Prefatory note: This post is not for those that have found your calling, love your job, and stroll into work with a smile on your face. It’s for the rest of us – maybe around 80 or 90% – that would rather be doing something else with our lives, and, in particular, for those of us that struggle with work stress and are beginning to burn out, with all the attendant mental and physical health problems. As you read this, you might think that my job was a bad fit for me, and you’d be right. But it wasn’t until the last five years that the job stress caught up to me. Before then I was doing okay. So, the lesson? Financial independence should be on your radar even if you enjoy your work, because one day your work world might start to unravel.

Thoughts on Stress and Burnout

There’s no doubt that chronic stress kills – read Robert Sapolsky’s Why Zebras Don’t Get Ulcers for all the myriad reasons why. By far, job-related stress has been the worst part of the Rat Race for me, and I bet many of you feel the same way. I’ve been prone to anxiety most of my life, which no doubt made it worse, especially the last five years when the job responsibilities and pressure really started to build. While my colleagues and the company I worked for were supportive, it was the pressures of the industry that did me in, and there was no changing that.

So, after a 13-year career in consulting, the chronic, slowly-building work stress had finally caught up to me. I was burned out, my mojo long since gone, and so I left my job. My last day of work was Friday, September 12, 2014.

At first light the following Monday morning, I started a slow road trip from my place in Tucson, Arizona, through northern New Mexico, and eventually on to Colorado, en route to visit with my brother and his family in Denver. Although it took a year, and a long tapering of residual work stress, my mojo is back. I’m quick to smile, at ease with the world, life is good, and I again feel that anything is possible. I began to heal that first night camping in the high country of the White Mountains near the Arizona/New Mexico border, drifting off to sleep among the pines – a godsend after the last few years of worsening stress-related insomnia.

Let’s Back Up

But let me back up, to the last few years on the job. While the company I worked for, and, in particular, my work friends and colleagues, were great, the industry I was in made for a near-perfect environment for chronic stress. What’s a near-perfect stress environment? There are four components: (1) it’s unpredictable; (2) you have little to no control; (3) the stakes are high, and; (4) there’s no end in sight.

I worked in the environmental consulting world – think industrial Superfund sites, not Nature Conservancy – managing numerous projects for clients. First, the work was unpredictable. Each morning I’d walk into the office not knowing whether a voicemail or email was waiting for me with bad news that would send me into crisis mode for the day, week, or longer. It happened a lot, and it got to the point where my stomach would flip at the sight of a blinking voicemail alert on my phone, or the sound of an email chime. Given the nature of most projects, I had some, but not enough, control over how the work unfolded or the outcome, and the stakes were high, with millions of dollars in the balance, among other high stakes involved in the work. Finally, looking out in the distance, I could see the chronic work stress getting worse, not better. Like I said, a perfect stress cocktail, in particular for someone like me that’s already wired to be anxiety prone.

And it wasn’t the number of hours that I worked, but rather the psychic toll of having things on my mind all the time. Work stress can cast a long shadow. I know it did for me. Weekends and the occasional day off don’t help if you spend them restless, in suspense and fretting over work-related stuff that hangs over your head like a cloud. As the Stoic philosopher Seneca said 2,000 years ago, “You have to lay aside the load on your spirit. Until you do that, nowhere will satisfy you.” This captured my situation perfectly.

Wired and Tired

When you’re young and starting out, adrenaline will power you through work stress – some of us are even hooked on the adrenaline high. Long hours in a pressure cooker will leave you feeling wired and tired, but with your soul still intact. But over time, if the pressure doesn’t let up – or if your ability to handle it doesn’t improve – it will start to catch up with you. At this point, your stress response is always turned on – a bad thing. Here’s why: our stress response is designed to keep us alive during a short-term crisis – being chased by a mountain lion or a mugger – and it works beautifully. But if it’s turned on all the time, just by the mere thought of stressful situations (and this is how most of us live, in particular due to work stress), then all the myriad physical, biochemical, and hormonal changes of the stress response, so necessary for short-term events, begin to break us down and do us much more harm than good.

Outstripping Your Ability

Eventually, work stress begins to outstrip your ability to deal with it. And so begins the inevitable decline of both mental and physical health as burnout takes hold. For me, the symptoms included: fatigue that was not relieved by sleep; growing insomnia; a flat, gray mood; restless; no peace of mind or sense of well-being; lack of interest in nearly everything – even things that were once important to me; low to non-existent confidence; creeping hypochondriasis; an inability to deal with stress, no matter how trivial; and a tunnel vision where I focused internally on the stress, the job, and health worries, while all but ignoring my friends, family, nature, arts, music – anything, really, that used to get me out of bed in the morning. My mojo was gone, and I wasn’t really living, just putting one foot in front of the other, struggling to get through the day.

Root Cause

Make no mistake, you can’t power through burnout or wait it out. It will only get worse unless you finally do something about it. Like most of us, I went to the Internet to find information on stress and burnout. I found quite a lot, but here’s the thing – none of it helped. What I found was the usual advice: meditate, do yoga, exercise, give thanks, try not to think about work outside the office, get a good night’s sleep, etc. But none of it really said what needed to be said, which is this: If you want to get better, you must deal with the root cause of your stress – the proverbial 800-pound gorilla. So, you must drop everything else in your life (as best you can) and address your 800-pound gorilla, whatever it may be. Ignoring it and trying to cure your stress with, say, yoga, is just swatting at gnats hovering around it.

My 800-Pound Gorilla

My 800-pound gorilla was the job and its pressure and stress. It took me a couple years of mental ping-pong and worsening health problems before I finally decided to pull the plug. During this time, the cognitive dissonance – simultaneously thinking that I should stay at the job and also that I should leave and do something else – was crushing. It went away as soon as I made the decision to leave, and I slept well for the first time in a long time. (For most of us, how well we sleep is the best indicator of our overall stress level, and whether we need to make structural changes to alleviate it. Whatever keeps you up at night is likely your 800-pound gorilla).

My Younger Self to the Rescue

How did I kill my work stress? Financial independence. At the start of my career, I got lucky and ran across two books at the library that changed the course of my life – Your Money or Your Life by Vicki Robin and Joe Domingues and The Four Pillars of Investing by William Bernstein. Do yourself a favor and read them. Your Money or Your Life gave me insight on tracking expenses and the advantage of keeping them low, while the Four Pillars book is the best I’ve ever read on investing. These books and the Mr. Money Mustache and JL Collins blogs were my road map on how to reach FI.

During my career, I worked hard and maximized my income, lived modestly, and saved and invested the difference in a handful of low-cost index funds. Reaching FI was easier than I thought, and predictable, for the simple reason that math is predictable. So by the time I was burnt out and left work in 2014, after 13 years of saving an average of about 50% of gross pay, I was at FI, and a whole new world opened up to me. I had just turned 43. And was it worth it? Yes, more than I can express on the page. I should also note that before I left work, I was able to sign up for decent, affordable health insurance in about 30 minutes through the Affordable Care Act exchange.

Looking Into the Future

During that first night camping in the White Mountains, I wondered how things would unfold. After all, I had just left a secure, well-paying gig with benefits. Based on the media and conventional wisdom, the sky should fall and crush me. There’s no possible way I could live without a fire hose of income and corporate benefits, right? Not really. As soon as I lit out for Denver, I could feel the built-up work stress begin to seep out of my system. And while it took about a year for the residual stress to finally dissipate, the healing process began on day one. My tunnel vision has expanded and my friends and family, interest in art, music, books, hiking, camping – life in general – came back into view. All the mental and physical problems – the fatigue, insomnia, gray mood, hypochondriasis, everything – just faded away without any conscious effort. With renewed confidence came interest in making plans for the future, creating a vocation rather than finding a job. FI provided me with the breathing room I needed to recover and heal from work stress without the burden of money worries, and as a result I got my mojo, and health, back.

New Worlds

New worlds have also opened up. An example: just about the time I left work, some friends of mine in southeast Utah needed some caregiving help. From October 2014 through the end of 2015, I split my time between the Four Corners area and my place in Tucson. I made new friends, wandered miles of hiking trails in beautiful red rock country, explored Anasazi ruins, and watched the sun set over stunning vistas. I also made a little income helping them, enough to cover my modest annual expenses. So, while I could have covered my costs with a 3% withdrawal rate, there was no need to draw from my investments. It was the best year I’d had in decades.