The (Chronically) Stressed-Out Chef

The passion part that keeps us going as chefs is almost always the same: cooking delicious food and being creative. It’s how we express ourselves, and at our best, how we connect with people and show we care for them.

But the challenging part is being the person who manages thousands of variables that could go wrong at any moment. Making sure the ship doesn’t sink just because someone called out by tapping into your last bit of energy so that service doesn’t fly off the rails during a flat seating.

Chefs are combination endurance athlete and social alchemist, conducting teams of various attitudes and skillsets to produce excellent standards at high speed, under stressful conditions. What’s more, restaurant chefs are responsible for approximately two thirds of sales and most of the spending, stretching to create many from few.

There are health inspections, HR issues, understaffing, staff development, purveyor mistakes, high prices, office politics, and equipment that seems only temporarily not broken. All of which appear to be a never-ending slew of challenges, resulting in the mental and physical stress that slows you down, erodes your energy and burns you out. Chefs know this feeling all to well.

Stress experienced consistently over a long period of time becomes chronic stress, a baseline state of being, keeping a person locked into fight or flight mode. Certain thought processes and strong emotions maintain your stress response at peak state, pumping you with cortisol, the hormone that gives you bursts of energy needed to run away or battle with danger.

Regardless of the environmental stimuli, we experience stress with the same cocktail of emotions as our ancestors. Thus, expediting dinner on a busy Saturday night might be a similar feeling to your primitive ancestor running away from a hairy, bloodthirsty beast (as some guests may appear to be).

Reality is that working in a kitchen is managing stress. Challenges are the reason for the existence of the job; to make things work when they don’t by themselves, ensuring success no matter what happens. The “chronic” part comes when we fail to manage it in a healthy way.

Because we can’t avoid the stress inherent in the job, many chefs feel like shit so long they don’t even pay attention to it anymore; it’s just the baseline. And when you get there, you can see burnout on the horizon rushing at you like the four horsemen of the apocalypse. 

It’s exceedingly difficult to bounce back after hitting the burnt-out stage, which can have drastic consequences because the physical and mental aspects of the job are so emotionally charged and demanding.

This is openly reported, and if you’re looking for modern examples, it’s recently happened to Heston Blumenthal, Sean Brock, and the gents at Joe Beef. Whether it’s Michelin kitchens, corporate dining or bistros, chefs across the industry face the same challenges.

Chronic stress is not a unique experience. We’ve all been there, and we can all be there, which is why it’s so important to develope constructive habits that improve our health and reframe problems with strategies.

The following paragraphs outline some ways you can take control and condition yourself to be venerable in the face of daily challenges.

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Manage your schedule like your life depends on it

Work life balance and mental health awareness are the biggest buzz words of our era, generally used by people who work 40 hours per week from home. But you’re a chef and you can’t work from home. To make matters more compelling to advocate for yourself, no Fairy-God-Escoffier is coming to save you. Manage your schedule like your life depends on it and consider it a method of establishing boundaries between you and your work.

If you don’t create time for yourself, you won’t have time for yourself because the demands don't stop, and grinding yourself down willingly each week isn’t good for anybody or any business. You should not need to work ridiculously long hours every day, every week. Sometimes? Yes, certain times are busier than others for a multitude of reasons and you’re in charge. But consistently? Something is wrong, yet everything has a solution.

Let’s be logical, no chef is going to work an 8-hour day, or 40 per week, but that doesn’t automatically imply you’re destined to work 16 hours per day, every day, with no days off until you die with your clogs on. The goal is to work strategically within the time frame you schedule and hit all your targets, not to slave away by default or guilt. Time spent and efficiency are not always equal.

The schedule is the most important document in your life, so make it work for you and hold to yourself and your team accountable to it. Don’t let trivialities or distractions impede you. Create a strategy for best case performance in your kitchen and have a clearly communicated plan for every person on your roster to make it work. During the scheduling process, prioritize yourself to have recovery time, even if you need to say ‘no’ to something. If you don’t, you will thanklessly grind yourself down in a kitchen and never have a life outside it.

Managing your schedule is managing your time. Let’s just be clear, there will always be issues to solve and work to do, so don’t let the fear of something happening or going undone when you’re away keep you from taking overdue care of yourself. You can prioritize creating efficient operational standards and yourself, it’s not one or the other.

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Treat yourself like an athlete

You can’t break yourself down and expect your body and mind to perform well, and you can only leverage your mind and body so long, until they start to fail you. Professional kitchens are hard on the body and being a chef is much more like being an endurance athlete than anything else. So, treat your body like an athlete.

Athletes are body and mind focused because those factors determine how long and how well they play their sport, thus, how much money they’re paid. This is the same for chefs.

However, because of the tremendous amount of learning involved, it can take many years for chefs to ascend the ladder to a salaried position that truly pays well, so it’s more crucial to maintain your health so that you can enjoy your career and be effective as you work your way up. Let’s keep it simple…

a)        Focus on nutrition: Find time to eat whole foods every day. Many chefs skip most meals because they’re too busy, so plan time to eat before you leave home, and consider taking something to work so that you can eat properly when you do have time. A quick smoothie in the morning, having some protein bars on hand, and making large batches of food you can quickly reheat for dinner can help make this easier.

b)        Consider foundational supplementation: As a supplement to your diet, to increase energy levels, strength and general wellbeing, consider supplementation with high quality protein powder, multivitamins, or whatever you need to fill nutrient gaps. It may be hard to consume all the nutrients you need to perform as a chef with food alone, so increasing your nutrient intake by increasing the nutrient density of your existing meals may help. Look for NSF Certified for Sport labels to ensure what you’re consuming doesn’t contain heavy metals and contains what is listed on the label.

c)        Maintain daily hydration: You work in a hot kitchen, and you’re moving constantly. Dehydration leaves you tired and weak. Drinking enough water is crucial. Everyone has a fancy water bottle now, go get one and aim to drink plenty of water each day. If you’re working stations and highly physically active, consider adding a clean electrolyte supplement to replenish what your body loses through sweating.

d)        Aim for 7-8 hours of sleep each night: Consistent sleep each night is like a magic wand for your mental and physical health. Sleep is the core of recovery and a major factor in how good or bad you feel each day, which then determines all your decisions afterward, because your motivation and mindset are a result of how much energy you have, or don’t.

e)        Limit alcohol: Yes, it can make you feel good in the immediacy of drinking it, especially socially, but alcohol negatively impacts stress by raising cortisol and screwing up your sleep, among many other downsides. We’re in the food and beverage business, and everyone loves a great cocktail, glass of wine or craft beer, but be aware of the frequency and quantity.

f)           Avoid energy drinks: Cheap, fast, heart thumping energy often “wellness-washed” with poor quality B vitamins, dead probiotics and other performance enhancing substances, these glowing neon drinks are more akin to radioactive waste found at Chernobyl, than to anything considered ingestible. The aptly named “Monster” and “Bang!” are also great descriptors for the subsequent heart attack. Try having a double espresso instead.

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Prevent problems with strategy & communication

We’ve already outlined that chefs tend to burn out due to the chronic stress of repetitive issues, but this last part is about flipping the perspective inside out for how the work is approached all together and goes hand in hand with managing your schedule (i.e. your time).

To see what’s repetitive as controllable is key. It means you can see patterns as a form of predicting the future. Most of what happens in restaurants is repetitive and predictable, outside of the occasional curveball or mishap. If you can predict it, you can prepare for it. See this as your opportunity to prevent problems.

It should be noted, stress can cause us to constrict and go silent, meaning we don’t communicate because we’re stuck in overwhelm. The crucial point is to never stop looking ahead and always keep communicating to your team, no matter what happens. It’s a continuous cycle of evaluating, advance planning, delegating and following through. It must become a habit.

What might sound obvious is often the missing piece. The organization must be in your mind first, before you or anyone else can act toward a goal, because everything is operationally determined by the leaders thinking.

The core of leadership is clearly communicating the plans, projections, expectations, responsibilities and standards to each person within each situation to achieve a certain outcome, leaving nothing to assumption, and being comfortable repeating yourself, even when you’re tired of hearing your own voice.

When leaders fail to do this, attitudes flair, mistakes happen, morale drops, targets are missed and trust in leadership wanes. This creates the scenario where it feels like everyone is against you, and you can’t get the ship to stay afloat (soon after people jump overboard).

People perform better when they’re less agitated. When your team steps into a moment that you planned and succeeds… everything becomes easier because you’ve replaced the stress of uncertainty with the clarity of certainty. Just don’t stop planning and talking, even if they say they “heard” you. Repetition is learning.

Doing this creates space and time to adjust emotionally to the challenges ahead. Problems seem to fix themselves, reducing the frequency of their occurrence. This cohesiveness creates more time to effectively anticipate the best move, instead of reacting perceived emergencies . Of course, you need to maintain a functional ‘sense of urgency’, but at a level that’s proactive, not reactive.

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Lastly, there is no light switch for managing stress, it’s a continuous process. Because chefs are on the front lines of potentially stressful situations every day, it boils down to controlling what you can, in advance, and prioritizing your health as a contributing factor in the success of your career.  It may sound simple, but it takes dedication.

Commit to yourself and know that prioritizing your time and health is not selfish. Get above the granular operational challenges to evaluate them without feeling overwhelmed by them. Being a chef is a truly impactful and rewarding career that can create many adventures, relationships and afford you a life that is comfortable. Just be sure to make it work for you.