Move Fast and Break Things: The Arousal System
Welcome to the “Insomnia in the Tech Industry” series! If you’re a professional in the tech industry with trouble sleeping, you’re in the right place.
During this series I’ll be sharing stories from a variety of tech workers who’ve been in your shoes, as well as info from other industry professionals like Health Tech CEOs, Psychiatrists, Sleep Specialists, and Sleep Researchers. Together we’re disabling the firewall that protects this topic to discover why sleep is so elusive, what factors in tech industry culture contribute to insomnia, and what you can do to create your own sleep algorithm.
Pace and Pressure
Ed Finkler is a Senior Software Engineer at Ziff Davis, and is also the founder of Open Sourcing Mental Illness (OSMI, also known as Open Sourcing Mental Health), a non-profit, 501(c)(3) corporation dedicated to raising awareness, educating, and providing resources to support mental wellness in the tech and open source communities. By sharing the story of his own struggles as an experienced tech worker with ADHD and anxiety, he’s opened the conversation for tech workers to start acknowledging their struggles.
Ed believes strongly that sleep was the pivotal feature that set up him for successfully navigating his other mental health concerns.
“I’d feel a lot of fatigue in the daytime, and then suddenly late at night, it felt like I got a big burst of energy, and I couldn’t fall asleep. My mind's engaged in other stuff and won’t let me fall asleep. That has made it very disordered, and I've had to really work to change that because I was essentially non-functional. Like, if I didn't get better sleep, I was not going to be able to keep my job. I was not gonna be able to function in society."
“You can be an expert in something and it can not matter in two years. It changes that fast!”
Ed cites how quickly the industry evolves and how much pressure there is to keep up as one of the things keeping him up at night, and influencing others to leave the industry altogether. “I think this is what gets a lot of people to leave, get out of doing IC work or straight programming work. Observationally, concepts haven't always changed a whole lot, but the nomenclature changes all the time.”
“You can be an expert in something and it can not matter in two years. It changes that fast! It can feel like you invest in a technology, but if you invest in the wrong one… I spend two or three years, four years getting really good at that. Maybe I go to college to get a degree or grad degree for that. And it turns out we actually don't do that anymore. Nah, Microsoft canceled it.” ¯\_(ツ)_/¯
Ed voices a primary source of fear and anxiety that came up in almost every tech worker I’ve spoken with.
Oscar, Tech Manager at an engineering firm, says this keeps him up too. “People in technology make the mistake of thinking ‘If I can do this then I'm set for life.’ Absolutely not. The fact is, when I was a student in 2009 you could get a CompTIA A+ certification, and that was gonna guarantee you $50,000 - $60,000 right out of school. Today, you got middle school kids that are getting that certification. And even that certification now is getting you barely into the $30,000 range. The whole world is shifting with technology.”
He worries about giving his employees enough support for them to do the amount of constant learning required to grow in their career and not have to fear losing their jobs to AI.
Arjun, Senior Marketing and Business Development Manager at Infosys, feels this pressure too, and knows there’s not time allotted for him to do this learning on the job. When asked about his sleep difficulty, he directly identifies the tech industry as a main player, “One of the main factors is the tech industry, right? Because it's so cutthroat and there's so much happening on a day-to-day basis. It’s tough to keep up with the new technologies that are coming up. The minute you master one it’s already become obsolete. Then when you're trying to learn something extra, you can't actually do it on the time you're clocking, right? You have to do it outside of that time, because that's personal growth for you."
“I feel almost like I’M the computer sometimes.”
Ken, Senior Graphics Engineer with Axis Games, echoes the same sentiment. “When I went to college, what I do now did not exist. Like the technology just did not exist at all. Especially with games and graphics it's an area that changes so fast and it's a lot to stay on top of. That's part of the job is always having to keep yourself informed and educated about all the newest stuff that's going on."
He feels the pressure to keep a fast pace is not only an industry factor, but also a personality factor for him. “For me, it's really hard to slow down. It's very uncomfortable. Whether I’m working or gaming it's always ‘go go go’ until I'm done. I feel almost like I'm the computer sometimes where I'm trying to solve everything all the time and eventually that's gonna burn out.”
This same pressure exists on the sales end too. Ronnie, Sales Executive at Salesforce, knows it keeps him from sleeping well. “It’s the pace of, and the pressure in the business world. It’s hard to shut your brain off when you know you're expected to run at such a fast pace at all times.”
“Salesforce is one of the largest enterprise software companies that exists today. Our innovation cycle is significant where we're constantly acquiring or delivering new capability. And the expectation is that as we improve our capability, we're selling that capability. With the hyper growth rates and the valuations that come in the software space, the expectation of the market is that you constantly need to be growing at ridiculous rates. If this year we did better than last year, doesn’t matter, we’re expected to do even more.”
Ronnie calls this pressure, “performance culture”, and for him it takes his original drive and motivation for the work and transforms it into work that clashes with his values. “My mentality was always, I want to help people. But if you never are given the time and you're never reinforced to actually help your customers, you just become what I would never want to be, which is a slimy salesperson that's always just trying to take, take, take versus give, give, give and serve. It causes me to wrestle in my conscience and that ultimately erodes peace. Then if you don't have peace, it's hard to have rest. If I were to describe the cycle I've lived in the last 20 years of technology sales, that's it. The pressure to take versus give".
The Arousal System
You’ve heard all these professionals connect this pressure and fear to their sleep struggle, but let’s go deeper into sleep science to understand why these are connected.
Our sleep is primarily regulated by two biological processes, the Homeostatic Sleep Drive, and the Circadian Rhythm. I talked about the Circadian Rhythm in “Free Running in Tech: The Circadian Rhythm”, and will discuss the Homeostatic Sleep Drive in future, but there’s a third process at play called the Arousal System. This is the emergency break for the first two processes. Without intervention those first two work perfectly on their own. The arousal system is like the automated trigger, built in to override the other two on the off chance that we need to stay awake.
The ‘automation’ is triggered by strong emotions like fear, anxiety, sadness, or sometimes a physiological state like exhaustion or stress. You may have also heard it called the stress response, or the Fight, Flight, Freeze response. If we’re afraid, anxious, or stressed, the brain assumes that we’re in danger and keeps us awake so we can remain alert to possible threats by activating the Sympathetic Nervous System. It releases stress hormones, enacts physiological changes (like heart racing, muscles tightening), and sends out a burst of energy so we’re prepared to run, hide, or protect ourselves.
This worked really well for cave men who needed to protect their families from predators, but it doesn’t work so well for us modern cave men who don’t encounter as many physical threats as we do mental/emotional threats (like job loss, failure, disappointment, embarrassment, etc).
How You Can Override The Arousal System
The key to sleeping well when the arousal system is in overdrive is either to reprogram it, or reboot it. Reprogramming it, aka Cognitive Restructuring, means changing how our brain interprets the world as safe or unsafe, and this has a lot to do with our thoughts. We’ll learn about that another time.
The other option, if our brain’s programming has misinterpreted a scenario as unsafe and triggered the arousal system automation, is rebooting. This doesn’t mean turning the brain off, it actually means slowing the body down by re-engaging the Parasympathetic Nervous System (lower heart rate, relaxation of muscles). Here are a few ways I teach tech workers to reboot:
Tactical Breathing
Breathe deeply and slowly into the lower abdomen
Place a hand on the chest and on the belly and focus on only the belly hand moving
Pay attention to the sensation of relaxation in your muscles as you breathe out
Imagery
Visualize with great detail a pleasant, calm scenario.
Focus on describing to yourself the scenario using the 5 senses
This is the same practice athletes use when preparing to perform their skills
Ronnie’s been using these with success, “I've been using a strategy for even deep breathing, and trying to remove the stress from my mind before I go to sleep.” And you can too.
If you’re ready to sleep better click below to schedule a free consultation.
If these stories connect with you, stay tuned for future articles on topics like #personality #perfectionism #introversion #COVID #pandemic #hyperfocus #gaming and much more. Subscribe below to be notified when new articles are released!
