Managing Work Stress to Live Longer
At Yolife, we’re on the mission to help people live longer in good health. As this is quite ambitious, we have to keep an eye on our own health, especially in terms of stress. Chronic stress weakens your immune system, causes increased inflammation levels and, therefore, accelerates the aging process. In order to make APX an accelerator for our startup and not for our aging process, we have to manage our stress as much as our tasks.
First of all, it’s crucial that the inevitable stress you suffer from is positive, not negative. Be stressed about things that matter to you, not about those imposed on you. Even though this should be a given when you work in your own startup, at some point everything becomes so complex and so many people are involved in what you do that your to-do list might seem to come from somebody else. My personal way to turn this perspective around is to meditate every evening and spend some hours in the woods on the weekend, whenever I get the chance. This helps me to get some distance and see our startup as what it really is: the application of our very own dream on the dynamics of reality. Even though it doesn’t have the exact shape of our original dream, we are still its main source.
Another measure to counteract stress is to maintain a strong level of good health through daily habits, even though there is not much time for it. Do intermittent fasting on every workday. Only eat vegan or vegetarian during the week. Come to work by bike and do strength training at home 1–3 times a week before work. Take cold showers everyday. Don’t eat too late and try to get at least seven hours of sleep per night. All of these measures don’t take a lot of additional time, but make me way more resilient to high stress levels. In good health, problems become challenges, complexity becomes beauty.
Finally, a proven buffer for stress is social life. If you work until late, however, the temptation to gravitate towards your couch afterwards while avoiding any further interaction is quite big. You have to make an extra effort at the end of the day to meet your friends, and in that moment, it can feel like Mount Everest to climb. My trick is to schedule get togethers with my friends already the week before, so that I’m already programmed and kind of obliged to do it. Because afterwards, I’m always so glad having met them no matter how exhausted I felt. There is no replacement for social fuel.
Many founders work on weekends. I don’t (unless hell breaks loose). Often, I don’t even turn on my phone or computer. I try to give my senses as much reality as possible. Because trying to recover from screen work with screen entertainment is like getting over a hangover by smoking weed. It feels good at first, but only exhausts another energy storage of yours.This is my survival regimen through the at times extremely stressful startup journey. Stay on top of the world whatever happens — because it’s the world you and your team members created.
If you want to see in how far your stress levels impact your lifespan, download Yolife app for free.
