Stress in the IT industry – effective ways to cope with it

The pressure to deliver projects at express speed and the market cooling make stress in the IT industry a daily reality, even for the most resilient experts. If you feel that constant crunch and anxiety about job stability are leading you straight to IT burnout, it is time to implement concrete remedial strategies. In this article, you will learn how to deal with stress at work by distinguishing between motivating eustress and health-damaging distress. Discover breathing techniques and communication methods with your leader that will allow you to effectively protect your work-life balance.

Understanding the causes of stress in IT work

The IT industry is very demanding – either clients are knocking down the doors in excess (as was the case at the outbreak of the Covid-19 pandemic), or there are times when there is less work and companies have to struggle to sign binding contracts and win more lucrative projects. Right now, we are observing exactly this type of market cooling, although specialists’ salaries are still rising, which can additionally cause pressure from the employer to deliver perfect solutions quickly. Given the aforementioned cooling, many IT companies in 2023 decided to cut costs and limit budgets, for example, for employee benefits; many of them also carried out the unpleasant process of layoffs. Sometimes this happened without prior warning to employees and IT experts, who collectively found out about the need to look for a new job. This is usually stressful, even if we do it of our own volition, despite the fact that IT is still one of the best-paid professions in the country and it seems that one can pick and choose from offers. At the moment, clients’ approach to what they are looking for is also changing – while previously large projects and personalized applications mattered, preferably built from A to Z by one provider with a choice of many competencies needed in one place (specialists in business analysis, solution design, cybersecurity, data science, programming, …), now clients are rather turning to experts with a request to optimize their existing systems (source: SoDA at the SoDA Conference 2023). This is associated with companies’ lower willingness to spend large amounts of money on IT solutions, and in the final analysis, it translates into a decline in engagement and satisfaction among employees who see that organizations have more trouble than before in acquiring important and large projects. If we already have such a demanding project and, in addition, the employer cares more about potential profit than about their employees, we may be dealing with so-called crunch. What is crunch? It is most often associated with loud and reprehensible situations in the GameDev market – that is, the branch of the IT industry that creates computer games. Crunch is a period of long-term, intense work with overtime and often also without days off due to pressure and the goal of completing a given project on time (where the deadline can be simply absurdly short or there are errors in management and planning). An example could be the production of the game Cyberpunk 2077 in 2020 – programmers and specialists reported that they worked 100 hours a week for many weeks. All this contributes to an increase in stress levels, which is difficult to fight, but of course, it is possible to do so – it is important that we are aware that we are stressed and that we find techniques and methods that suit us and work well for us.

Effective stress management techniques

As we mentioned above, it is very important to realize that you are stressed. Conscious thinking about stress is the first step to reducing it and dealing with it… However, we must also remember that we will never eliminate stress from life completely. We can only react to it according to its intensity and our capabilities. Importantly, stress is not always inherently bad. It is a psychophysiological reaction to what happens to us and what is important to us in some way. We distinguish two types of stress – eustress and distress. The former is able to mobilize us, gives us energy to perform a task, “pushes” us forward and motivates us, so it can be said that it is “good” stress. The latter… works the opposite way and we should consciously fight or avoid it, because chronic distress leads to really bad consequences for us, including health issues, which ultimately causes an increased risk of premature death. It is therefore not a trivial matter. So what should be done to reduce stress in the IT industry? After we already know that we are stressed and that it is this negative type of stress, we must find the right technique to deal with the situation. You have to decide whether you have influence over your stressor (the stimulus that causes stress) or not. If so, we should solve our problem as soon as possible to get rid of this stressor – for example, we should talk to our leader and tell them directly that we will not be able to complete part of our tasks and need support. This sounds even more stressful, but the fact is that if we choose a problem-solving strategy, we will help ourselves much more in the long run than if we pretended that the stressful issue did not exist. For our body and mind, the best thing is to quickly face the fear and completely remove the stressor. If we are in a slightly worse situation and have no influence on a powerful stressor that is beyond our control, one of the techniques is avoidance – in some situations, this is really the best strategy we can adopt. When avoidance is impossible, we can use “emotion-focused” techniques – that is, focus on activities that cause our tension level to be lower. These are very simple things – walking, physical exercise, gaming, reading, going for a massage. It is incredibly important to take care of your rest, healthy sleep, and its regularity. This is one of the most important things for our body and regeneration. Another important point is the issue of social relationships, sometimes neglected due to work duties. Psychology says directly that support from friends and family and open communication are essential to more effectively reduce stress levels. Ways to fight stress are many; some of them are universal (like social relationships, sleep, and strategies: problem-solving and avoidance), however, some we must choose for ourselves (like emotion-focused strategies or individual routines that establish our daily rhythm).

Practical exercises and relaxation methods for IT professionals

IT industry specialists, no matter how overloaded with work and deadlines, must take care of themselves and their mental health to effectively reduce stress levels on a daily basis. In addition to the strategies described above, each of us can perform special exercises that usually do not take much time and we can do them anywhere, and they can work wonders:

• Breathing exercises – the simplest watches and smartphones now have calming breathing simulators that can be turned on at any time of the day. Even a minute of such breathing can slow down the heart rate by several/a dozen beats per minute. It is important that breathing is the only thing we focus on, that the inhalation and exhalation are long, and that we take a few-second break between them.
• Stretching exercises – according to specialists, it is enough to perform them even for 10-15 minutes a day. We can use YouTube videos or apps with prepared sets, or just stretch like for a simple warm-up in PE class, focusing on every movement and how our body moves. This focus is the best “booster” in immediate stress reduction.
• Mindfulness exercises / mindfulness techniques – these have only advantages, and we only need a few minutes to perform them to support ourselves in everyday life. We also use mindfulness in the already mentioned breathing and stretching exercises, but here we also have such possibilities as “mindful eating” (very important for our health) or performing “mindful dishwashing” – this is the practice of turning burdensome duties into opportunities for mindfulness practice.
• Body scanning – a more engaging way to reduce stress, body scanning requires a bit more focus from us, but we can still perform it in office conditions – provided that no one disturbs us and we can really focus.

These are just some of the possibilities, but by introducing them into your daily life and work, everyone will see their benefits and will be able to reduce their stress level with greater ease. It must be remembered that mindfulness is not something we are born with, especially in the era of augmented reality, phones, and the internet – but practice makes perfect, and it is worth dedicating even a few minutes a day to it.

How to prevent burnout in the IT environment

Burnout in the IT industry is a medical condition that is mainly associated with time pressure and a backlog of duties, a lack of a healthy work-life balance, and poor management by leaders. Already 66.7% of technical employees describe their mental health as “very poor, poor, or deteriorated,” and over 76% feel more or less burned out, which concerns the workplace or current duties. It seems that this is unavoidable, but every employer can take steps to minimize the risk. An employee left to their own devices has no chance of dealing with burnout – that is why a direct leader and company policy play a very large role here. It happens, of course, that someone will personally seek help from their superiors, but more often they will keep their thoughts and chronic fatigue to themselves – however, their condition will likely be reflected in results or work speed, so a good leader should notice the problem and help their employee identify the causes and look for solutions. Taking care of the balance between work and private life is one of the necessary steps to take if we diagnose burnout in ourselves. At the moment when we are not able to do this in a natural way because our company does not support us in this or we are not able to resolve a conflict with a coworker, sometimes changing employers is unfortunately the only sensible solution. One of the more radical ideas is the introduction of a 4-day work week, and although most IT organizations settle with clients in man-hours and therefore it is difficult to see the financial benefits of such a solution, it is not excluded that more and more companies will at least try to check how such a solution works for them.

Psychological support and its importance for stress reduction in the IT industry

Stress reduction in the IT industry is an increasingly popular topic – many employers fortunately notice the need to take care of the work-life balance aspect in their organizations and introduce, for example:

• Meetings with a psychologist – webinars, workshops, the possibility of consultation with a therapist during working hours,
• Flexible working hours,
• Assertiveness and open communication as a must-have in teams, between leaders and employees,
• A culture of trust in the employee, while eliminating micromanagement and the associated additional stress.

If we do not feel that our employer cares about such things, and even forces actions such as crunch, sooner or later we will feel used and tired of work. Support from the organization is therefore of great importance for reducing stress in the IT industry. Fortunately, this is now also an EU requirement – a few years ago, the work-life balance directive was introduced. We can be sure that the topic will not disappear, but will be increasingly and better taken care of by IT companies wanting to take care of their experts.