What If Stress Is A Choice?

And if it is, what are you choosing?

AI is dominating every conversation right now: in teams, in companies, and in headlines.

But the more time I spend thinking about how engineering leadership is changing, the more convinced I am that the fundamentals matter more, not less.

Stress management is one of those fundamentals. Without it, none of the rest works. Not the AI strategy, not the productivity gains, not the team you’ve spent years building.

Today I’m pleased to welcome Artur Henriques to TIE. Artur writes The Long Missing SoW here on Substack, where he shares practical frameworks for IT leaders, the kind of insights you can put into practice straight away.

When we first spoke about collaborating, we chose this topic deliberately. Stress doesn’t always get the attention it requires in leadership writing, and Artur’s perspective is honest about what it actually feels like. It certainly resonated with me and I’m sure it will with you, too.

Now, over to Artur!

Stress is an inside job

Stress, each person deals with it differently.

It is very challenging to give one recipe that fits all use cases. In my view, stress is an internal reaction to how we perceive a certain event or how we manage expectations about a specific episode.

A person who cares little about their position and role won’t experience the same levels of stress as someone who gives their all.

Stress affects each of us differently, and the best way to learn how to handle it is to read and listen to accounts from multiple perspectives until we find one that resonates with us.

What is stress, after all?

I remember talking about this subject with some co-workers one day, and I stated my view that stress is an internal trigger. The table almost caught fire.

Everyone else insisted that stress comes from external episodes and events.

But is it only that, really?

If your house is paid off, you have no mortgage, and you have a reasonable amount of savings to withstand a few years without working, your boss’s paranoia becomes much easier to handle.

The same applies when someone asks for a gigantic task to be delivered at record speed. Some people can remain factual and pragmatic about the expectations and the reality of the task. Stating beforehand what can actually be delivered. Another person might lose sleep trying to accomplish the impossible.

Yes, events trigger stress, but I believe that stress is an internal response to how we perceive and deal with difficult situations. Sometimes we cannot prevent something bad from happening, but we can learn to react better to events outside our control.

The Wake-Up Call

I am lucky enough to have led and delivered a portfolio of challenging projects and initiatives over the years. I was also lucky to have found great people, and together as a team, we managed to do great things.

I have delivered projects and portfolios that C-level executives didn’t believe were possible within the proposed strategies and timelines. Yet, I never felt a breaking-point moment over those challenges.

However, my big, eye-opening experience with stress happened a long time ago, when I was first promoted to lead an Engineering team.

My younger self had studied hard. I had prepared myself for years to land a leadership position. Eventually, there was a major restructuring in the leadership layers at the company at the time, and my opportunity finally arose.

Along with it, I got a new manager who had a similar level of experience in leadership roles as I did: none.

He was a great guy, and he was also learning.

The difference was that I had been preparing for that moment for years, and I felt more qualified. My ideas and strategies created continuous friction with another inexperienced leader, to the point where I began to think all my effort was going to waste.

My opportunity was not being fulfilled as I had predicted. My initiatives were being blocked, and I lacked the arguments to fight back. I was making mistakes.

This was when my stress reached levels I had never felt before. This was when I was first introduced to insomnia.

Everyone’s Peak Stress is Different

Because stress is an internal factor, it manifests differently for everyone. I learned how my own stress presents itself.

For those reading this who have also struggled with insomnia, you understand how challenging it is to manage. Once the damage is done, it is incredibly difficult to find a “cure” to return to normal.

For others, stress manifests as physical tension that accumulates over time, and if it is never released, it can result in a myriad of physical problems.

The real challenge is developing the self-awareness to realize that things are not okay.

In my peak stress, I remember when I finally went to the doctor, she asked me, “Are you under stress at work?” I replied that I was, but I added that I didn’t consider it “challenging” or a big deal.

I was literally contradicting my own body’s response. It was affecting me so deeply that I couldn’t sleep for days.

Worse still, I was in denial. This happens in almost every case of chronic stress. It is a silent effect that takes hold of you.

How I Managed to Address It

If you are feeling the physical effects of stress, you should go to a doctor. That is what I did.

I took pills to help me sleep as an emergency measure. I didn’t see them as the final solution, but rather as the first action to address an emergency until I could figure out a definitive fix.

If you are at your peak stress level and need to regain control, see a professional to help put things back to normal. In my case, after a few nights of good sleep, I could finally reason normally and think clearly about how to fix my situation.

After months of trying to understand what was going on, I made a decision: I asked HR to move me to a different team.

This decision was not made out of despair or a bad night’s sleep. I did what was necessary to get my routine back to normal and pursue something different.

I followed my doctor’s orders to deal with the immediate fire, and once it was out, I experimented with other approaches that I will explain later.

When my decision to leave was made public, it felt like a ton of weight had been lifted off my shoulders. My stress levels decreased significantly almost immediately.

That turned out to be one of the best decisions I ever made, and my career skyrocketed afterward. Later, I found a new opportunity where I established a new activity with over 30 people reporting to me. And I aced that mission.

How I Keep My Stress Levels Under Control

This is the part where everyone works differently, but I will share my experiments and findings in case you want to try them.

Once I got my stress levels down to a sustainable level, I began researching and trying new approaches.

Meditation

One of the best methods, and one that worked wonders from the very first attempt, was meditation. This was when I learned that stress can literally leave your body through exhaling.

I attended meditation and mindfulness sessions near my work, and those sessions helped me a lot.

Eventually, the practice led me to Yoga.

Yoga

Not the fancy “dynamic flows” or whatever trendy name is used for classes today. I did Ashtanga, Hatha, Prana Vashya, and Integral Yoga. They helped me immensely because they combine meditation with a strong physical component.

Some of these practices are not just easy “stretching”. I had sessions where sweat was visibly evaporating from my body because I was working so hard.

I learned that I needed real, intense physical activity in my routine. Eventually, life happened, and because the yoga practices where I live are for a different audience, I replaced them with CrossFit.

Intense physical activity has worked wonders in keeping the effects of stress under control. While I miss the meditation aspect of yoga, I have other strategies in my arsenal now, so I don’t need it as often as before. Still, I cannot recommend meditation or yoga enough.

Hobbies

Beyond that, I learned that I need a hobby to take my mind off work.

I’ve tried theater, dancing, meetups, and everything under the sun.

Having a goal, like performing in a play in three months’ time, is a great way to push your mind away from the hurdles of work.

Most importantly, it surrounds you with different people and different experiences, which lifts a degree of stress from your life in a way that is hard to explain.

Keeping myself busy with these endeavors helped immensely. For some people, a hard stop and finding peace within an inner circle of friends and family might work better. That’s great!

Explore what works for you

What matters is finding something that shifts your thoughts away from work fixations outside of business hours.

Eventually, difficult situations become easier to handle. Conflicts still happen, but I have given myself the tools to view those challenges through a different lens. Having more experience certainly helps, as does having a set of achievements behind me.

These factors keep my mindset steady and my stress under control.

However, those improvements only happened because of what I did after work hours. That is where my “secret recipe” lies: physical activity and surrounding myself with good friends to occupy my mind with other things.

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