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You probably wouldn't want to live a stress-free life: stress is often also a source of great meaning in people's lives. Stress doesn't necessarily cause bad effects (threat response), it also causes good things (challenge response).

And the rats in these studies are usually essentially tortured (which is definitely something to avoid).

I highly recommend everyone look at the book "The Upside of Stress", the Ted Talk is here:
https://www.ted.com/talks/kelly_mcgonigal_how_to_make_stress...

"I learned the hard way that failing to have a pacing strategy can lead to disaster. We should stop treating our businesses like short sprints. Move fast; don’t break you." -- I found Dr. Sherry Walling's tips relevant not only for founders but for anyone with a desire to create a massive impact in the company. I see many people switch jobs to deal with burnout, instead of learning to pace themselves and increase their overall impact on the company they are today. I highly recommend reading this post to find some new strategies and tactics to operate within healthy limits, and buying the book The Upside of Stress by Kelly McGonigal.

Check out the book "The Upside of Stress" by Kelly McGonigal (or watch her TED talk - https://www.ted.com/talks/kelly_mcgonigal_how_to_make_stress...). It helped me understand how different sources of stress were affecting me and how I was framing those situations.

There are multiple ways stress can affect you, and only some of them should be viewed negatively when they pop up at inappropriate times. In many cases, stress can be viewed positively as the body warming itself up to take on a challenge, rather than a response to a threat. Those things feel physiologically similar, so your brain doesn't always interpret them correctly. The goal is removing/reframing the stressors that make you feel threatened, and selecting for the ones that make you feel challenged.

There's burnout and there's burnout.

Some burnout is basically your mind slowly coming to associate some (class of) activity with negative feelings eventually building up to the point where it basically becomes an emotional net negative to the degree you can't push yourself to work on it anymore and you (have to) disengage.

Then there's the kind of burnout where you've been marinating your nervous system with extreme amounts of stress hormones for extended periods of time (months or more likely years on end) and when your performance starts to degrade due to this, as it inevitably will, you keep pushing yourself to maintain your expected standard of productivity up to the point where your body is basically trashed and your productivity suddenly drops precipitously to virtually non-existent levels which generally takes years to recover from.

The former is mostly psychological; the latter starts psychologically but most definitely crosses into the territory of the physical.

As an aside; the book The Upside of Stress [1] is a really good book on dividing 'good stress' which basically trains up your body and 'bad stress' which bathes you in damaging hormones. Many burnouts happen when someone with a high workload unwittingly switches from good to bad stress.

[1] https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/23281639-the-upside-of-s...