Resources
Support. Reading. Prompts.
People to talk to, organisations that understand the work, and material worth sitting with.
Talk to someone
Reaching out is not weakness. It is the same thing you would tell anyone on your team to do. Free, confidential, no judgement.
Australia
UK
US
Global
Built for this industry
Organisations run by people who understand the work. Peer support, resilience training, and community from inside cyber and tech.
Neuroscience-backed resilience training for cybersecurity teams. Military-proven iRest protocol adapted for cyber defenders.
Runs mental health programming at security conferences. By and for the infosec community.
Open Sourcing Mental Health. Awareness and education in tech and open source communities.
Peer support and workshops. Direct, grassroots approach to men's mental health. Australia-based.
Suicide prevention built around one question. Action-oriented, no-nonsense. Australia-based.
Research-led mental health. Runs Man Central for early detection of depression. Australia-based.
UK's leading mental health charity. Comprehensive information and helpline directory.
Reading list
6 entriesBessel van der Kolk
On how pressure and trauma are carried physically, not just mentally. Essential reading for anyone who carries responsibility in their body.
Atul Gawande
A precise, unsentimental look at how systems fail. Medical and human. Useful for anyone who thinks seriously about resilience and ending.
Atul Gawande
On how structured process reduces failure under pressure. Translates directly to incident response and high-stakes operational work.
Viktor Frankl
On finding meaning inside conditions you cannot control. Overused as a reference but underread. It earns the citation.
Cal Newport
On the conditions that make serious work possible. Particularly relevant if you are trying to recover quality of attention after a period of overload.
Kay Redfield Jamison
A psychiatrist's account of living with bipolar disorder. Rigorous, honest, and one of the best pieces of writing on what it costs to carry something invisible.
Reflection prompts
for state inspectionState check
If you were debugging your current state, not your output, your actual state, what would the variable dump show? What is loaded? What is overflowing? What has been silently discarded?
Load audit
What are you carrying right now that no one assigned to you? What load did you take on without a ticket, a deadline, or a conversation about capacity?
Signal/noise
In the last week, what actually mattered? What consumed attention but changed nothing? What did you respond to out of reflex rather than judgement?
The gap
Where is the distance largest between the person you are performing and the person you actually are right now? What is maintaining the distance?
Continuation condition
What would need to be true for you to continue at your current pace without cost? Is that true right now? If not, what is the honest estimate of time before something gives?
Dependency map
What are you depending on that you do not control? A person, a decision, a system staying stable. What happens to your position if one of those dependencies fails?
Worth reading.
Occasional writing on pressure, recovery, and what it costs to keep going. Arrives when there is something to say.
Infrequent. No third parties.