I'm starting to realize the work/stress correlation is strong... too much work makes me severely unhappy and eventually depressed (I'm a software engineer at a top software company). This becomes obvious during weekends (provided I don't work), vacations and periods of lower work load, where I feel my unconcious mind coming back to life.
During work, I'm trying not to dip in unhealthy coping mechanisms, like junk food, bad sex, alcohol, pain killers, or cigarettes, and I'm searching for alternatives. Here's what I found so far searching this forum:
- Arriving to work later and leaving earlier. I seriously think this isn't worth it, because there's a huge stimga and red flags directly associated with that, even if your employer is flexible and doesn't micro-manage. You need to find a way to work less by flying under the radar.
- Leave work at work, never work at home, don't think about work at home. Work from home is less rewarded, because people don't see you working so they assume the solution was simple. Promotions are based in part on apparent complexity.
- In general, never think about work unless you're at the office in front of the computer. Whenever doing something else (working out, relationship, relaxing, etc.) focus 100% on that activity.
- Only look at and answer emails unfrequently, i.e. 3 times a day (morning, early afternoon, before leaving).
- Chatting with people about light topics. This seems very important. This relaxes your mind AND puts you in a more powerful position for politics. I noticed successful people (high levels) do this seemingly excessively. When I started this job, I noticed 2-3 people always blabbering/chatting and thought "wow, they seem to be slacking, not accomplishing much", and perhaps from a code perspective it was true, but those are the people who got promoted (even twice) since then! I notice I've been the "rat" (i.e. sucker) who got his head down to work and "solve hard problems", but it doesn't go very far if you go at it alone because no one can vouch for your work...
- Exercising during lunch, long lunches with co-workers, chats, breaks/walks, etc.
- Not giving a shit in general. I see some of the most successful people are the ones who work from home 2 days a week, have 10 kids with paid paternity leave each time, commute inter-state, don't attend all meetings. It seems this invigorates them to be (or seem) even more productive on the days they are present. Some also goof around and delegate more, not imposing any high pressure work on themselves.
- Let go of career advancement
Overall, this is difficult to accomplish because as a thought worker, my mind is naturally obsessing about work all day, until I can't take it anymore and just escape via e.g. food. I'm somewhat a perfectionist, and it's hard to completely let go if something isn't solved yet.
My primary goals with these coping mechanisms would be to maintain my health/sanity, but if it can improve my performance, I'll take it.
In the past, I've been in this situation where I worked MANY hours and got nowhere (just built a maze of complexities in my mind but didn't reach any conclusions), gained weight, got stressed, etc. Then said screw it, started coming in at noon, got in the best shape of my life, just did the minimum (which turned out to be great), then gave a presentation and just because I looked/felt good, I could sense people liked me and they invited me for a return position. I think obsessing over performance leads to unhappiness but stressed people don't get promoted; managers/social people do while accomplishing nothing stressful and getting credit for other people's work because they chatted with them.