How do you manage stress? [Part 3]

Living abroad, balancing a 9-5 with writing, and stress

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To all my new subscribers, welcome to my publication and I’m honoured that you have joined my self-improvement journey!

This is the final part of a 3-part collaboration series where we look into the diverse experiences of stress.

If you would like to read from the extensive research post, click here.

Alternatively, here is a condensed summary of all my posts so far. ⬇️

TTB's Table of Contents [Start Here]

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Introduction

I’m grateful to have travelled to different countries and experience different cultures.

📍15th August 2023: Morocco - Ouzoud Waterfalls

I believe that travelling is essential.

It’s essential to realise that there’s a world outside of your own and for me it helps me reflect on what I’m grateful for, what I hope for, and my perspective as a black child being raised in London.

Emphasis on the ‘grateful for’ because the tendency to complain actually underpins UK culture, and I imagine its because of the severe disconnect between the expectations and the cold hard reality of living here.

Anyways, one of my aspirations is to work abroad one day; whether it is in a professional sense, like secondments, or just independent opportunities, but change is scary.

We like to remain comfortable, and the idea of assimilating to a new culture and in some cases learning a new language is a shock to the system.

As with anything though, you wouldn’t know unless you try.

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Moving country is a fresh start where we fear being alone.

In a life where so many are trying to find purpose, travelling is a fulfilling way to learn more about ourselves and the world around us.

As my guest is a YouTube creator and I am an avid YouTube consumer, I wanted to discuss this major shift in Gen Z content that that touches upon the idea of feeling alone.

Storytelling has always been key to retention, but there’s been a new wave I wasn’t familiar with prior.

The best way to compartmentalise it is to say ‘vulnerable storytelling’, but we also know that vulnerability comes with every good story.

So, to put it into perspective, it’s the type of story that you write inside of a diary, with a padlock, and its own safe.

Over the past year, this type of content paired with introspective insights has gained virality.

A lot around this genre pertains to ways of self-improving and finding purpose within yourself, and sometimes this includes undoing the conditioning reinforced by psychology-driven distractions such as social media.

To me, this new wave represents a trend that is subjugating the classic motivational video by bringing real life experience, practical insights, and realism into the fold.

This is because, community building is a staple to the longevity of creators and in this case you get a personal, intimate, relatable experience where you get to trust the person behind the story.

This is a feature that mirrors the Substack platform which in itself is a supportive community and hence alleviates the pressure caused by withholding our thoughts or feeling like we are experiencing something alone.

It is a community where you can always find a relatable writer who has been through similar experiences and shares common interests.

Therefore, it was only right I invited the person who has been there for me since the start of my journey on the Substack app.

Benjamin is an incredibly supportive person who has rightly seen exponential growth in the last year for his daily notes and powerful posts.

His writing focuses on anti-productivity which is a fitting topic to discuss stress, and he shares his experience of being an expat from the UK on his YouTube channel.

I asked of his experience of stress as an expat as well as it’s influence on his current genre of writing.

Q&A

In your writing I have found that you very much describe rationalisations against the mainstream narrative of productivity. How has stress affected your writing style and are there areas that you specifically relate to?

Yes, I’d say much of my writing pushes back against the mainstream productivity narrative because I’ve felt, quite viscerally, what happens when you internalise it too deeply.

The constant push to optimise, systematise, and squeeze more out of every hour… it wears down the soul. And in my own process, stress has shaped the voice you see now, not just as a backdrop, but almost as a co-author.

There was a time when I measured my worth in word counts, deadlines and output. But the more I worked that way, the more hollow it felt.

Eventually, stress became this dull ache in my lower back. Not just from overwork, but from a dissonance between what I believed about creativity and what I was actually doing.

That tension forced me to slow down. To write fewer, more intentional words. To stop trying to win the algorithm and instead speak to someone, not everyone.

Now, I see writing less as productivity and more as integration. A way of understanding life. Of putting conflicting parts of myself in the same room and letting them talk.

So when I write about structure, or the 9-5, or resistance, I’m not trying to teach from the mountaintop. I’m walking through the same fog, just pointing at the outlines I can make out.

The areas I most relate to are the internal ones, the negotiation between ambition and stillness, between wanting to build something lasting and not wanting to lose yourself in the process. That’s where my voice has settled: serious, philosophical, maybe a little contrarian, but always searching for something true, not just useful.

You work a 9-5, write notes daily, post every couple weeks, and recently you have started doing Substack lives. Do you ever find this difficult to balance and how important is resting and recharging?

Yes. I do find it difficult sometimes.

There’s this constant tension between wanting to build something meaningful and knowing that you can’t force it.

It’s important to integrate different parts of my life into an organic alignment. If I find myself having to cut back or restrict certain things so that I can “get more done” it’s time to take a step back.

“Substack lives” are a good example of this. I tried them out because it was a new feature and there was a lot of excitement around it. However I discovered that it drained my energy and increased my stress levels and so I decided to focus my energy purely on the writing.

Rest is an essential component of productivity. Not just in the physical sense, but mentally too. If you don’t step back, you lose sight of what you’re actually building.

It’s easy to get caught up in the grind and mistake motion for progress. That’s how you end up creating without depth. So I don’t chase some perfect version of balance.

What I try to follow is rhythm. Periods of output, Periods of reflection, periods of planning, periods of rest. It’s more sustainable, less stressful, and at least from my point of view, it creates higher quality work.

Being an expat in Germany and previously China, were there stressors you didn't expect when you made the move and are there any chronic stressors now? What would your advice be to someone leaving their home country alone?

Absolutely. When I moved to China and later to Germany, I expected culture shock, language barriers, all the usual stuff, but what I didn’t expect was how disorienting it can be to lose the subtle, invisible support systems you don’t even notice when you’re home.

Simple things like humour, ease of conversation or even just knowing how to read a room. Those things don’t always translate, and that can leave you feeling strangely isolated, even if you’re surrounded by people.

I wouldn’t say there are any chronic stressors now. In order to fully integrate into a new environment you have to evolve. Not just superficially such as learning the language or becoming culturally competent but you’re very identity has to evolve. What you feel inside. The story you tell yourself about who you are changes.

I think moving to a new country is the ultimate self development hack. You are forced to stare nakedly at your own inadequacies and either accept them or make radical changes.

It can be uncomfortable, lonely, and painful but it adds a deeper layer of richness to life, one which staying in your place of birth cannot give you.

My advice? Don’t expect it to be easy, but know that it’s worth it. Build small routines that ground you. Journal. Call home often, even if you don’t feel like it. And find something that gives you a sense of stability or familiarity. That’s what keeps you anchored when everything else feels foreign.

📍Benjamin’s Travels: The Edinburgh Skyline

A lot of your notes focus on personal reflection. Is there something you wish you knew about stress when you were an adolescent?

Yes! Honestly, I wish I’d known that stress isn’t always a signal that something’s wrong. Sometimes it just means you care. As a teenager, I saw stress as this enemy to fight off or hide, rather than something to listen to or work with.

I thought calm meant you had everything figured out, but often, calm comes after you’ve faced the discomfort, not before.

If I could go back, I’d tell myself: stress doesn’t mean you’re broken, it means you’re alive. The key is learning how to respond to it—through reflection, through movement, through creating, not trying to numb it or ignore it.

When looking at your relationship with stress, are there any glaring misconceptions that you unravelled as you got older?

I would say one big one was the idea that stress is purely negative. I used to think that if I was stressed, I was failing somehow. Like, “real” adults or “successful” people don’t get overwhelmed. But that’s just not true.

What I’ve come to realise is that stress isn’t always a sign of weakness, it’s often a sign that you’re growing, or that something actually matters to you.

Another misconception was thinking I could out-organise or out-hustle stress. I thought if I just planned better or worked harder, I could avoid it altogether. But the reality is, stress is part of any meaningful path.

What matters most is your relationship to stress. Knowing when to accept it, knowing how to recover, how to reflect, how to pace yourself. That’s what makes it sustainable, and that’s what its all about.

Reflections

As a person who’s only lived in the UK, when it came to moving abroad, Benjamin similar to Mark, pointed out that experience is the best teacher.

The romanticisation of relocating overlooks the small details which can only be understood when experiencing it yourself.

The responsibility and ownness to evolve within a new environment at the start I imagine requires a great deal of resilience and persistence.

With that shock comes the inevitable reflection on where you stand, which would be humbling but transformative at the same time.

By having non-negotiables to simplify decision-making, ground you, and see light through the storm is also a recurring theme in managing stress.

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“The constant push to optimise, systematise, and squeeze more out of every hour… it wears down the soul.”

My first idea of productivity was getting the most out of every hour, which at the time was harmless.

I only applied it when I should apply it - when hyperfocusing for the study hours I would block out.

It was in fact as I got older that my relationship with productivity became more toxic, and the urge to get the most out of each hour led to fatigue and going into autopilot.

I did indeed feel a foreboding emptiness, which in the end did lead to burnout…

Subconsciously, my reaction mirrored that of Benjamin’s reaction to cutting back or restricting things he’s doing in order to “get more done”.

Stepping back from creating a superficial and unsustainable reality aligns with a reframing of sacrifices.

The stress induced from making such sacrifices can almost be used as a toxic metric for achievement, when in fact the sacrifices are only to our own detriment.

Especially for creatives, forcing output will blind you to what the wider goal/mission is.

Just like Benjamin, I write from a place of figuring out and interpreting life as a journey rather than from a position of know-how.

For those who have followed the journey from 2024, you may have noticed that I use the word ‘productivity’ a lot less than I used to, and I asked myself why this is the case.

What could be behind this unconscious shift?

Through observation of TTB’s Table of Contents, there has been a bigger focus on looking within.

When I started writing, the time blocks I would have for writing had to be fulfilled for me to keep the rhythm of posting.

If I missed those days for writing, while I don’t chase perfection, the pressure to produce in order to stay consistent would temporarily shift my priorities, which in the end was unsustainable.

What I find interesting and a bit funny is that my focus then was more on ‘optimising approaches’ rather than ‘looking within’ and ‘exploring the bigger picture’.

Since having two weeks between posts, there is more creative freedom as I don’t have to expect the finished product immediately in the first week.

Exemplified by the post that initiated this whole series which took three weeks to write, shifting the focus from less on output to value creation has created higher quality and deeper work.

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Ultimately, how we manage stress is what is most important, where working against it is a constant uphill battle.

What you resist persists, and by trying to ignore overwhelm we create a short-term façade of keeping strong, which in the end leads to more problems due to internalising how we really feel.

Self-awareness and reframing were reaffirmed as a key part of our relationship with stress which related to Sara’s outlook on work-life balance.

The mainstream narrative of self-care counteracts the unspoken rules of managing stress and productivity that many had become accustomed to.

However, the signs of stress building up can easily go unnoticed.

Exhaustion, being easily distracted, irritable are all things that are invisible and have fed that narrative of stress we created when we were an adolescent.

Through communicating our experience we dispel the assumptions and invisible rules that we are currently in the process of unlearning.

Something that all the writers touched upon was sustainability; slowing down, reflecting and prioritising for the future ahead.

This series as a whole placed emphasis on the fundamentals and the fact that stress is in fact a personal experience.

Before reaching out to my favourite writers, I noted that through all the research articles and papers, scientific blogs, research studies… the conclusion wasn’t overly complicated or spectacular by any stretch.

It just reaffirmed the importance of foundations and clarity.

All three writers contextualised this research with their real experiences, making this a wholesome, informative, and spectacular experience if I say so myself. 👀

A massive thank you to

Sara

,

Mark

, and

Benjamin Antoine

for being my first collaborations and I hope you enjoyed the series as much as I did!

P.S.

What points resonated most throughout the series?

Reach out for more collaborations!