Dan brought to my attention this nice post summarizing some research on the effect of gratefulness on mood. Three groups were asked to write down a list of 5 events and to fill out a survey on their mood and health at regular intervals. One group wrote down things they were grateful for, another group wrote down things they found irritating, and the control group wrote down events of any nature.As you might expect, the grateful group had a more positive outlook than the irritating group. Beyond that, the grateful group was healthier, they got more exercise, they slept better, and so on.
"Ok fine," you say, "why is there a monkey over there?" For a while at Amazon, I was the Manager of Website Performance and Availability. Very fancy sounding title, but I liked to refer to myself as the latency monkey, because a major part of my job was to make sure the site was running fast (i.e. with low latency). Whenever something went wrong, and some chunk of the site got slow, I tracked down why and got people to fix it. Each week I wrote a report summarizing everything that went wrong in excruciating detail, and presented it to a room of directors and VPs in a weekly metrics meeting. It was as sisyphean a task as any you can possibly imagine. In a software system as large, complex and constantly changing as amazon.com, something is always going wrong; documenting failures is an endless task.
In short, my job was to make a list of irritating things each week, and I was widely regarded as having done it as well as anyone ever had. Given the present research, it's no wonder that I found this job to be the most soul-crushing work I've ever done. I totally burned out in a year, as did the person who held the job before me.
I tell you this story as a cautionary tale. Try to find work that allows you to focus on positive things. Avoid like the plague any work that focuses on negative things.
The authors of the study speculate that simply enumerating things you are grateful for might be a treatment for mild forms of depression. I suggest the opposite: enumerating things that you find irritating might cause a mild form of depression.
5 comments:
Doing a lot of software testing has a similar effect. You begin to judge all things in your life and people around you think you are a pessimist.
If your hypothesis is correct, one might expect dedicated anti-war bloggers like me to feel unbelievably
oh fuck it, BLAM
Interesting study, the power of positive thinking.
Would it be different if you also documented in your reports your successes and the parts of the site that were fast.
This way you would be able to be the latency monkey and the speed monkey at the same time.
The CEO of a local company used to come to Board Meetings and give detailed accounts of the company's problems that quarter. But he never, ever used the word "problem". He would say "opportunity" instead.
"Look at all these opportunities we have to do better," he would say.
So instead of looking at your role as fixing all of the latency problems, you might view it as a role of finding and taking advantage of endless opportunities to make Amazon run faster.
Breck said:
The CEO of a local company used to come to Board Meetings and give detailed accounts of the company's problems that quarter. But he never, ever used the word "problem". He would say "opportunity" instead.
"Look at all these opportunities we have to do better," he would say.
So instead of looking at your role as fixing all of the latency problems, you might view it as a role of finding and taking advantage of endless opportunities to make Amazon run faster.
I love being self-employed.
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