Physical Health in Cybersecurity: The Body Keeps the Receipts

It's Friday morning. You stand up to refill your water and your back doesn’t move the way it used to. The systems are up and running smoothly. Your body hasn’t gotten the same memo.

Episode 25 of Plaintext with Rich is the third installment of the Month of Mindfulness, a five-week series on self-care for people working in security and tech. This week we’re talking about physical health, the silent receipt your body keeps for the cumulative load of this job. We get into the specific body costs of security work: long incident response shifts, screen time, the cortisol of on-call, sleep disruption from pages, and the war-room conditions that turn your spine into a slow-motion lawsuit. The episode lands with a Plaintext Starter Kit of habits you can start this week, no programs to join and no protocols to memorize.

If you’ve ever come off a long incident and felt every hour you spent at the keyboard in your shoulders, this one is for you. Whether you’re an analyst, an engineer, or the one person doing security at a 40-person company, the body keeps the bill.

For community around this conversation, find Rich’s LinkedIn group, Desk to Deadlifts. The name is catchy, but it’s not a powerlifting group. It’s a space for professionals trying to fit physical health into busy lives.

Ten minutes or less. One topic. No panic.

Desk to Deadlift (LinkedIn Group) https://www.linkedin.com/groups/13248033/

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Transcript

The Job Runs Smoothly, You Don’t

SPEAKER_00 0:00

It's Friday morning. You stand up to refill your water. Your back doesn't move the way it used to. Your knees remind you exactly how many hours you've been sitting at the desk on the keyboard. Your eyes have to focus twice just to look at things. The systems are up and running smoothly at work, but your body hasn't gotten the same memo. Welcome to plain text with Rich. We're three weeks into the month of mindfulness. Mental health covered. Spiritual health covered. This week is the third leg of the stool and probably one of my favorites, and that's physical health. And I gotta be honest, this is the one I feel most security people don't think about enough. Because most of us already know, right? Inherently, it's in the back of our minds, your Apple Watch is buzzing about standing, that aura ring is flagging the sleep score, the annual physical mentioned cholesterol again for the third year in a row. Look, we know. So I'm not going to spend 10 minutes telling you to drink water and stretch. I am going to talk about why the body is the part of this job we keep ignoring and what happens when we do. So here's the plain version. In plain text, physical health in this context is the cumulative state of your body under the specific load this work creates. Not gym numbers, not weight on the scale, the capacity to do the job and recover from it. Cybersecurity work has a body cost. Most of us pay it without ever tracking it. Let me just name some of the specific receipts, and some of you all listening might resonate with some of these, right? Long incident response shifts. When a breach hits, you don't move for hours. You don't eat real food, you don't see daylight. The war room runs on coffee, takeout, and adrenaline. That's a one-day tax, right? Run that play four times a year, if not more, and those receipts, they start piling up. What about that chair, that desk? Most cybersecurity work is a desk job dressed up as something more exciting. Your shoulders, hips, lower back, and neck are paying rent on a posture they were not built to hold. And speaking of that desk, what about that screen time? Hours staring at the same focal length. Your eye muscles do the same micro movement all day long. Imagine your body doing that. Headaches at 4 p.m. aren't a personality trait, they're a load measurement. What about our on-call cortisol levels? Your nervous system learns to anticipate the alert. Cortisol stays elevated even when nothing's happening. That's not paranoia, that's biology for you. And sleep. Oh, sleep disruption. Emails, alerts, phone calls at 2 a.m. don't just cost you that night. They cost the next two, three days more the older you get. Sleep debt compounds in ways that no nap is going to repay you for. And the actual war room environment itself. Cramped, fluorescent, energy drink fueled. You're trying to outsmart attackers while running your body on the worst inputs you'd ever choose voluntarily. When you stack those and you get a workload that your timesheet doesn't track. There's a phrase I've been thinking about a lot, and that's the body keeps the receipt, right? Your nervous system doesn't take meeting notes. It just remembers every late night, every skipped meal, every adrenaline cliff after a contained incident, it logs all of it. You can ignore the log for a long time. Eventually it's going to catch up with you. I personally came up doing work that put real load and stress on a body. I've watched what happens when people try to white knuckle through it. Discipline alone doesn't get you through the long haul. Discipline plus recovery does. And that's the part most of us skip. We're great at discipline. We're terrible at recovery. We treat rest like the thing we'll do when we have time instead of the thing that creates the time we have. So here's our practical part. Here's your plain tech starter kit for protecting your body from the load. Five moves, all small, none require a gym membership or a supplement aisle. Number one, stand up every hour. Set a timer if you have to. Stand, walk to a window, look at something across the room, or out a window so your eyes get a different focal range. Your hips need the change of position too. This costs you what 90 seconds and potentially gives back hours of capacity. Number two, defend your sleep window like a maintenance window. You wouldn't take production down at random. Don't do it to your nervous system. Really do try same time to bed, same time up, phone out of the room when you can. That was a game changer for me. Number three, eat real food during incidents. Heck, eat real food as much as possible. During incidents, right, or the war room, it literally runs on takeout for a reason. It's fast. But as I mentioned earlier, it's the worst input you can give a brain that has to make high-stakes decisions for 12 plus hours. Real meals, water, and breaks as you can. The incident gets handled better, not worse, when the responders are running on actual fuel. Number four, build a recovery day after long shifts. If you wouldn't run a server at 100% CPU for six days in a row, why would you do it to yourself? So after a long incident, after a long week, build in a day where you do less on purpose. Walk, sleep, see sunlight, touch grass. That's not slacking, that's capacity planning. And number five, get a baseline. Most of us don't know what our body's normal looks like anymore, which means we don't notice when it's drifting. Annual physicals, resting heart rate, sleep quality. You don't need a fancy wearable, you need awareness. The earlier you can notice the drift, the easier it is to course correct. So here's our plain text recap for the week. Physical health is the silent receipt cybersecurity work collects. The body keeps the bill even when you're too busy to look. Long shifts, screen time, heightened cortisol, sleep loss, bad war room inputs, all of those are going to stack. Discipline is necessary, recovery is what makes discipline sustainable. You don't have to overhaul your life this week. You just have to stop pretending the load isn't landing somewhere. And that's the third leg of the stool. Next week, we name what happens when all three legs, or maybe one or even two of them, get ignored, and that's burnout. If you have a topic you want broken down in plain text, or you just want to confess that you also have a standing disc you've never raised, send it my way. Email me, DM me, drop it in the comments. Notes slipped under the door, the chiropractor you keep rescheduling are also accepted. I read them all and I get back to you. Now, one more thing before we close. If you want a place to keep this conversation going between episodes, I do run a group on LinkedIn called Desk to Deadlifts. Don't let the name fool you though. It's not a powerlifting group, it's a community for professionals trying to fit physical health into real busy lives. So come find us. Now, if you're listening in a browser, hit subscribe and whatever app you use. It's the single best way to make sure you don't miss the next episode. And if this episode helped, please share it with someone who'd actually benefit. This has been Plain Text with Rich. 10 minutes or less, one topic, no panic. I'll see you next time.