THE WORD STRESS IS used to describe a wide variety of situations, from the seemingly small stress of being unable to reach someone on her cell phone to the feelings associated with having too much work and not enough time to the extreme stress of the death of a loved one. One of the more widely accepted definitions is by Richard S. Lazarus: “Stress is a condition experienced when a person perceives that demands exceed the personal and social resources the individual is able to mobilize.”1 In other words, the term is used to describe our response to an event based on how we perceive the event and not the event itself. We especially feel stressed when we feel that things are out of control.
Our perception of our ability to cope or even thrive with the demands placed on us is fundamental to our experience of stress. For example, moving to start a new job for which you are well prepared might be a wholly exciting experience. If, however, starting that job comes at the same time that one of your children is about to enter his senior year in high school where you are presently located, you might feel conflicted, making it hard to decide what to do.
We can feel stress when faced with choices in life, but we can also feel stressed when placed in certain situations, even if that place is where we wanted to be. My four years at West Point were a very stressful time for me. It was an environment that placed demands on us each and every day, academically, physically, and mentally. I knew that to thrive at West Point, not just survive, I would have to adapt and manage the stress. I became self-disciplined, motivated, focused, and driven. Those four years became the foundation for everything I did after graduation, shaping my personality and also laying the groundwork for the research I would do on mental agility and control.
Stress comes from demanding or unexpected events in our lives, but not all are equally difficult. One element of a good stress management program is having the ability to measure your current stress level based on the events in your life. Knowing where you are with respect to stress at any given moment provides you with the opportunity for more precise and effective stress management intervention.
The Holmes-Rahe Social Readjustment Rating Scale, commonly referred to as the Holmes-Rahe Stress Scale, was designed to do just that in a standardized and reliable way.2 This instrument helps measure the day-to-day stress load we carry, or what I call “walk-around stress.” It is the stress you feel every day as a result of events that have happened to you over a period of time and that dissipates only with the passage of time. Knowing where you are goes a long way in helping you decide what to do to manage the stress in your life.
Indicate which of the following events have happened to you within the past twelve months by circling the value associated with that event. If the event has occurred more than once, add the value indicated the number of times the event has occurred. (For example, if you have had a change in residence twice, which has a value of 20, you would double it and then give yourself a score of 40 for that item.)
LIFE EVENT |
VALUE |
Death of spouse |
100 |
Divorce |
73 |
Marital separation |
65 |
Jail term |
63 |
Death of close family member |
63 |
Personal injury or illness |
53 |
Marriage |
50 |
Fired at work |
47 |
Marital reconciliation |
45 |
Retirement |
45 |
Change in health of family member |
44 |
Pregnancy |
40 |
Sex difficulties |
39 |
Gain of new family member |
39 |
Business adjustment |
39 |
Change in financial state |
38 |
37 |
|
Change to different line of work |
36 |
Change in number of arguments with spouse |
35 |
Mortgage over $300,000 |
31 |
Foreclosure of mortgage or loan |
30 |
Change in responsibilities at work |
29 |
Son or daughter leaving home |
29 |
Trouble with in-laws |
29 |
Outstanding personal achievement |
28 |
Spouse begins or stops work |
26 |
Begin or end school |
26 |
Change in living conditions |
25 |
Revision of personal habits |
24 |
Trouble with boss |
23 |
Change in work hours or conditions |
20 |
Change in residence |
20 |
Change in schools |
20 |
Change in recreation |
19 |
Change in church activities |
19 |
Change in social activities |
18 |
Mortgage or loan less than $300,000 |
17 |
Change in sleeping habits |
16 |
Change in number of family get-togethers |
15 |
Change in eating habits |
15 |
Vacation |
13 |
12 |
|
Minor violations of the law |
11 |
TOTAL = ________ |
|
Scores on the Holmes-Rahe Stress Scale indicate the following:
300+ You have a high or very high risk of becoming ill in the near future.
150–299 You have a moderate chance of becoming ill in the near future.
< 150 You have only a low to moderate risk of becoming ill in the near future.
A primary reason for the relationship between levels of stress and susceptibility to illness is that stress, especially from anxiety or worry, compromises the immune system, making you more vulnerable to illness and infection. The greater the stress, the greater the likelihood of getting sick.
It is also important to recognize what stress is and what it is not. The word stress is quite often misused, seen as both cause and effect. First, the word stress does not refer to a causing event, but to a response to that event. Stress is a nonspecific response to an event that is perceived as demanding or threatening. That means that a stressor (cause) inherently has neither positive nor negative valence, but is determined largely by the perceptions of the individual. Even “good” events can be stressful. For example, a wedding or a vacation can be just as stressful for some as the threat of losing a job. When considering stress, we must think of two simultaneous events, an external event called the stressor, and the mental, emotional, and physiological responses associated with that event.
The Chinese have recognized stress as both positive and negative for centuries. The Chinese symbol for stress is 
and is translated into danger and opportunity. It suggests a double-edged sword that cuts both ways—there can be a benefit as well as a cost. In the Western world, we tend to address stress primarily as a negative factor, a bad thing. When it is large and unremitting, it certainly can be. But the Chinese description suggests that there is a beneficial side to stress, and that it can be useful as well as harmful. This is a much broader and more useful way to look at stress. Taken in this broader context, the psychophysiological components of stress turn out to be something we actually need to survive and even thrive as human beings, up to a point. For example, the resources we need to either engage or avoid a threat are automatically triggered by the autonomic nervous system. The body responds with involuntary functions such as increased heart rate, rapid breathing to gain more oxygen, muscles tensing for action, narrowing of attention, and so on.
Later in this chapter, I describe this autonomic nervous system response, better known as the fight-or-flight response, and the relationship between stress and performance. That relationship is curvilinear, and it shows that some level of stress is actually helpful because it activates body systems that are critical for responding to and acting on external events. In this chapter, I want to emphasize that stress can be helpful as well as harmful and show that the beneficial effects of stress can be achieved by understanding the mechanisms that trigger the stress response, and the voluntary actions you can initiate to moderate and manage that response.
How much of a problem is stress? It is substantial, especially when it is unremitting. A number of studies have indicated the following:
75 to 90 percent of all doctor visits in the United States are for stress-related disorders.
80 percent of all disease and illness in the United States is initiated or aggravated by stress.
Eight out of ten of the top ten prescription drugs are given for stress-related disorders.
The number of workers indicating they are feeling highly stressed has doubled since 1985.
According to the American Institute for Stress, the effects of stress cost American businesses $300 billion a year. This total includes ever-increasing healthcare costs, accidents, absenteeism, employee turnover, and reduced productivity.
Job stress has become the twenty-first-century disease and is considered a global epidemic.4
Each year, stress-related healthcare costs are a large chunk of overall business costs.5 Work-related stress factors include being overloaded with responsibilities and meeting tough deadlines, feeling rushed to finish projects, and communication problems with coworkers. As stress increases, we become more and more irritable and increasingly more short-tempered with others. Many people feel unappreciated for their efforts and thus develop a “What’s the point?” attitude.
Can we identify key business forces that contribute to workers feeling stressed? The answer is a resounding yes. For example, because of technology and workers being seemingly available 24-7, it becomes extremely difficult to clearly separate work and home life. Not to mention because of frequent mergers and acquisitions, there is little job security anymore. Figure 6.1 summarizes the work environment and its direct impact on the ability of today’s workforce to perform at the levels needed for companies to be competitive.
Figure 6.1 The causes and effects of today’s work environment.
The relentless pressure to deliver quality products and services cuts across every business organization. Such a climate can lead to employee burnout and the feeling of being overwhelmed. Downsizing the workforce while at the same time not adjusting the work demands on the “survivors” is a major contributor to this. Doing more with less has become the new normal.
With downsizings and restructurings, employees also face changing skill requirements and job assignments for which they often have little or no training or qualifications. In time, working under such conditions erodes a person’s confidence and self-esteem. Lack of confidence can make people hesitant and risk averse. Under high pressure and stress conditions, such hesitancy can become paralysis, and risk aversion becomes avoidance.
As companies moved strongly toward more empowerment and emphasis on teams, business results showed significant improvements in productivity and employee satisfaction. However, there were also casualties and unintended consequences. Many employees who were excellent individual contributors quickly discovered that they were uncomfortable and stressed in a team environment. One of the hallmarks of a close-knit, highly effective team is a sense of accountability and responsibility, not only for one’s own contribution and welfare but also for that of other team members. For individuals with a strong sense of accountability and responsibility for their own work but a discomfort with assuming that for others, being part of a team can be quite stressful.
One of the greatest concerns and a constantly looming stressor for employees is work–life balance. The ability to enjoy the fruits of our labor as well as family and friends is vital to the motivation and morale of today’s workforce. The delicate work–life balance is being threatened now more than ever. The transformation of work through information and communication technology is a major contributor to the blurred lines between when we work and when we play. What initially started as “anytime, anywhere” has become “all the time, everywhere.” The resultant job instability and uncertainty over the proper work–life balance threatens our health and wellness.
Stress management can provide the self-control and self-mastery training that allows people to reduce the effects of stress and therefore reduce illness, sick day rates, and medical attention costs, while substantially increasing performance and productivity. We need to learn to deal with these stressors in a much more effective and efficient way. We do this to not only cope with adversity but to actually thrive in it.
What is the underlying culprit behind our stress response? It is an evolutionary mechanism called the autonomic fight-or-flight response,6 which triggers powerful mental, emotional, and physiological responses to threatening events. It goes back to prehistoric times, when the primary threats to our ancestors were physical ones, whether wild animals or unfriendly rival tribes. In such threats of physical harm, our ancestors had to possess the ability to quickly respond physically in order to either fight or flee from the danger. Either way, instant activation of automatic bio-systems was needed.
When confronted with a threat, the fight-or-flight trigger suddenly activates the adrenal glands and increased hormone secretion such as norepinephrine and cortisol, resulting in increased heart rate, muscle tone, blood flow, breathing rate, and so on. The sudden flow of psychophysiological resources through sympathetic nervous system activation provided our ancestors the chance to survive the physical threat. Once the threat was gone, another part of our autonomic nervous system, the parasympathetic system, kicked in to bring everything back to a normal, balanced level, reducing our heart rate, decreasing our blood pressure, slowing down our breathing, relaxing the muscles, and generally just calming us down.
The problem today is more complicated. Given the development of our thinking and imagining brain, this same primitive response mechanism kicks in even for threats that are not physically derived but are imagined. And so our sympathetic nervous system fires with all the same physiological responses, even though it is not a physical fight-or-flight situation. Unable to fight or flee, we experience a constant level of system activation that, over time, can have deleterious health consequences. Figure 6.2 lists the common changes associated with stress.7
As you can see, stress affects our most fundamental functions needed to survive and thrive as humans. Learning to control and regulate the underlying cause of these effects is a key step toward enhancing performance and improving health and wellness.
Figure 6.2 Common issues associated with stress.
Now that you have a better understanding of what stress is and what it is not, let’s look at the relationship between stress and performance, and strategies for managing stress so it can serve as a driving force for enhanced performance.
Until recently, the conventional wisdom on how stress and performance were related suggested a linear relationship. With that in mind, much of the training in athletics and the military was driven by the idea that the more stress you created in training, the greater the performance. It was based on the idea that adding pressure and stress to practice situations would “toughen” individuals and therefore make them better performers.
For example, the training of U.S. Army Rangers and Navy SEALs has always involved pushing soldiers to the limit to prepare them for the rigors of their specific type of combat. Making training tough and pushing to the limit does result in better performance, but at what price? Many learn to survive and make it through successfully. The essential issue with that kind of model is that it has a high failure rate. Even people who are selected and are highly qualified to engage in this kind of program fail. The failure rate from the Navy SEALs BUD/S (Basic Underwater Demolition/SEAL) training program is about 80 percent. This is the Navy SEALs’ basic entry-level training that accepts qualified recruits but then pushes them through the most rigorous mental, emotional, and physical training in the military.8
In their classic inverted-U curve, Robert Yerkes and John Dillingham Dodson showed the relationship between arousal and performance to be a curvilinear one.9 Arousal is generally defined as activation of autonomic nervous system responses to threatening or potentially harmful events. Their finding provides a more accurate and research-based framework for describing the relationship between arousal and performance. Their research suggests that a certain amount of initial activation and arousal is actually good for you, but too much is harmful. By substituting stress for arousal, we can use their general finding as a way to portray the relationship between stress and performance. We can also view the relationship as having three general performance states.
Figure 6.3 shows that initially an increase in stress is actually beneficial in becoming activated. But with continued stress and being overly activated, performance will suffer as the various automatic responses to the stress continue to kick in. The figure shows that there is an optimal stress level that results in the best performance, commonly referred to as the area of peak performance or optimal performance.
In the early stages when there is not enough stress, performance is low because there is little activation, little physiological arousal. This is the situation where some stress is needed to move up the curve to improve performance and where motivation can play a role in getting there. Once you increase stress by allowing yourself to feel some anxiety or nervousness or concern for doing well, you actually trigger just the right amount of sympathetic activity to increase alertness and overall physical and cognitive functioning. This improves performance and moves you toward the middle on the stress–performance curve. This is the energy and activation level that athletes often describe as being in “the zone” or “peak performance.” Here, relative calm, focus, alertness, and emotional self-control describe the mental, emotional, and physiological state of the athlete.
Figure 6.3 The relationship between performance and stress.
However, if the stress continues unmitigated, performance deteriorates. Now you would find yourself overly activated, overly anxious, or even fearful, and the fight-or-flight response is in full gear. You find it difficult to focus, to be clearheaded, to make sound decisions, to plan, to perform. Once you are in this performance state, you need ways to calm yourself quickly, to regain composure and control. You need techniques that counterbalance the activation of the sympathetic nervous system and produce a homeostasis that allows you to bring to bear all your skills and abilities to perform at your best. The remaining sections of this chapter detail techniques that give you control over your stress responses and bring a recovery essential for performing in pressure and stress situations.
It is important to realize that the curvilinear relationship is not fixed; it varies from person to person. In other words, the height (level of performance) and width (level of stress) of the curve will vary, depending on your developmental experiences, personality, formal mental skills training, exposure to and coping with stressful situations in the past, and a positive, supportive environment versus a negative, unsupportive one. Whatever your developmental experiences, it will always be curvilinear. Everyone experiences the three performance states, just in different magnitudes.
Being keenly aware of what you are thinking, what you are feeling, and how you are responding physiologically is essential for performing at your best when it matters most. Managing stress and energy involves constant monitoring of your emotional and physiological responses to events and possessing the prerequisite mental skills for regaining control and performing at the levels to which you have trained and worked so hard.
If we intervene at the very first part of this process, that is, the environment, we call it environmental engineering. If possible, this should be the first intervention. If you can change the environment, then the other parts of the process change as well. For example, when you walk into a dentist’s office and soft, soothing music is playing, it is an attempt to engineer the environment to be less stressful. Unfortunately, more often than not, the ability to change what is happening is not an option. Most of the time, we have little control over the outside world and can rarely change external events.
So the first place you can directly intervene in this sequence is in your thinking. In Chapter 5, you learned a number of techniques for determining and changing your thoughts: thought stopping, thought replacement, rational thinking, and self-talk management. In this chapter, more emphasis is placed on the emotion part of this relationship and its impact on both physiology and thoughts. Emotion plays a role in activating the sympathetic nervous system and thus the resultant physiological responses.
The most commonly known techniques for countering the fight-or-flight response fall into the category of relaxation exercises. It has been known for some time now that the mind and body are inextricably linked; each influences the other. You cannot relax without the mind, and you cannot relax without the body. The history of relaxation dates back more than twenty-five hundred years. Yoga, perhaps the earliest form of “relaxation,” can be traced back to India more than five thousand years ago.
The modern history of relaxation begins in the 1920s with Edmund Jacobson, who developed a technique called progressive relaxation, in which patients were taught to progressively relax their muscles. Dr. Jacobson’s premise was that relaxing the muscles of the body would make a person feel more relaxed in general. In the 1960s, Hans Selye, an endocrinologist, was the first to document the consequences of stress on the immune system. He introduced the three phases of the stress response—alarm, resistance, and exhaustion—in his general adaptation syndrome. Dr. Selye also coined the word stressor, which since has become a part of the stress vocabulary.10
Around the same time, Dr. Herbert Benson, a cardiologist at Harvard, was studying the medical benefits of relaxation. He proved beyond any doubt that the mind–body connection did in fact exist. He demonstrated that simple relaxation techniques could lower people’s blood pressure, slow their heart rates, and calm their brain waves. He called the effect “the relaxation response” and popularized it in his 1975 book, The Relaxation Response. Here are some of the most documented benefits of using relaxation techniques:
Reduce the risk of heart disease by 30 percent
Significantly reduce the risk of high blood pressure, heart attacks, and fatal heart attacks
Reduce the risk of a depression recurrence by 50 percent
Help treat anxiety and panic attacks.
Strengthen the immune system.11
The most commonly used relaxation exercises/techniques follow. When selecting which one(s) you should use, consider the following factors: How comfortable are you with the exercise? How effective is the exercise in producing relaxation for you? How much time do you have available to engage in the exercise?
Rhythmic breathing involves becoming aware of your breath and deliberately changing the timing of your inhales and exhales. A paced breathing exercise serves two major purposes within the context of our program. First, focused breathing using the diaphragm (the muscle that controls the expansion and contraction of our lungs) stimulates major nerves in our parasympathetic nervous system, which is responsible for balancing out our stress response.12 Additionally, breathing can be done anywhere, and it is something everyone has been doing for their entire lives. It does not require equipment or much time at all, and paced breathing can be taught in seconds. We typically instruct our clients to place a hand on the stomach just below the rib cage and inhale through the nose for about four seconds while feeling the stomach expand. This is followed by a six-second exhale while feeling the stomach compress and get pulled toward the spine. This exercise is perfect for those just starting a stress management program because it often shows noticeable results within minutes, if not seconds.
Meditation involves focusing your attention in such a way that you feel calm and gain a deeper awareness of yourself. Eastern philosophies have recognized the health benefits of meditation for thousands of years, and only more recently has it found its way into Western practice. The two meditation techniques most commonly used are concentrative, which focuses on a single image, sound, mantra, or your own breathing, and mindfulness, which emphasizes awareness of all thoughts, feelings, sounds, or images that pass through your mind at the time. Meditation involves sitting quietly for at least ten to fifteen minutes, accompanied by slow, rhythmic breathing. More often than not, the time frame is usually much longer.
Developed by Edmund Jacobson in the early 1920s,13 progressive muscle relaxation is a technique for learning to gain awareness and control the state of tension of a particular muscle group (since the body responds to stress with tension). A relaxation session might consist of a full-body scan (checking in with your muscles) or modified by using specific muscle groups as you sit in a quiet room and comfortable chair. The objective is to focus on each muscle and then attempt to change the tension by deliberately tensing and relaxing each body area. Make sure you do not tense to such an extreme that it causes pain due to muscle cramping. You can add deep breathing by breathing in as you contract the muscles and relaxing them as you breathe out. You will feel the difference between tense and relaxed states. Also, actively engaging the muscle groups loosens and relaxes them. This particular relaxation technique is especially effective with athletes, who are very much in touch with the tense and relaxed state of their muscles. Progressive relaxation is especially popular with today’s physical therapists. With the advent of smartphones, there are great relaxation and meditation apps available and easy to get.
Autogenic training is a relaxation technique developed by the German psychiatrist Johannes Heinrich Schultz in 1932. In autogenic relaxation, the practitioner repeats a set of visualizations or imagery, usually related to warmth and heaviness, that induces a state of relaxation. This technique is used to influence your autonomic nervous system. Autogenic training restores the balance between the activity of the sympathetic (fight-or-flight) and the parasympathetic (rest-and-recover) branches of the autonomic nervous system.14
The brain does not differentiate between real and imagined experience; therefore, the body responds to both as though they were real. This principle helps make guided imagery a useful tool for relaxation since you usually imagine soothing, peaceful scenarios. Practitioners employ guided imagery to help clients using mental imagery, commonly referred to as visualization, to reduce stress. A typical session involves a script of a relaxing and calming scene that clients hear and then imagine in their minds. It is in some ways a form of self-hypnosis. A key advantage of guided imagery relaxation is that it involves all the senses, making the experience as real as possible.
In recent years, as the technology and ease of use of its equipment became more prevalent, biofeedback as a relaxation technique has continued to grow. In its application, practitioners usually take the most basic elements of progressive and autogenic relaxation and develop simple versions that are used in conjunction with the biofeedback. Biofeedback relaxation is especially useful for people who have difficulty focusing inward and who struggle with self-awareness.
Biofeedback is a process by which we gain greater awareness of physiological functions, such as heart rate, breathing patterns, skin conductance, muscle tone, body surface temperature, and brain waves and their relation to stress. The goal of biofeedback training is to increase awareness, understand the physiological responses, and learn to manipulate them at will. Biofeedback technology and the accompanying instrumentation and equipment have seen a flurry of innovations and advancements in recent years. Equipment that used to be bulky, cumbersome, and not readily available has become streamlined, user-friendly with advanced sophistication, and readily available for qualified practitioners. Once relegated to the medical and clinical professions, biofeedback has seen a significant expansion as an effective training and feedback tool for enhancing performance. For example, for the 2010 Winter Olympics, Canada’s goal for “owning the podium” was heavily driven and supported by sports psychologists utilizing sophisticated biofeedback equipment.15
We make extensive use of biofeedback as a training tool for developing the core mental skills of our clients. Trainers and coaches know the two fundamental requirements for learning a new skill are (1) a good knowledge and idea of what the skill looks like and (2) receiving good feedback as to progress in learning the skill. Mental skills are inner skills; in other words, they are inside as our thoughts, emotions, and physiological functions. As such, it is far more difficult to ascertain progress in developing these skills. This is where biofeedback comes in. Biofeedback can provide accurate and real-time feedback on the smallest of changes that might otherwise be imperceptible. As with any learning, even the smallest positive feedback is enough to provide the motivation to continue. I talk about how you can measure your performance matched with your stress release responses in Chapter 9.
Our training protocols start with a battery of standardized assessments along with a twelve-minute baseline biofeedback evaluation that measures physiological responses to a set of events that has been designed to evoke such responses. These assessments provide us with an accurate picture of the starting point for each individual. The biofeedback tools help accelerate and solidify the learning process. The ultimate goal of biofeedback training is to develop control and self-regulation of physiological responses to events in any situation without the use of any equipment.
It is unrealistic to believe that we could ever create a stress-free life. There are so many aspects of life that are threatening or difficult or challenging, all with the potential for inducing stress. In fact, some of the most satisfying and rewarding parts of our lives result from events and activities that are demanding and challenging, like winning a race or coming in first in a contest or creating something new. They give us a great sense of accomplishment. We like what we do; we enjoy the rewards and therefore persevere through potentially stressful situations. Stress management is not about trying to create stress-free situations, but about embracing potentially stressful challenges and demands to experience the joy of having done something that pushed you to the limits of your skills, knowledge, and abilities.
Because the fight-or-flight response kicks in automatically whenever we feel threatened, real or perceived, we need to have a more systematic way to acquire the necessary tools for controlling and regulating mental, emotional, and physiological responses to potentially stressful events. These stress management tools provide the means for recovery. Recovery ensures reengagement in the moment and continued high performance.
What are these recovery tools and techniques? Figure 6.4 portrays a balance between work–life stressors and counteracting recovery techniques. Note the various life events that can lead to stress. It is important to regard what impact each of these has and the stress it creates varies from person to person. In other words, whether or not you feel stress for any of these life events is strongly determined by factors like personality and experience.
RECOVERY |
|
• Life Stresses (Work/Home) |
• Quantity/Consistency of Sleep |
• Stress with Boss |
• Quantity/Quality of R&R |
• Extensive Travel |
• Number of Small Meals |
• Leadership Stressors |
• Healthy Eating Habits |
• Personal Expectations |
• Regular Exercise |
• Unforeseen Changes |
• Proper Rest Periods |
• Social Stressors |
• Personal Time |
• Health Stressors |
• Fun Times |
• Family Matters |
• Relaxation Exercises |
Figure 6.4 Stay Prepared and Maintain Balance.
Staying prepared is all about maintaining the balance between stress and recovery. Address stress by ensuring that extended periods of high-performance demands are balanced out with appropriate recovery. Recovery counterbalances daily stressors before they accumulate and become a significant impediment to performance. When you know an especially stress-filled period is approaching, plan and schedule recovery activities much like your work activity. Mark the recovery activities on the calendar, increasing the probability that you will engage in them.
Of all the recovery tools listed above, I want to focus on four of the most important: sleep, nutrition, exercise, and personal time. These are important not only because of the stress management resources they provide but also because they are tools that we as individuals can use and business organizations can provide. There is a direct relationship between how much stress time the body can handle and how much recovery time is needed. The more time devoted to recovery, the longer you can function in high-stress conditions with greater magnitude. Armed with this knowledge, organizations should be optimizing their work environments so that recovery tools are readily available and highly encouraged.
Unfortunately, too many organizations (businesses, military, sports, hospitals, education) do not pay enough attention to advocating or even reinforcing recovery activities, making it hard for people to routinely engage in them. With all the knowledge about stress and the idea of recovery, I find it difficult to understand the reluctance of organizations to incorporate meaningful and effective stress management activities. Some companies, however, have stepped up and taken dramatic steps for the betterment of their workers. One that comes to mind is Google. It created a work environment to keep its workers in the best mental, emotional, and physical shape with nap pods, relaxation rooms, cafeterias, basketball, allowing dogs to come to work, and so on.16
Perhaps no other recovery activity is as important as sleep. Not only does it have an effect on our physical wellness but it has a tremendous impact on our mental wellness, that is, brain health and function. More recent neuroscience discoveries demonstrate how critical sleep is to our well-being. Most of the important work of the brain in preparation for the next day is done while you are sleeping. Sorting, integrating, recalculating, and resetting are all critical functions accomplished during sleep. Interrupt sleep and you interrupt the completion of these critical functions. For example, we sleep in roughly ninety-minute cycles that have various stages, ranging from fully awake to deep sleep, or REM, to almost awake. We repeat these cycles throughout the night. Deep sleep is the most critical stage. It is here that our brains do their most critical work. If you awaken out of this stage, you feel tired, sluggish, and restless.
What are some of the things you can do to improve your sleep to gain the benefits of this important bodily function? Sleep is imperative for body and brain repair. We need about eight hours to fully restore ourselves, five to eight hours to maintain health, and we need to stay on a sleep routine.
Go to sleep and get up at the same time if you can only sleep a few hours. This helps provide a rhythm and to some extent can minimize waking from REM sleep.
Let us look at sleep versus the relaxation response. Is there a difference? Dr. Herbert Benson showed that triggering the relaxation response produces significantly less oxygen consumption than sleep. Triggering the relaxation response is not the same as sleeping in terms of the benefits and what is occurring within the body. During sleep, your oxygen consumption is higher because your body and brain are recovering from the day, and energy is needed to do this. But when engaging in relaxation, there is less oxygen consumption because the body is not working as hard, which enables true relaxation benefits for the body and nervous system and allows them to reach a more restful state.
Oxygen consumption is a measure of metabolism, among other factors, at any given moment, indicating the body at work with the sympathetic nervous system activated. Dr. Benson’s research showed that triggering the relaxation response can produce a calming effect and can serve as an excellent supplement to sleep, especially if you have difficulties sleeping.
What you eat impacts both your mental and physical health. Never has paying attention to nutrition been more important than today. We consume way too much fast food, high sugars, high fats, carbohydrates, glutens, and so on. What we put in our bodies also affects our brains, and to a greater extent than we have realized. Neuroscience is demonstrating how beneficial certain foods are for the brain’s health and proper functioning, and just how damaging some foods can be. Certain foods that have always been seen as especially beneficial for our bodies are now known to also boost brain health and functioning. For example, oatmeal settles nerves (stabilizes blood sugar); vitamin C in oranges decreases cortisol levels; bananas contain tryptophan, helping you sleep. Here are some tips that can keep you healthy and sharp, both physically and mentally.
Choose healthy foods, especially brain healthy.
Eat a balanced diet, incorporating all the major food groups.
Drink plenty of water, sixty to eighty ounces a day.
Consume four to six small meals throughout the day.
Always plan your meals ahead of time, especially during those periods at work when you are so busy that you find yourself drifting to the snack machine because you are starving.
We have always known the importance of exercise for our physical well-being, but only recently have we become aware of just how critical exercise is for the brain. For example, exercise stimulates the rate at which nerve cells bind to create new pathways, increasing the brain’s storage capacity. Getting the body moving gets the mind moving, enhancing short-term memory, also known as working memory capacity. Here are just a few tips on exercising that can maximize the benefits you can gain from it, both physically and mentally.
Exercising just thirty minutes most days of the week reduces the risk of chronic disease.
You need sixty minutes of moderate to vigorous exercise at least three times a week to maintain your proper weight.
Be sure to incorporate all three of these components into your exercise routine: cardio, stretching, and resistance. It is not enough just to run.
The one thing that suffers greatly in our busy and sometimes overwhelming lives is taking what I call a “time-out.” Taking a time-out is one of the best ways to maintain balance, but it is most often left out. How often have you told yourself, “I have no time,” “I’m too busy,” or “I have too much to do”? Taking a time-out can be as short as a few minutes or as extended as a long-awaited vacation. Everyone can take a time-out. However, to have any chance that you will do it, you must plan for it, schedule it, and put it in your calendar every week. I do not know about you, but I live by my calendar. Typically, if it is not on my calendar, I end up not doing it. A good calendar should have not only work scheduled on it but also the other important things in your life. Those who indulge in activities they love are healthier, less depressed, and in better shape.17 Here are some simple tips for taking your time-out.
Listen to music. Music can produce calm energy and improved memory. Play the right kind of music, and you can achieve the right mind–body state.
Talk with other people. We are social animals. We need the company of others. Interacting and socializing with other people is being neglected in today’s wired lifestyle. Having 360 “likes” on Facebook is not the same as having 360 friends!
Get outside; breathe some fresh air. Get away from your desk. Enjoy being outdoors, even if only for a few minutes. You would be amazed at how exhilarating a few deep breaths of fresh air can be.
Do fun things (a hobby, sport, and so on). Timeout also means taking a little time just for yourself, doing the things that you enjoy. Do not lose the child within you.
Get away from work at home and away from home at work.
Know What You Can and Cannot Control
Ultimately the only thing you can directly control is what you think, say, and do. Trying to do otherwise will only lead to frustration and much wasted effort and energy with little impact on improving performance. We delude ourselves into thinking and even wanting to control others. But you really cannot. People always have the choice of refusing to do what you want, even under threat of harm. Witness the countless martyrs throughout history who sacrificed their lives rather than give in to someone’s attempts at control. Imagine how much better you could be if you were to put all your effort and energy into things over which you have control, rather than wasting them on what you cannot control.
Stress Is All About Perception and Reinterpreting
Our stress levels have much to do with how we perceive the events of the day. I reiterate here what I said earlier in Chapter 5: It is not what happens to you that really matters, but how you think about what happens to you. If you want to achieve your personal best, you must deliberately reinterpret your situation even to the point of embracing the stress response as somehow being beneficial. This is not about deceiving yourself or looking through rose-colored glasses. It is about looking for something potentially good in what is a bad situation. Put another way, this is the classic question: Is the glass half-full or half-empty? If something has the potential for energizing, you should view it in the best possible light so that what may be perceived as a threat can be seen as an opportunity instead. There is a wonderful line in the Oscar-winning film The Sound of Music: “When God closes a door, somewhere he opens a window.” Give yourself a chance. Use self-talk to help.
The first thing that occurs after you perceive anything is you say something to yourself. You cannot help it. We are wired that way as part of our survival mechanism. But what comes to mind first is not what has to remain and affect your subsequent actions. Change the way you explain to yourself the cause of an event. Try to be factual and as accurate as possible. Above all, do not engage in catastrophic thinking, that is, making much more out of something than it really is, piling up negative thoughts, one on top of the other.
For example, imagine you have just left your boss’s office after having been told the long-awaited report you have been preparing has not been done very well. Your thoughts and self-talk might go something like this:
Wow! She didn’t like my report. I worked so hard on it. I wonder which other of my reports she didn’t like? I wonder if she thinks I’m not good at reports? I don’t know—maybe I’m not? Wonder what else she thinks of me? Maybe I’m really not cut out for this job. Why did I ever get into this? She is going to fire me. I know she’s going to fire me. I am going to lose my job, and then where will I be?
To ensure that you do not engage in catastrophic thinking, practice perpetual optimism. Watch the self-defeating thoughts. A doom-and-gloom outlook will only harm your ability to cope and, more important, thrive in a stress-filled situation. You always have a choice because by controlling your thoughts, you interpret what is happening.
Stress Is Cumulative—a “Use It or Lose It” Plan for Recovery
As mentioned earlier, a certain amount of stress is actually beneficial. It allows for activation and arousal so that energy is gained for the moment. The right amount of stress and energy actually helps you focus sharper, think clearer, decide better, and perform at the level for which you have prepared yourself. The real harm from stress is when it is continuous and unmitigated. Unchecked, stress can be cumulative and damaging, not only to your performance but also to your health and wellness. You can manage your daily stress by using it as energy for exercising and losing it by engaging in relaxation exercises. Who hasn’t felt better from exercise after a long, hard day, especially if it was also stress filled? The release of endorphins and other feel-good hormones dissipates the stress and gives temporary relief.
Develop an Awareness of the Inevitable Parasympathetic Backlash
Powerful weariness and tiredness after long hours of work can occur even before we recognize it as affecting our performance. Another sign is that the mind wants to slow down in attention. Thinking patterns become less coordinated and logical, our memory is affected, and decision making becomes unreliable, confused—for example, putting groceries away in the wrong place, or forgetting to get off at your exit on the highway. This occurs when the parasympathetic system (the part of our nervous system that is there to bring us back to a balanced, calm, and collected state) overreacts as a result of prolonged activation of the sympathetic nervous system. In other words, in conditions of prolonged stress where our nervous system finally says enough is enough, the brain overreacts and, as a result, diminishes the effectiveness of many of the faculties needed to function at our best. You need to be aware of this and recognize the signs, especially in periods of high stress. A parasympathetic backlash rarely occurs for people who have mastered stress management techniques and are able to control their responses to various forms of stressors.
Learn to Self-Regulate Through Relaxation and Physiological Control
This is about learning relaxation techniques that have been very effective in triggering the relaxation response. It is about training yourself to voluntarily control psychophysiological mechanisms that are fundamentally wired to be involuntary. Because you can learn to control these responses—heart rate, blood pressure, breathing, perspiration, surface temperature, and so on—lie detector tests are not admissible in court. Lie detectors measure the same physiological responses. Learning relaxation techniques gives you a counterbalance to sympathetic nervous system functions. As discussed earlier, the relaxation response is the trigger to the parasympathetic nervous system.
In summary, to be able to manage stress, we must organize stressors, focusing only on what we can control, make a deliberate commitment to practice optimism and adaptive thinking, reduce stress through exercise and relaxation exercises, balance heavy demands placed on us with appropriate amounts of recovery, and plan for recovery by putting it on our calendars just as we plan and schedule our other activities.
