If you are in reporting, chances are you have experienced this term. Have you been given an "urgent" change request from an upper manager for a dashboard? Did it need to happen yesterday? Did you notice that this request has caused a ripple effect of anxiety to multiple people, not just you? According to the Pragmatic PhD article here "Thrashing" is a term borrowed from computer science, referring to what happens when a computer’s virtual memory is over-used. Stress Thrash