621016/ Leiter MP, Maslach C. Six areas of worklife: a model of the organizational context of burnout. J Health Hum Serv Adm. 1999 Spring;21(4):472-89. PMID: 10621016.
(Schrecker and Bambra, How Politics Makes Us Sick, 53.)
William T. Gallo et al., “Involuntary Job Loss as a Risk Factor for Subsequent Myocardial Infarction and Stroke: Findings from the Health and Retirement Survey,” American Journal of Industrial Medicine 45, no. 5 (May 2004): 408–16; and W. T. Gallo et al., “The Impact of Late Career Job Loss on Myocardial Infarction and Stroke: A 10 Year Follow Up Using the Health and Retirement Survey,” Journal of Occupational and Environmental Medicine 63, no. 10 (October 2006): 683–87.
Anxiety and Worry as a loop
There’s plenty of research showing that anxiety gets perpetuated as a negatively reinforced habit loop…When worry gets triggered by a negative emotion (e.g., fear), it can also become reinforced as a way to avoid the unpleasantness of that emotion: Trigger: Negative emotion (or thought) Behavior: Worry Result: Avoidance/distraction In the dictionary, worry is defined as both a noun (“I am free of worry”) and as a verb (e.g., “I worry about my children”). Functionally, the act of worrying is a mental behavior that results in a feeling of anxiety (nervousness or unease). On top of this, the feeling of anxiety can trigger the behavior of worrying, which becomes cyclical:
Brewer, Judson. Unwinding Anxiety: New Science Shows How to Break the Cycles of Worry and Fear to Heal Your Mind (pp. 39-40). Penguin Publishing Group. Kindle Edition.
https://www.themantic-education.com/ibpsych/2020/10/08/key-study-social-status-and-stress-in-olive-baboons-sapolsky-1990/