Over time I have come to gauge my stress level with my overall feeling of my health. In times of great mental and emotional stress, I tend to get very dry skin, circulation to my extremeties (fingers and toes) slows down and they get cold, and my stomach gets all funky. Historically through college, I used this to help me make important decisions such as "do I play Mechassault, or do I work on the paper I don't even know how to start?" Thanks to this, I made it through college and was able to figure out when it was a good time to sacrifice the grades and turn up the social.
I just put last night's pizza square into the toilet, and after taking my temperature, I'm reasonably certain I'm not sick. That and I can't feel my fingertips.
I have to say, the hardest part about my job isn't the working with users who have a hard time spelling, or tracing down when someone hacks another user, or even the occasional modding (gotta stay true to my roots). The hardest part is the absolute necessity to be as objective as possible, all the time. Yet still be empathic, and understanding, yet keep your mind clear of everything but the issue. To treat a complaint from one person as a complaint from any other, to set aside friendships be them admin, mod, or user, and to be able to address the issue in a pure sense for exactly what it is, an issue.
And when you've set aside everything, when it is just you and the issue, it's really damn lonely.
In other news, I've started playing around with Textpattern's comment text feature.
In response to "Stress Causes Sickness":
I will only quote Stan Lee:
“With great power comes great responsibility.”