The Stomach Keeps The Score

I once had a job that felt a lot like being bullied in high school.[^1] At some point I had to decide whether to leave the job, and was a little torn because e.g. on the one hand, money; on the other hand, feeling bad all the time.

Ultimately what decided it for me was a combination of
1) a supportive partner who told me it was ok to leave (important! grateful!), and
2) I was literally getting constant stomachaches.

I thought this was idiosyncratic but after other conversations I've started to suspect it's common: people who are having stress/trouble at work start having stomach trouble a lot.

I'm not giving advice here, I'm not sure if leaving was the right decision in my case, nor that "once you're getting stomachaches it's time to leave" is good advice in general. But descriptively I think it's what happened, and once I left the org the stomachaches stopped.

It does make me wonder how much of people's ability to hold power comes down to either not-feeling stress in this acute phyiscal way, or feeling it but having a willingness to power through it anyway. It would be fun to interview presidents and CEOs and see what they say, whether they don't get these kinds of stomachaches or whether they power through them.

[^1]: from my point of view – and of course that's a limited one – I got told to do stuff by superiors that would cause obvious but manageable levels of blowback from elsewhere, and then got abandoned by those superiors as soon as the predictable blowback blew back. So it felt like the corporate equivalent of "why are you hitting yourself? why are you hitting yourself?" but with the added humiliation of HR smiling over you saying "in my experience, the best way to deal with problems is to apologize for them: why don't you try apologizing to everyone, for hitting yourself?"