Work can be addictive
And nine other surprising things I’ve learnt about resilience
Resilience has become a buzzword in recent years but it’s a topic that’s long fascinated me.
My interest began when I was training for an Ironman more than ten years ago. Preparing to swim 2.4 miles, cycle 112 miles and run 26.2 miles is not the sort of distance where you turn up and “wing it”. So I explored my food, mindset and how to best recover between work-outs.
Over the last ten years I’ve continued to explore physical resilience doing events like 5K races, marathons and long distance cycling trips. More recently, I began training as a psychotherapist which is helping me to better understand mental health and emotional resilience.
This passion has now become my job. I work with CEOs, directors and founders of start up companies to explore their resilience and what it means for them to thrive in their work. I also work with teams and support company wide resilience programmes.
As part of my approach I use heartbeat analytics to assess people’s resilience. The wearable technology provides amazing insights into each person’s unique areas of stress and sources of recovery.
Each day I’m going to share one of the ten most surprising things I’ve learnt about resilience after doing more than 200 of these assessments. The observations are based on personal accounts rather than objective data or quantitative research.
I would welcome your feedback if you have any comments that support or disprove anything I’ve written in these insights.
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Insight #9 — work can be addictive
We can thrive on stress and risk-taking.
It’s what we see with adrenaline junkies.
As Robert Sapolsky, author of Why Zebras Don’t Get Ulcers, describes it:
‘These are the folks who push every envelope. They spend every last dollar in Monopoly, have furtive sex in public places and try out a new complicated recipe on important dinner guests. What’s up with them?’
The answer is dopamine, commonly associated with pleasure seeking behaviour and also responsible for activating the stress response.
This means we can get addicted to our work too.
For example, one of my clients is responsible for mergers and acquisitions in a pharmaceutical company. His role involves high levels of stress when negotiating a deal. The process is combative and adversarial with long hours and high stakes.
The job is too stressful for most people with a high turnover in the industry. For other people, such as my client, they are addicted to the rush of doing a deal.
As a result, he has extremely high levels of stress and little motivation to change his behaviour.
In saying this, I want to make the point that stress isn’t always a bad thing.
Just as bones and muscles need physical exercise to stay strong, we also need certain amounts of stress to stay healthy. It’s only problematic when we have too much stress and too little recovery.
Click here to read insight #1 — one person’s stress is another person’s recovery.
Click here to read insight #2 — life is more stressful than work.
Click here to read insight #3 — introverts should be more introverted.
Click here to read insight #4 — culture eats recovery for breakfast.
Click here to read insight #5 — exercise isn’t always good for you.
Click here to read insight #6 — senior leaders are not more stressed.
Click here to read insight #7 — the power of purpose.
Click here to read insight #8 — numbing out from stress.
Tomorrow I will share insight #10 — rest doesn’t mean recovery.
