software development | Technology | thought leadership
Welcome to Create Impact, a new series from Aviture focused on the topics that inspire our engineers to innovate. In each article, an Aviture team member will take you on a deep-dive into a subject they’re passionate about, showing you the thinking behind cutting-edge engineering advances, the latest UX trends, development theories, and other unique topics that enable Aviturians to embrace the Art of the Possible for our clients.
In this inaugural post, we’re spotlighting Senior Software Developer Art Doler. Art has been a software engineer for 17 years and an Aviturian for the past 7 years. He is an advocate for talking openly about mental health and psychology in the technical world, topics which he has discussed on the global stage as a speaker at events such as NDC Oslo, Devoxx UK, and Techorama, and closer to home at Nebraska.Code and KCDC. He spends a lot of time thinking about how we program and why we program, and about the tools, structures, cultures, and mental processes that help and hinder us from our ultimate goal of accomplishing amazing things.
Keep reading for a look at mental health for engineers that applies to anyone in any workplace, especially those transitioning back to an in-office set-up from a remote or hybrid environment, as well as what organizations can do to create a safe environment for speaking about mental health issues.
I got interested in mental health because I didn't have a choice.
Like a lot of people who become a therapist or get deep into psychology, I’ve grappled with my own brain my entire life. I've had to pay attention to the way my brain works in order to help me deal with issues that arise when I behave in ways that don't mesh with what other people expect or the way the world wants me to operate.
I’m hardly alone in my experience: 1 in 4 people in the US will receive a mental health diagnosis during their lifetimes. Many more will suffer alone, and that suffering can be exacerbated by high-stress environments like software engineering.
In an ideal, supportive, healthy environment, you can reach out for help, or work to find solutions when you notice something’s going on inside your head. In a not-so-healthy environment, the behaviors can build on themselves, and then your family and work life both just go to hell. This spiral can take the form of behavioral problems or relationship conflict, and it leads to a terrible time for everyone involved.
At the heart of this mess lies a fundamental misunderstanding about human thought. Think of your brain as running two different processes at the same time. There's the conscious self, which psychologist Daniel Kahneman called “System 2” in his book Thinking, Fast and Slow. Kahneman describes System 2 as “the conscious, reasoning self that has beliefs and makes choices, and decides what to think about and what to do.” Other psychologists have referred to System 2 as the “intentional self,” which is a term I find a little more readily graspable.
And then you have the unconscious self, or System 1, which according to Kahneman has the job of “effortlessly originating impressions and feelings.” This is the autonomous self, the portion of your brain that does its job without any input from you, and without you really noticing it’s doing it. It's a whole bunch of running processes that occur at an unconscious level.
You'll hear people say things like “lizard brain” to describe this, but that’s really a misunderstanding of what these systems are. There's no one physical area of your brain that represents either System 1 or System 2 — your whole brain gets in on the act.
The autonomous self really shines at thinking fast and keeping you alive - in life-or-death situations, these unconscious processes focus you on the important things like avoiding predators or identifying dangerous situations. The intentional self is the champion of thinking things through – with it, you navigate complex situations and work with abstractions…like programming languages.
Humans evolved with these two selves working together to get us through everything the world threw at us. But the key thing to remember is that these days, most people don’t experience life-or-death scenarios anywhere near as frequently as our ancestors...but that evolutionary adaptation is still there. The autonomous self is still part of us, and it’s ready to take over when, say, we feel threatened at work, or when conflict arises within our ingroups, or when something happens in our home life that we focus on or stress over.
The Two Systems at Work
There’s a curious interplay that happens between these two selves. Think about times when you’ve gotten frustrated with somebody, so you responded angrily for the emotional satisfaction. Logically, you understood that the response would probably not be great for you, but in the moment the intentional self didn’t want to or couldn’t override the underlying urge.
Here’s the thing, and this is the key: System 2, the intentional self, takes energy to use. Quite a lot of it. Consciously considering every thought is functionally exhausting, and it will wear you out. At some point, you’ll start falling back to the thing that gives you the easy answers: the autonomous self. In fact, thinking consciously uses so much energy that when you ask your intentional self a question, your brain will often direct your autonomous self to respond instead, and it won’t tell you it did it.
In those moments, your intentional self has a chance to intervene. When the autonomous self provides an answer, you can instead choose to override that answer with something else – you can opt to swallow that angry comment, or to rethink your choice to buy into that timeshare. But when we’re tired, overworked, or outside stresses push on us, or even when we’re just plain paying attention to something else, it becomes a lot harder to examine what the autonomous self is up to. Instead, we take the easy way out, and our intentional self hops on board the thought or the feeling. “Oh, that's what we're doing?” it says. “I guess I’m along for the ride!”
And everybody experiences that! It’s the way that brains work. Everybody does things they regret; everybody does things that we’d call dumb. You cut someone off in traffic or argue with your spouse about something trivial. You fall for a dumb phishing email, or you buy something that’s totally not your color because there were only 3 left in stock and 2 people had the item in their carts! These things don’t make you stupid, they make you human.
Where this all intersects with mental health is that the more stressed we are, the more things we have to keep track of, the stronger our emotions…the more we just ride with the thoughts and feelings our autonomous self provides us because we have less mental space to examine them. This can manifest in any number of ways at work: you might react angrily when your output is questioned, turn projects in late, or find yourself unprepared for a meeting so you overcompensate by talking over everybody throughout.
Grappling with a mental health diagnosis can mean that not only does your intentional self have fewer resources to check your autonomous self, but those unconscious processes put out problematic thoughts and feelings more often. This is one of the key things I’ve picked up in my own journey of trying to understand my brain. It helps me understand my own behavior and enables me to try to work with myself instead of against myself. I was forced into this journey of discovery, but the lessons I’ve learned can help anybody.
Because here’s the thing — it doesn’t have to be a mental health diagnosis at the root of the problem. You could find yourself in these situations if one of your parents develops cancer, or your pet suffers an accident, or even if you simply find yourself with insomnia for several nights in a row.
In one of my talks, I tell a story about an old coworker of mine who used to fall asleep in his chair. And not discreetly, either; we're talking full head back in his desk chair, snoring. Everyone else made fun of the guy behind his back about it, and unfortunately, not being as emotionally mature at that time, I joined in.
But nobody ever asked him what was going on. Nobody ever asked him if anything was wrong, or if we could help.
Psychological Safety and a Healthy Work Environment
To address an issue like the ones described above, we need to adopt compassionate and inclusive practices that recognize the whole of a person at work. A great start is learning to employ a mindset known as “cognitive empathy.” Though it sounds like it’s just thinking about other people’s emotions, it’s actually a practice of recognizing that different people think differently from each other — whether that’s because of differences in how they grew up, what they value, or even how their brain works “under the hood.”
With cognitive empathy, you recognize that simply because someone else thinks in a different way than you, it doesn’t mean they’re automatically wrong. There’s any number of reasons why someone could come to a different conclusion, and exploring those differences can greatly benefit our jobs, whether in the form of more creative and resilient technical solutions or, at the very least, a workplace where people feel like they can contribute their own viewpoints.
Unfortunately, certain things stand in our way and prevent us from just doing that. Some are culture-based, while others relate to the “wiring” in our brains.
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Inflexible Culture
A work environment with strict criteria for how work is to be accomplished, with little to no room for deviation (i.e., strict hours, limited PTO, etc.), can make individuals feel stressed or like they’re not valued. Punishing or shaming these behaviors can lead to a downward spiral, with the behaviors becoming more and more pronounced.
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Narrative Bias
We use narratives to explain the world around us. It’s human nature to weave a narrative that encompasses any and everything that happens. So, when an individual is going through something difficult at work, it could be because of an obvious trigger, like a sick pet or a family argument, but not necessarily. Even someone well-meaning, such as a supervisor (as opposed to a qualified psychiatric professional) trying to identify a trigger, can end up making the person feel worse, because they’re positioning the individual as the problem.
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Fundamental Attribution Error
Tied somewhat to narrative bias, this is the cognitive bias that states that humans tend to view our behaviors as the result of circumstances external to ourselves, whereas we tend to view others’ behaviors as the result of innate properties of that person. This line of thinking can contribute to an unhealthy work environment; for instance, a team lead may give themselves a break when they don’t follow the team rules because they had to accomplish a goal, but then turn around and expect the developers on their team to always follow the rules exactly.
In order to invite diversity and cognitive empathy, a different approach can and must be attempted, one that seeks to provide an environment of psychological safety for all who are a part of the work environment. Here’s my advice for supervisors:
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Be Open
Psychological safety comes through communication and observed behavior, which is itself a form of communication. Kickstart the process by being open about things yourself, especially if you're in a manager role.
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Be Flexible
Building a system and environment that accommodates various types of behaviors and people requires flexibility. It may mean enabling people to work at different hours than the standard 9-to-5 or letting them take off work when they need to..
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No Consequences
When people start to bring up sensitive issues such as mental health, demonstrate that there are no consequences. You want to show your team that it is safe to engage in and be open about who they are and how they feel, and key to that is not coming down with a hammer or saying that their openness or behavior is unacceptable.
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Center Outcomes as the Primary Driver of Change
When approaching an employee who appears to be struggling with a situation at work, it’s important to not assign blame, but to instead talk about their behavior in terms of actual outcomes. “The end result of your work is not where it needs to be. What can we do to get it there? How can I help?” That’s a much better conversation than, “You screwed up, what’s going on?”
If you’re an employee in a situation where you’re unsure about the psychological safety of a work environment, but you’re struggling, what I recommend doing is trial balloons. You don’t really want to throw the door wide open on your full mental state until you know it will be okay to do so. Try offering up things that are small, like “I didn't sleep so great last night.” Watch what happens if you say something, and then note: does it come back around as gossip? Do people say, “Well, you did this that one time,” or does it wind up being accepted? That will let you know if you can start to introduce larger, potentially more sensitive topics.
Also: find allies. Reach out to people who will treat you well if you’re not certain what situation you are in. And if the work environment is really bad? You may need to get out of that job to preserve yourself.
From Brain Drain to Brain Train
An environment of psychological safety and cognitive empathy can be used as a recruiting tool and bring talented individuals to your company. More importantly, it can help keep them there. Conversely, an unwelcoming approach to cognitive empathy or diversity, one that seeks to blame and restrict behavior, can send some of your most talented people to greener pastures.
My journey through understanding the brain has taught me that striving for good mental health isn’t just a personal issue. It can be a driver of success and resilience for teams and throughout entire organizations.
Want to hear more from Art? He’ll be giving a keynote about mental health and the current turbulent times at Prairie.Code in September. You can also follow him on Twitter at @arthurdoler.
