Stress and bad sleep during shorter periods is not dangerous, as long as you have time to recuperate between stress periods.

But, bad sleep during extended periods is a clear sign of getting closer to a job burnout. Burned out persons have lost all energy, lost cognitive ability and cannot do anything else than sleep the entire day. They find it extremely difficult to put on clothes, take a shower or cook food. This hibernating period usually takes half a year or longer, to get over. Getting back to work is totally out of the question for another half a year. Could you afford that? Do you want to avoid getting burned out?

I have two friends who got burned out. Both are very ambitious highly educated persons with well paying jobs (they are typically the ones who get burned out). One of them took closer to a year to recover. In the end, she felt so bad when she tried to get back to her old job, she had to switch occupation and get another university degree in a totally unrelated field. The other person took over a year to recover.

If you, for an extended period, notice that the majority of nights, you awake at 03:00 am (because cortison levels spike at that time) and can not fall asleep until 06:00 am, you must do everything you can, to get back to normal sleep. Because with so much sleep deprivation, your cognitive performance will be badly affected, and in due time, your brain will melt. And that is when you get burned out.

In case of bad sleep, get back to this blog, and read how I managed to overcome bad sleep. The solution is to decrease stress. Read my posts on stress decrease.

Agressive people

What makes people irritable and aggressive is not testosterone. High levels of testosterone makes you confident and calm. What makes people aggressive, is high levels of the stress hormone cortisol. Cortisol is released if there is a grave threat. The greater the threat, the more cortisol.

So if you ever meet a very short tempered aggressive person that is a real a**hole – try to be gentle with him, because in his mind, he is under a very grave threat. Maybe his manager is a bully, i.e. he thinks he might loose his job, i.e. loose his income, home and starve. Such a situation triggers flight-or-fight mode. If he cannot flee from his manager, he has to fight. Because he can not fight his manager, he fights everybody else. Violence is a defence mechanism to fend off danger. A stressed person see danger everywhere so he is tensed up, ready to explode for even no reason at all. Everything is perceived as a threat. Gangsters are under extreme pressure because they face existential threats everywhere, they can get killed anytime by rivals. Therefore gangsters have very low barriers to extreme violence, ready to kill anyone for nothing. You can assess the stress levels of a person, by how unpleasant he is. And if he is physically violent, he is extremely stressed.