Advice on preventing/managing burnout
The best advice I received about life in general was from AJ Cook during #ILFest. The advice was to stop holding myself to such high standards – instead simply be 100% present.
That helped me because, unfortunately, I’m a perfectionist, and even before becoming a mother, I always felt like I needed to do more, be better, and nothing was good enough. As a mother, I have even less time, but I have to identify that I can only do so much and the rest will take time or require additional resources.
When working in Incident Response, you have very little time to gather a lot of information and digest it. If distracted, the job became almost impossible, so I would focus. However, that means hours to days at a time focused on something. I never stopped.
So whilst the advice of “be 100% there” applies, remember that also means to your capability. Taking time off to be at home, alone, on holiday, and to be there for your own needs, your family – not just work.
Burnout occurs when we aren’t able to balance our work and personal life. In InfoSec, many of us tie our identity to our job. In return, we then become our job, stop having a life outside of InfoSec, and lose our other identities.
We also work in a high-stress industry that runs 24/7, with the expectations to work all hours and days, if necessary. This reduces time spent on our personal lives and the people in our life outside of work. Thus, the balance of work and personal life cannot occur because we have a broken foundation that leads us to burning out incredibly fast.
The best advice on dealing with burnout is to recognize it’s not just about self-care. It’s recognizing that we work in an industry that seemingly discourages flexibility and balancing. It's also an industry that is heavily invested in being reactive versus preventative. In exchange, it continues to place us in a repetitive burnout loop.
This industry pressures those in it to focus all of their waking hours on security. This is a dangerous mentality to have. On the contrary, I have always felt it’s critically important to resist this pressure and pursue hobbies and interests outside of the security world.
If you never take time to reset your brain and use other parts of it, fatigue will build and build. I firmly believe it’s critical to find balance.
Although I am involved in security organizations and events even outside of my work, I also paint and compete in Olympic weightlifting. When I do these things, I don’t think about work – at all.
By turning the technical side of my brain off during these other pursuits, I give my brain a break.
Because I do this, I’m able to come back to work the next morning refreshed and better able to approach projects with new perspective. Whether it’s taking time to focus on being fully present with family, pursuing a hobby, or even just going for a walk, time away is critical to mental health and well-being.
Security is a marathon, not a sprint. I love achieving goals and doing things to the best of my abilities. Whenever you're talking about security, that is a massive change management experience, which means that doing better than what you did yesterday is sometimes good enough.
There are occasions where you need to push and really demand more from your team, and that's okay. Healthy friction in any organization is what supports us in growing.
Above all, try to make it fun. Cybersecurity, and our digital threat landscape, and all of the risks that are out there to be mitigated or reduced, can be so overwhelming. There's a lot of fear-mongering in this space.
However, my experience with anyone in information security has been awesome. These people who are drawn to these types of roles often are unique personalities, possessing a ton of knowledge, and they truly want to help and serve both organizations and people. We might as well have a good time while we're doing it. Otherwise, what are we here for?
Learn mindfulness. Not only does it help empty your head of stressful thoughts, it helps you stay in balance. It’s important to make time, understand how you feel in yourself, and listen to your mind and body. If you become skilled in that, the chances of you overlooking that you are about to burn out reduce massively. There are some great apps out there that can help, such as Calm and Headspace.
It’s really important that people make happiness one of their biggest priorities when it comes to a job in cybersecurity. This should be your number-one goal. I think if more people focused on what they enjoy, we might see a reduction in burnout across the industry and generally in life.
A few other tips I can share to help with mental health:
