Under Pressure: What Doesn't Kill Me Makes Me Stronger

How to Handle Stress

A psychologist on TED once spoke about stress management. The gist: stress itself is not what destroys your health — the negative belief that stress is bad for you is what destroys your health. In other words, when pressure hits, we should be a touch more like Ah Q, telling ourselves, “I’m not afraid. I’m an optimist.” Sounds like chicken soup, doesn’t it?

But it really is the result of years of experiments by research institutions. There’s science behind it.

This echoes a principle from the Harvard happiness course that left a deep impression on me: Belief is a self-fulfilling prophecy.

Belief Is a Self-Fulfilling Prophecy

Belief is a self-fulfilling prophecy — that’s lesson one of stress management. In plain words: whether pressure crushes you depends on how you think about it.

If this proposition interests you, watch Positive Psychology. It’s brilliantly delivered and comes highly recommended. There’s a classic example in it: the famous “Four-minute mile” case.

The case goes like this: many years ago, everyone believed the limit of human running was a four-minute mile. No athlete in the world could run under four minutes, even as their times crept infinitely close to it. Athletes’ results and researchers’ studies corroborated each other, turning the breakthrough into a physiological impossibility for the human race. Then one scholar refused to accept it. He trained relentlessly, challenged it again and again, failed again and again, and finally broke the four-minute barrier.

The climax of the story: when this explosive news spread across the globe, another athlete also ran under four minutes. Then within a month, within a year, person after person ran under four minutes, turning this so-called “limit” into a joke. Belief is self-fulfilling prophecy, perfectly illustrated.

If you believe stress won’t do anything to you, then it won’t do anything to you.

Having picked over others’ crumbs of wisdom, let’s look at this programmer’s own methods.

Stress Needs an Outlet and Release

Facing stress, a little Ah Q helps. But sometimes, even if at the psychological level you think, “I can take it, it’s no big deal,” there are still things that leave you utterly drained — you can’t eat, you can’t sleep. Even someone as optimistic as this programmer (yes, my hide has thickened another layer) has his anxious moments.

That was several years ago, when I’d been a manager for just over half a year — hungry for knowledge, learning management experience everywhere I could. When I was made manager, my boss’s boss summed me up: everything else is fine, you’re just too young, not enough life experience. I agreed, and tried every which way to make up for it. But life experience isn’t something you can gain by reading a few books. So I got a little anxious. Right at that moment, a manager resigned, and his people were split in two, with the majority coming under me. Suddenly a lot changed:

(1) I needed to lead as many as fifteen people (nearly double);

(2) My team’s scope covered several key features across two big projects. I had to build emotional connections with new people while trying hard to get my head around new projects and new features;

(3) The number of meetings I had to attend multiplied — basically every morning from Tuesday to Friday was spent in meetings.

This lasted a month, and I finally collapsed — persistent blood in my stool. After ruling out lesions (thank god it wasn’t anything serious), the doctor gave me a week’s sick leave, specifying bed rest, and prescribed a pile of anti-anxiety medication.

I felt miserable. I’d assumed anxiety was something that would never happen to me. But the doctor’s prescription was right there in black and white. That week I talked a great deal with my wife about the problems at work and took in a lot of her advice. Only then did I realize that being overworked meant I rarely talked with her about work.

Back at the company, I had a good long talk with my boss about the difficulties I was facing, and I poured my problems out to some colleagues too. Gradually I felt much better. I realized that the reason the earlier stress had made me anxious was that I wanted to carry everything myself, with nowhere to release it. Now the confusion, the sadness, the problems had been released, and the anxiety left on its own.

Have you noticed how your wife is always complaining to you about all the annoyances at her company? That’s a woman’s instinctive reaction to handling stress. When it happens, just listen quietly — she doesn’t need you to provide solutions, she’s simply releasing pressure.

So when stress is heavy, share it with someone close and pour out your grievances.

Beyond talking, a decompression method I sometimes use is: crying — ideally sobbing out loud.

All right, set aside the prejudice that “real men don’t cry.” Some stress simply cannot be fully released through talking.

When the pressure is so great you want to cry, don’t hold it in. Crying it out will make you feel much better. Crying is an excellent way to release stress; it uses an extreme method to help you vent and ease your emotions. This too has a scientific basis, though I can’t remember the exact explanation now.

You might say, isn’t crying all the time kind of wimpy? Of course, crying in front of everyone all the time makes you either a wimp or a political operator (did I tell you to learn from Big-Eared Liu Bei?). But couldn’t you just cry in your car, or somewhere more private?

Another way to relieve stress is self-mockery — you can’t very well cry in front of people all the time, so you mock yourself to ease the tension that pressure brings. No need to explain that one further. Every day everyone calls themselves a “loser coder” — isn’t that just seeking a little spiritual comfort in a miserable life? But note: the premise of self-mockery is a strong and upward-looking heart. Otherwise, if you keep calling yourself a loser every day, in time you truly will live up to the name.

Actually, You Don’t Have That Much Stress

If you’re a programmer, you’ve worked steadily for several years, to the left you see no hope of rising to architect, to the right your boss shows no sign of moving — then sorry, you don’t actually have that much stress. What you may need isn’t stress reduction but stepping out of your comfort zone and adding stress to yourself.

The IT world has a saying, crude but true: most architects got there by screwing up a pile of projects.

Set aside politics; let’s talk only about technology.

If you never screw up a project, you’ll never accumulate the corresponding experience. Sheltered by systems others designed, no matter how good you feel, you’re still at “you don’t know that you don’t know.” It’s like knowing the Linux source code inside out — build your own system and you’ll still stumble countless times.

Screwing up means growth. Every time you screw up, it’s like a Saiyan battered to the brink of death and then restored, or Seiya and those other Bronze Saints who just won’t die after going through purgatory and rising like phoenixes from the ashes — your combat power, your cosmo, erupts once more.

Nietzsche said it (and I freaking love this line): What doesn’t kill me makes me stronger.

Doesn’t it feel like grinding monsters to level yourself up? Far more fun than playing Dota.

Now you know why you can’t be an architect and can only be a loser programmer — because you haven’t yet been handed enough pressure to screw up enough projects.