How do I stop firefighting on-call and reduce the stress?

The pager goes off and your stomach drops. You put out the fire, and you brace for the next one, and nothing ever seems to actually get better. That grind wears people down. What you are feeling is real, and it is not a sign that you are bad at this. The stress comes partly from the fires and partly from the sense that they are endless. You can break that. Not all at once, but by refusing to let a single incident pass without leaving one thing a little better than before. Firefighting forever is a choice the system makes for you unless you take some of it back. After the next alert, once things are calm, write the one change that would have prevented it and raise it with your team. You will not fix everything. But turning even one recurring fire into a permanent fix will show you that the cycle can be broken, and that is where the stress starts to lift.