Ask HN: Why So Stressed?

Why? Because a lot of folks have bet more than just the farm. Their life savings, their careers, reputation, personal relationships, their health - everything for their respective ventures. And business, like always, remains brutal.

Not lately, always.

Suicide is an extreme form of self harm. It's very common - one of the most common forms of death, and the most common for men under 49.

Then you have a wide variety of depression, anxiety, amd stress. These problems are very common. If you include the milder end it's easily one in four people. (See eg the office for national statistics which also has this figure).

Some of that is situational. Some of that is long term entrenched behaviours and thinking. But it's very common. When you're talking to people who have very stressful work - not startup founders so much (who'll have understandable stresses) but office workers with TPS reports it's not that surprising to see people talking about it.

People aren't taught concepts like "resiliance", or how to talk to each other to spot potential problems before they get too serious, or how to seek help if help is needed.

For example: you'll often see people on HN talking about exercise as a treatment for depression, and they are convinced that it is and that we have loads of evidence for it. Exercise is almost always a good idea, and it may help someone avoid getting depression (although there are plenty of athletes with mental health problems) but the evidence for exercise as a treatment just isn't very good yet. And if it does work it's possibly not endorphins.

There are a couple of campaigns I particularly like.

Time To Change is a UK organisation that tackles mental health stigma. http://www.time-to-change.org.uk/

I particularly like the work they're doing around men. http://www.time-to-change.org.uk/talking-about-mental-health

There's another UK charity that particularly tackles male suicide: the campaign against living miserably. https://www.thecalmzone.net/

And there's an Australian org with a typically robus Australian name (which they don't censor on the website): soften the fck up: http://www.softenthefckup.com.au/

Came here to share a breathing technique I picked up a few weeks ago that helps me deal with stress called the 4-7-8 breathing method. It's promised as a go-to-sleeping technique but that didn't work 100% for me. However, it helps me feel relaxed and centered! https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gz4G31LGyog

I think it's a combination of a few things:

1. It's that post-college freak out that many many young people have ("What am I doing with my life!").

2. Many people who jump into startup life let the demands of the job strip them of their old healthy habits (like eating well, working out, drinking rarely, hanging out with friends) and this compounds their anxiety and depression.

3. It's not particularly socially acceptable to cry for help in person. While we're totally used to seeing it on HN I can't remember the last time I heard of anybody at a startup being candid with their coworkers about their depression. You can often tell it's happening to someone, but nobody talks about it. Which only makes people feel more isolated and depressed.

But all those things have been constants...nothing is new about them. Why are we seeing the posts becoming more frequent now? I think it's just that people are becoming more comfortable with expressing their feelings online. I don't think more people are stressed, just that more people are talking about it...and this is the medium in which it's okay to do that in 2015. Hopefully 2016 will be different, hopefully it will become more and more acceptable to have those conversations in person.

Why Stressed? Let me tell you why I'm stressed and since last week thinking of turning of my life.

1. It's not ok to just be a programmer who goes to office, finishes work and comes back home. 2. It's not ok to just know about few things. You need to be full-stack engineer, mediocre developers are bad as the internet says. 3. Oh what are you doing at job, real programmers leave their job and pursue your dreams. 4. Oh you don't have a dream Very bad. You need one. 5. Oh you don't have passion you must have one. Look at all the founders, genius people who have become millionaires. 6. Oh you know javascript and jquery. Yes you can learn any new framework but Do you know Angular.js? How about Node.js. 7. Oh you work only with C#. A good prgrammer needs to know python if possible haskell etc etc. 8. Oh you have worked for 5 years but do you have a blog? do you have contributions to open source, do you have github account with regular commits? No? You're not good programmer. Sorry no job for you. 9. Oh you know a bunch of things but you don't know more than those silicon valley programmers. They are genius. Why aren't you genius? 10. Oh you are approaching age 30 but you're not famous. Why aren't you. Some kid made an app, some guy created this great business...why didn't you. 11. Add the list goes on.....

I have realized even if you are good at what you do, it's not enough. You have to meet right people at right place in right time who can give publicity and credit to even your small work. That makes you look good. But people who are not at the right place at right time, they think how the hell did that guy do it. How is he now regarded as great. Then the mind goes crazy. People feel down and depressed.

I did the same. I left a perfect job. Why? Well a programmer takes risk, learns new things. After a year? I have no job, no income, I'm unhappy, depressed. Because I was chasing a mirage.

Where I work I feel stress/burned out. A lot of it is the under currents of the culture where I work. There is a lot of passive-aggressive behavior. Some senior devs are outright sarcastic and hard to deal with. I try to avoid or minimize the cross over of my work with those people. Sometimes I engineer solutions or try not to involve certain people so I can get things done quicker, in line with expectations of time taken which is always less than you need to do it properly.

I am expected to get up to speed with things in a nano-second, work on spaghetti code and break down months long projects into sub-day chunks and provide deadlines (with justification based on a plan) within a few hours. Then when inevitably the plan slips there are signals of 'disappointment' and 'how can we improve / move faster' next time.

We have a process management system that is in practice worse than any other Scrum / Waterfall I have worked with. Think getting an algorithm to schedule your work, but your boss has other ideas, but you need to keep the algo AND your boss happy.

[Insert 1000 other rants here]. You can imagine.

Anyway solution is simple. I am looking for a new job.