For years, you come home from work exhausted.
You don’t want to talk to anyone. Small things irritate you. You eat something, watch television, and go to bed. On weekends, you mostly want to be left alone.
You think this is what you’re like when you’re stressed.
Then you change jobs.
The new job isn’t perfect, but your manager doesn’t call you at night. Nobody changes deadlines without warning. You don’t spend meetings wondering who is about to be blamed for something. When you leave work, you are usually finished for the day.
A few months later, you notice that you’re doing things you haven’t done in years. You cook dinner sometimes. You answer messages instead of leaving them until the weekend. When a friend asks if you want to go out after work, you occasionally say yes.
You’re also sleeping better.
You didn’t work on any of these things. You didn’t make a plan to become more social. You didn’t try to be less irritable. You didn’t develop more discipline around cooking or decide to improve your sleep.
One set of conditions changed, and other things changed with it.
At the old job, part of your attention was always occupied. You had to remember what might go wrong, watch people’s moods, anticipate changes, and remain available after you had supposedly stopped working.
That didn’t end when you walked through your front door. The job took up more than the hours you spent there.
When those demands disappeared, some of what you thought was simply you changed too.