3
Stress Makes You Stupid

Stress can be a good thing when it enables your body to survive for another day. But is that really the metric by which you want to be evaluating your life? “Well, I wasn’t torn to shreds by wild beasts, so today was a win.” In order to lift ourselves out of a perpetual state of fight or flight, we need to take daily action to eradicate the backlog of stresses stored in our cellular memory so that we are able to function in a state far superior to survival mode, which is where most of modern society has become stuck.

There are some modern-day high-demand situations in which the fight-or-flight chemical reactions can be relevant. For instance, if you get jumped in a back alley or need to lift a car off a baby, you’ll probably be grateful for hardwired biological responses that enable your body and mind to work in tandem to save your life or someone else’s. And there are even forms of exercise and health routines that induce hormesis, or “good stress,” in the body. Good stress looks like a cold shower, an ice bath, a sauna, or high-intensity interval training. These are short-term activities that wake up the body and rejuvenate the cells. They put just enough strain on the body for just long enough to kill off the weak mitochondria (the brain of your cells) and empower the strong mitochondria. Like most forms of exercise, they are good enough to burn off your stress in the right now.

But if we want to get rid of stress from the past, then we need to add the deep body rest of meditation. Most forms of hormesis are brief, so that your body burns off stress chemicals in the moment so they don’t become chronic. It’s not bad for your body to get stressed; however, it is toxic for your body to stay stressed.

Unfortunately, the reflexive part of the human brain responsible for squirting out chemicals in response to high-stress situations can’t distinguish between life-or-death demands and the stress of a pending deadline or a bad breakup. In other words, our brains react to most demands as if they were a tiger attack, even if they’re not life-threatening. As a result, we’re walking around our twenty-first-century lives with minds and bodies primed to ward off threats that are not a part of most people’s daily experiences anymore—and the negative effects are quickly adding up.

We all know the feeling of being so stressed that we can’t seem to think straight, complete a simple task without our hands shaking, or make a sound decision when the pressure is mounting. Now imagine if that were your default setting: having to function in high-demand, high-stakes situations day in and day out. Wait—that’s already your reality, isn’t it?

Even if we aren’t always in panic mode as we watch the clock tick down, most of us are still living in a world of heightened anxiety and tension—yet we’re still expected to react as if nothing’s the matter. If you’ve ever felt overwhelmed by your inability to cope with all the demands on you, I want you to be gentle with yourself, because it’s not your fault. Your brain and body are responding in the only way they know how. My goal is to give you an alternative—one that, over time, may just change the trajectory of your life.

Stress has been getting a bad rap these days. It gets blamed for high blood pressure and heart attacks; it’s been called an epidemic—the “Black Plague of our century.”1 And while I definitely don’t disagree with these assessments and have committed my life to reversing the negative effects of stress, let’s first understand why, over time, the human body has changed in the way it reacts to stress before we finish sharpening our pitchforks.

De-Exciting the Nervous System

Back when you were either swinging a club to bludgeon that tiger or sprinting to your cave in hopes of outrunning it, your body was able to burn off those stress chemicals. In our far more sedentary modern life, however, our bodies need a different outlet to release that stress. This is why a lot of people say to me, “Exercise is my meditation.” Actually, no. It’s not. Exercise is exercise; meditation is meditation. They are different things, which is why they have their own words. What people usually mean when they say that exercise is their meditation is that physical exertion is an avenue for stress release, much as meditation is an avenue for stress release. To that end, exercise and meditation are similar, but they achieve that end in very different ways because they do very different things to our nervous systems.

When you exercise, you excite your nervous system and increase your metabolic rate. This is not to say that exercise doesn’t help with stress release—it does. Exercise can help you get rid of stress from today. But when you meditate, you de-excite your nervous system, which decreases your metabolic rate, which helps you get rid of stress from your past. (Don’t worry—this does not mean you’ll gain weight if you meditate. Your metabolic rate is simply the rate at which your body consumes oxygen!)

When you de-excite your nervous system, you enable it to purge old stress from the body in a far more efficient manner, clearing the way for better performance and mental clarity. Have you ever tried to remove a piece of rice from a pot of boiling water? It’s nearly impossible. But by simply removing the pot from the heat source for a few seconds and allowing the water molecules to calm from their agitated state, you can scoop out that tiny speck of rice with no issues.

Meditation allows you to rapidly de-excite the nervous system and give your body deep rest. This creates order in the nervous system so you can expel stress that is otherwise nearly impossible to remove. This is just one of the ways meditation makes you more productive.

In the previous chapter, I mentioned the corpus callosum, the thin strip of white matter that connects the gray matter of the two hemispheres of your brain. It is a bridge of nerve fibers that allows one side of the brain to communicate with the other side, carrying neural transmissions back and forth between the right and left brains to help facilitate the overall function of the mind. Neurobiologists have known for years that a meditator will have a thicker corpus callosum than a nonmeditator, but correlation does not necessarily equate to causation, so scientists were unable to confirm whether that strengthening of the nerve fibers was directly tied to the practice of meditation. Thanks to recent advances in neuroscience, we are able to see tangible proof that the brains of meditators are different, and that meditation actually changes the brain. The longer you have a daily meditation practice, the thicker the corpus callosum becomes.

In 2012, a team of neurologists at UCLA’s Laboratory of Neuromodulation and Neuroimaging published a study that clearly demonstrated the thickening of the corpus callosum in people with regular meditation practices.2 Even more interesting, in 2015, a team from Harvard published findings from an experiment in which they conducted baseline MRIs on participants before starting half of them on a regular, daily meditation program.3 The subjects were selected on the basis of their overall health; all subjects, however, reported dealing with the effects of stress on their lives. During the course of the experiment, subjects answered questions about their moods and emotional states; those in the meditation group reported more positive overall feelings and a reduction of stress. At the end of eight weeks, the scans were repeated, and the brains of those who had begun meditating showed unmistakable physical changes, including shrinking of the amygdala (that is, the brain’s fear center), which expands when the brain is steeped in cortisol or other stress hormones, and expansion of the brain stem, where dopamine and serotonin—the chemicals responsible for feelings of happiness, love, and contentment—originate.

Just think about that for a minute: In only two months, meditation can change the brain enough to be visibly detectable by MRI, shrinking the fear center and enlarging the centers responsible for happiness, love, and creative problem-solving.

Meditation, it turns out, is literally a mind-changing experience. The left brain is, in essence, in charge of the past and the future—reflecting on lessons learned and planning for what is ahead. It’s in charge of language, critical thought, analytical thought, math, balancing your checkbooks, managing your responsibilities—all really important activities that make us act like functional adults. (Or at least a lot closer to the respectable people our parents desperately hoped we would grow up to become.) For most of us, and especially for high achievers, we’ve been taking our left brain to the gym day in and day out, working out to the same song: “Think, take action, achieve, and make money so you can be happy in the future.” Your left brain is a total stud that never skips leg day.

Meanwhile, for most of us in modern Western society, our poor little right brains are in a state of near atrophy. The right brain is the piece of you that’s in charge of the right now, of intuition, inspiration, creativity, music, and connectedness. The right brain is where our creative problem-solving epiphanies and our innovative approaches to common challenges come from. Unfortunately, the reason these flashes of brilliance are usually just that—short, temporary flashes where our right brain bursts onto the scene with some amazing stroke of genius and then fades back into the background—is that we’ve conditioned our left brain to be hypervigilant. The left brain often steps in and takes over before our right brain is done doing its thing.

If you look at a human brain, it’s physically divided in half, with the size and shape of the right and left hemispheres perfectly balanced. I don’t think Nature makes mistakes. I don’t believe Nature would have given us a 50/50 brain if we were supposed to use 90/10. When we meditate, we are taking our brain to the gym to strengthen the corpus callosum, to reinforce and redouble the bridge between our left and right brains. This creates brain cohesion, meaning that the communication and interaction between the two hemispheres is increased.

What does this have to do with stress? Simply this: When you’re in a high-demand situation, you can feel your body and mind beginning to descend into stressful responses. When you have a strong balance between your right brain and left brain, instead of slipping into fight-or-flight mode, you’re going to find that your mind is able to remain clear, open, and capable of coming up with creative solutions. Your brain will be better equipped to resist a panicked response to a stressor, whether it’s your boss yelling at you, a really tight deadline, or a competitor breathing down your neck, while simultaneously accessing a whole other realm of inspiration.

The Artist Formerly Known as Stress

Contrary to popular belief, stress is not helping you in the productivity or performance department. In fact, according to the Vedas, “There is no such thing as a stressful situation, only stressful responses to a given situation.” In other words, stress is not what happens to you; stress is your reaction to what happens to you.

When you become a meditation teacher, you become an expert on stress. Stress is at epidemic levels in the West, as well as in much of the rest of the world. But what do we really mean when we use the word stress?

Let’s take a minute to discuss what stress is not: Stress is not deadlines, breakups, going to see your family at Thanksgiving, or your morning commute. All these things are demands; they are demanding your time and attention, and they are burning up your adaptation energy. For this reason, I have actually moved away from using the word stress to talk about all the pressures of our professional and personal responsibilities; instead, I prefer to call them demands. We juggle many demands on our time; our stress is the negative impact we allow those demands to have.

Every fast-food meal you’ve ever eaten, every Jack Daniel’s you’ve ever drunk, every all-nighter you’ve ever pulled, every flight you’ve ever taken—all those things burn up your body’s adaptation energy. They’re not necessarily “bad,” but they’re all outside the basic norm our body and mind have evolved to be compatible with. They’re affecting the way you handle stress right now, and this impacts the way you’ll handle stress in the future. Here’s the trick: If you have a bunch of demands that burn up your adaptation energy and then you have one more demand, your body is going to launch involuntarily into a fight-or-flight stress reaction. And that is what stress is: your reaction to the stuff, not the stuff itself.

Adaptation Energy: The body’s ability to handle a change of expectation or a demand.

Demand: The artist formerly known as stress.

We don’t act in accordance with what we know; we act in accordance with the baseline level of stress in our nervous systems. Hopefully this is comforting news, because it means you’re not a failure if you didn’t implement the lessons you’ve learned from every self-help book you’ve ever bought. The icing on the cake is that the technique you’ll learn in this book will allow you to start running all the fancy software (information) you’ve acquired by defragging your hard drive (aka your brain).

This concept is foreign to most of us, so I want to put our new vocab words all together. If you’re out of adaptation energy and you have another demand, your body will launch involuntarily into a fight-or-flight stress reaction, whether you have read The Power of Now or not. Meditation allows you to rapidly refill your reservoir of adaptation energy, which in turn gives you the luxury of choosing how you want to respond to life’s demands. This may sound like a small benefit. It is not. Responding elegantly to demands rather than your body habitually flying off the handle can make the difference between heaven on earth or a living hell.

Let’s take a moment to do a side-by-side comparison of the days of two hypothetical people we’ll call Suzie Stressbox and Peggy Performer. Peggy has a twice-daily meditation practice; Suzie does not.

Suzie Stressbox

Peggy Performer

6:00 a.m.

Exhausted from the day before, Suzie hits snooze on her alarm until 6:45.

Peggy wakes up before her alarm goes off, brushes her teeth, and settles in for her 15-minute meditation.

8:00 a.m.

Frantic because she’s overslept, Suzie races to drop her daughter off at school. They are late and Suzie doesn’t have time to grab coffee or breakfast—which she desperately needs.

Peggy packs herself a healthy lunch and gets her daughter dressed, fed, and off to school on time. She arrives at work a few minutes early.

11:00 a.m.

Suzie’s boss changes the due date on a big project. Panicked because she’s already behind, Suzie works through lunch to get it done.

Peggy’s boss changes the due date on a project. She remains calm and uses creative problem-solving to get the job done in 90 minutes. She pauses her work to eat her lunch and enjoys a few minutes outside.

3:00 p.m.

Barely squeaking in before the deadline, Suzie turns in her project. Not having eaten all day and now behind on the day’s work, Suzie runs to Starbucks for a coffee and a slice of banana bread.

Peggy uses a spare conference room for her afternoon meditation. Having filled up on adaptation energy and feeling refreshed, she dives into her tasks for the rest of the workday.

6:00 p.m.

Head pounding and ravenously hungry, Suzie hits traffic on the way home and angrily honks at the cars in front of her.

Sitting in traffic on her way home from work, Peggy listens to a favorite podcast and enjoys her extra time alone.

8:00 p.m.

Suzie and her husband have a difficult conversation about his aging mother. Suzie breaks down in tears; it feels like too much to handle after a tough day.

Peggy and her husband discuss the health of his aging mother. Peggy listens compassionately, then she and her husband calmly work together to come up with solutions to this difficult situation.

8:30 p.m.

Suzie’s daughter interrupts. With no patience left, Suzie snaps and yells at her daughter to get in bed and go to sleep.

Peggy’s daughter interrupts. Peggy scoops her up, grateful for the joy she brings to their lives. Peggy reads her daughter a book before bed and kisses her good night.

10:00 p.m.

Suzie is mentally fried but stays up late working because she’s frustrated with how little she accomplished today. She hopes tomorrow will be better.

Peggy puts down her book and reflects on how much she has to be grateful for. She feels proud of how she handled her high-demand day and looks forward to tomorrow.

Your Relationship with Stress

What if, like Suzie Stressbox, you secretly crave that stress? Some of us wear our stress as a badge of honor. There is a little piece of us that enjoys how important it makes us feel or how in demand we are.

I teach a lot of CEO and actor types, and they have two different stories that both point to the same addiction. My CEO clients insist, “Emily, I need my stress. I need my angst. It’s the thing that gives me my competitive edge.” My actor clients insist, “Emily, I need my stress. I need my angst. My pain is where my creativity comes from.”

Nope.

Your stress reactions are not the source of your inspiration, ingenuity, or vision. Your creativity and innovation come from the right hemisphere of your brain, not from any biological reaction designed to protect you from a predator. If the two hemispheres of your brain are able to communicate clearly and easily, you’ll be better able to access your creative solutions and genius ideas even in the middle of a high-demand situation. Stress makes you stupid because it costs your brain and body so much energy preparing for something that isn’t even real. When we meditate, we take that mental and physical energy back, allowing us to get more done in less time.

Let’s do a little math experiment to evaluate how you are coping with your stress. Over the last six months, how much has stress cost you in:

When you stop to consider the actual toll stress is taking in terms of time, money, and self-respect, it seems unimaginable that you would not want to take steps to shed this pollutant from your system. I am going to give you a homework assignment at the end of this chapter where you will actually tally up the money and time wasted on stress. Accumulated stresses have been slowly seeping negativity and insecurity into your life like poisons, and because you’re human, you seek outlets to feel better. The trick here is that lots of people stand to make lots of money off this fruitless search. The entire multibillion-dollar advertising industry is built on it.

Not only can meditation save you money in all the fruitless things you may have tried to curb your stress, but after it becomes a daily habit it may become invaluable to you. We give our Ziva grads an exit survey five months after they begin their journey, and one of the questions we ask is, “How much would you need to be paid to stop meditating entirely?” The average amount reported is $975 million! Granted, that is hardly a scientific study, and certainly impossible to objectively quantify, but it makes an important point all the same about how valuable finding your own happiness can be. (Personally, no amount of money could ever convince me to drop my daily practice, because I would just end up a really rich insomniac, and it’s impossible to enjoy life when you’re completely knackered!)

Before we move on, I want to make sure you take the time to do that assignment and figure out what stress is costing you in terms of time. It is so powerful to have before-and-after data. Most of us are terrible at recognizing and celebrating our successes, so I want to share a story with you from one of our zivaONLINE students, Shaunda Brown, who tested her cortisol levels before and after the training.

I started losing my hair and had bald spots at the age of thirty-five. While I consider myself healthy, I found out that I had alopecia areata due to high cortisol from stress. I always thought this stress was normal in the nonstop, busy life of growing a company, having an active social schedule, and what I had previously considered living my best life.

I decided to make some changes and reached out to Emily Fletcher for help. I started meditating regularly for fifteen minutes twice a day. It was so impactful that I immediately felt more present and able to handle important decisions with ease. I started sleeping better, became more efficient, got more accomplished, let go of things that had previously overwhelmed me, and stepped into what is truly my best life, with each day being better than before. My test results show the incredible difference Ziva has made to my body, with a tenfold reduction in my stress.

Before zivaONLINE my Na/Mg ratio (a measure of adrenal function) was very high—96. This indicates adrenal insufficiency. In my most recent test the Na/Mg level dropped from 96 to 10, indicating my stress levels and adrenal health have improved tenfold in only five months!

Emotional Detox

Before I share the specific techniques you’ll be using to meditate, it’s important to take a moment to explore the process by which our bodies begin to rid themselves of stress. This emotional preparation is essential for reaping maximum benefits and establishing the healthiest and most productive relationship with the Z Technique. If we agree that accumulated stress in the body is slowing us down and that it makes sense to get rid of it so we can perform at the top of our game, the next question we must ask is . . . where does the stress go?

Meditation wrings you out like a sponge, so if you have some sadness inside, you may have some sad-flavored stress coming up and out when you first start practicing. The same is true for anger, resentment, insecurity, and on through a whole host of unpleasant emotions. I warn all my Ziva students that during the first two weeks following the course there are to be no quitting of jobs, no divorces, and no proposals. People usually laugh—until they experience firsthand how intense the feelings can be as the body and mind detox. The fact is, stress can have the same flavor on the way out as it does on the way in. And as much as I would love to wave a magic wand and have your lifetime of stress disappear in an instant, that’s not the way Nature works. That old stress from the dog that barked in your face when you were four may create some feelings of anxiety as it is released.

I find it helpful to warn people that these uncomfortable sensations may come, but it does get better. There is no way around but through. And I’ll be walking you through this emotional and physical detox process in the coming chapters. The best thing you can do in the first few weeks after starting the Z Technique is to schedule some extra rest and make sure you have a solid support team around you. Maybe start a meditation-book club with some friends or coworkers and begin this program together. It is so much easier to stay committed if you have support and accountability. As with any detoxification process, like quitting smoking or fasting, the initial responses can be strong as our bodies and minds release stress that’s accumulated over our lifetimes.

Some students report feelings of sadness or anger over past traumas they thought they had moved beyond; others have found that they are overcome with urges to drastically change the direction of their lives; still others are confounded by the physical manifestations of catharsis, such as tears with no discernible cause, or very vivid dreams, nightmares, nausea, or fogginess. I am not writing this to scare you; I share this so you can go into this detox process with your eyes wide open and prepared to bravely move through discomfort if it arises.

All these reactions are completely normal, and they’re usually most intense in the first few days and weeks. If you find yourself wanting to quit your job, take a walk. If you want to divorce your partner, take a nap. If you want to move, take a bath. If that doesn’t work, reach out to a fellow meditator in the zivaTRIBE online community at facebook.com/groups/zivaTRIBE.

It’s also very possible that you’ll have few or no symptoms of emotional detox. I didn’t when I first started, but I still got tremendous benefits from meditation (clearly). In other words, the detox and the benefits don’t always correlate. Unfortunately, there’s no easy way to predict how your body will react to the initial phases of unstressing. Simply being aware of the possibility of strong physical reactions, however, allows you to prepare yourself for what may come, and also reminds you that this, too, shall pass. Our theme song through the initial detox phase will be “Better Out Than In!”

Unstressing: The process of a lifetime of accumulated stresses leaving the body. This period can last a few days to a few months.

Emotional Catharsis: The purging of deep emotions, resulting in psychological healing and sometimes physical relief.

Stress is a bully. Stress keeps your body and your mind trapped in a place of perpetual unrest, worry, and discontent; it keeps you on edge, feeling nervous, and always looking over your shoulder—exactly like a playground tyrant. Meditation allows you to feel safe enough for emotional release. It allows you to finally let go of the fear and the panic that can take control of your body and mind. Like a loving mother, meditation wraps you in her bosom and lets your nervous system know you now have access to your own bliss and fulfillment internally, which allows you to feel safe enough to let go of a lifetime of stress. I want to encourage you to stand up to that bully, even though doing so can be scary at first.

When a person begins a meditation practice, he or she is jump-starting the unstressing process. I urge my students to move bravely through the temporary discomfort. Discomfort is not the same thing as suffering. Suffering is intense and prolonged pain; discomfort is a short period of intense feeling as you move through a release. On the other side of that temporary discomfort, you emerge stronger and better equipped for the future. The emotional detox you may experience at the outset of this process is nothing more than your body finally letting go of the backlog of stresses you’ve been accumulating over your lifetime. That’s not to say these responses are not real or valid or intense, but simply to recognize that they are on their way out. They ultimately lead to liberation from stress and its effects on your physical state as well as your mental acuity and performance.

If you feel prepared to tackle your demands with a fully engaged brain and to release the lifetime of stress in your body, despite some possible initial discomfort, then you’re ready to begin this practice. Remember that this is a journey about up-leveling your life. As your stress is gradually released, you’ll begin enjoying the space and energy it leaves behind for creativity, productivity, and even an increased IQ—up to 23 percent in some studies!4 Remember, stress makes you stupid.

Eyes-Open Exercise

What Is Stress Costing You?

I want to get really practical here. The question I asked above regarding how much stress costs you was not a hypothetical one. Now it’s time to write it down. You will be so happy you have this information a few months into your meditation career.

Look over your past six months of expenses and make note of the ways that stress slows you down and drains your bank account. If there are other things I didn’t list here, feel free to add them in.

Over the past six months, how much money have you spent on the following?

  • alcohol
  • therapy
  • coffee
  • cigarettes
  • binge shopping
  • anonymous sex
  • medications
  • recreational drugs
  • missed appointments
  • lost job opportunities
  • sick days

Now I’d like you to tally up what you think those outlets are costing you in terms of time (how much is your time worth, after all?) over a six-month period. Surveys among my students have revealed that the number comes out to almost $6,000—that’s nearly $12,000 a year! Now take a moment to write down what you could do with that extra money. Take your dream vacation? Hire a personal trainer? Invest in your child’s college fund? Does it seem worth it to exchange fifteen minutes twice a day for that money?

If your numbers are causing you to have a stress reaction, feel free to engage in this simple but enjoyable exercise for getting out of feeling overwhelmed: Breathe in through your nose and imagine you’re smelling the scent of freshly baked cookies. Hold that breath for a moment, then exhale out through your mouth, imagining that you’re blowing out birthday candles. Repeat this exercise for at least three breath cycles.

Ziva Case Study 2

How I Stopped Being a “Meditation Failure”

My teen years were spent stuffing feelings into a metaphorical box so that no one, not even I, could see them. If I was sad, I would fake a smile; if I was angry, I would brush it off as if it were nothing. These habits grew into extreme behaviors in which I would withdraw fully from uncomfortable situations and have rash reactions to others. I was so out of touch with my own feelings that I made huge life decisions because of feelings I didn’t even know I was having.

I spent the majority of my twenties on antidepressants, antianxiety medication, and sleeping pills. Countless therapists tried to “fix” me, but I was so out of touch with my own feelings that I wasn’t sure what they were trying to fix.

After years of being medicated and eager to wean myself off my addiction to sleeping pills, I sought out alternatives. Meditation had just started becoming mainstream, and it was so exciting to be able to download an app that promised to make me feel better instantly. I would listen to certain mindfulness exercises and attempt to follow their directions. I would work to focus on my breath and “quiet my mind,” but I could never quite understand how to do this. When the drop-in meditation studios began popping up, I thought, This is my chance to learn how to stop my thoughts and finally find that bliss that everyone speaks of! Unfortunately, that’s not what I got. I found myself yet again getting told to sit up straighter, focus on my breathing, and stop thoughts from entering my mind. This only magnified my anxiety, in the very chair that was supposed to relax me, and left me thinking that “meditation” could now be added to the list of things I had tried and failed.

Later, in a discussion with a friend, I explained my failed attempts at meditating, and she suggested that I might be doing the wrong kind of meditation. I didn’t even know there were different kinds! She started raving about Emily and Ziva and all the amazing ways her life had changed because of it. I immediately got myself into Emily’s next “Intro to Meditation” talk and was so inspired as she spoke about her personal experience of overcoming insomnia and how her life, as a whole, had changed for the better. I decided immediately that I had to learn.

Nine months later, I am incredibly happy to report that my life has changed in exactly the ways Emily said it might. For the first time in ten years, I am medication-free! I fall asleep effortlessly—without any kind of sleep aid—and wake up feeling rested and refreshed. But most important, I now connect with my own feelings. I can identify what comes up, feel it, and move on. My reactions are authentic to each moment, and I’m not stuck in the past reviewing old traumas. I’m now in a healthy, committed relationship in which I’m able to show up fully as myself. I’m more focused in my work and find creative outlets all over my life.