Category: Career

What keeps you up at night?

Is it money? Work? Family responsibilities? Relationships? Health?

Have you considered that what keeps us up at night is our thoughts about life situations?

Lying awake at night is simply one of our body’s reactions to the meaning we give to life situations.

But do we see things for what they truly are?

Join me in exploring how to be in charge of your power by choosing the way you look at what we have come to define as the major challenges of our existence.

Do You Have a Good Relationship With Stress?

In the midst of this crazy world we live in, fueled with uncomfortable phenomena, one thing that will never discriminate against us, regardless of our race, sex, or socio-economic status is—stress!

Stress has been described as the epidemic of the century. Prominent scientists around the world have provided us with over five decades of evidence that links stress to more than 90% of today’s disease, regardless of the color of our skin or any other of our unique characteristics.

I have had a tumultuous relationship with stress because I did not make friends with it. I am now living with some significant consequences. I have developed a musculoskeletal condition that graces me with chronic pain and restricts my activities to a great degree. Furthermore, my brain has been sculpted to be over-sensitive to stressors. This means that my amygdala (our nervous system’s alarm system responsible for identifying threats) is probably enlarged and my hippocampus (mainly associated with memory, among other critical functions) has probably experienced some shrinkage. So, you can say that finding a solution to the problematic consequences of not having a good relationship with stress has been a big deal for me.

During my diligent study and experimentation to improve my relationship with stress I came across a bewildering realization:

The dire ramifications of stress are not because stress is such a great villain, but because we don’t fully realize just how much power we have to choose how we relate to stressors and to the critical players involved with our stress response! Could it be that our “untamed” power leads us to the troublesome stress symptoms we experience?

What if we use our power to “befriend” stress?

On first thought, you may think the idea of “befriending stress” is a conundrum. The truth is, we all know how to do it. We go through the process of making friends pretty much every day in life.

In fact, making friends involves a simple two-step process:

  1. We get to know someone better.
  2. We establish safety and trust.

What if we followed the same process to improve our relationship with stress?

This week I want to talk about Step One: Getting to know stress better.

  1. What is stress?

Stress is the pressure we feel when our body goes off-balance (homeostasis) to respond to an environmental demand. In small quantities, stress is not necessarily bad as it motivates us to stretch ourselves to meet life’s demands. Imagine if you were an Olympian training to run for a gold medal. Some stress might be helpful to motivate you. Every day, we are all Olympians having to deal with situations that take us off homeostasis, which is our optimal, internal balance of essential bodily functions like temperature and heart rate. Next time you feel the subtle signs that your stress response is activated (for example, if you notice your heart rate has increased) give yourself sixty seconds to assess if the situation at hand is worthy of the activation of your stress response or not.

2. Is the reason for your stress a truth or a story?

What we don’t realize is that most of the time what triggers our stress response is the subtle, momentary interpretation we give to life situations and not the life situations themselves. For example, public speaking in and of itself does not actually pose any significant threat or danger to an organism. However, the thought of possibly forgetting our words and feeling embarrassed has the power to trigger our stress response, which we can immediately feel by the increase in our heart ratem just the same as if we had encountered a shark while swimming in the ocean. What if we shift our attention to simply recognizing how amazing it is that we are just as powerful as a shark or a bear in activating our fight or flight response, instead of allowing the power of our mind to take us off-balance?

 3. Too much of a good thing can be bad.

There are situations that warrant the appropriate elicitation of our stress response. Maybe we are in a car accident and we have to rush to provide aid for ourselves and our loved ones. A temporary, and infrequent, activation of our stress response with ample time to rest and digest what has happened in-between does not lead to health issues. However, we are now estimated to elicit our stress response over ten times a day. We are over-estimating threats and placing our bodies under a tremendous amount of unnecessary strain that does have significant short and long-term health consequences. What if we acknowledge how efficient we are at identifying threats, but shoot for eliminating one unnecessary stress response activation per week?

 4. Balance and optimal performance go hand in hand.

When we identify a situation as a threat, our thoughts and words trigger our brain to engage multiple systems in our body to address the threat. This diminishes the effectiveness of critical structures in our brain, for example, those that govern thinking; and shuts down other essential functions of our body, for example, our immune and digestive systems. In other words, when we operate under our stress response, our power is momentarily diminished and we enter a state of temporary impairment. Additionally, when we are in this defensive mode we cannot learn as well. What if we use the old advice to “pause and take ten breaths,” and then reconsider if we want to label a situation a threat, considering how powerful our thoughts and words are?

5. There are significant consequences to chronic stress.

When we allow our body systems to be used too often to address imaginary fears, like public humiliation, we are essentially exhausting our body systems by asking them to work overtime. Allostasis is the process that our body uses to regain homeostasis after it has been taken off-balance by a stressor. The total sum of all the things our body has to do to get back to its balanced state is called allostatic load. When our allostatic load is greater than our ability to recover, we enter the overload-level of allostatic load, and significant damage to organs and functions can occur. What if we consciously infuse breaks of calm in between jumping through hoops of stress as a means of boosting our resilience to life’s demands? Even sneaking out to the garden to water the plans, or creating a five minute space at work to listen to a guided meditation could be enough to restore balance in our nervous system.

We seem to frequently judge ourselves for our shortcomings, but we do not acknowledge how powerful we can be in creating not just our reality, but also our health and well-being. Although life’s demands are endless and many of them are outside of our control, what is actually within our control is working on building the resources that help us bounce back when something pushes us off-balance.

We are all drawn to rewarding experiences, and we strive to be happy. Reinstating an internal sense of safety and security is one of the most sustainable forms of happiness.

We know how to install a security system in our home to help us feel safe, but do we know how to reinstate a sense of safety in our neurobiology to improve our relationship with stress?

Join me next week for the second part of ways to improve our relationship with stress—how to establish safety and trust with stress and our nervous systems.

We cannot eliminate the sheer volume of stressors, but we can improve our relationship with our body systems and our stress response as a powerful way to live happier, healthier, and more productive lives.

Self Care for a healthier, happier and more productive reality.

I am celebrating my birthday this week, one of my favorite days of the year to give myself some much-needed self-love and care. I know I ought to be giving myself “birthday love and care” every single day of the year, but out of the 365 days per year, most days there seems to be something else that takes precedence over taking care of myself.

The truth is that optimal performance; peak productivity, happiness, and health are not possible without scrupulous self-care. Our species has achieved some amazing accomplishments throughout our history: We have uncovered the human genome; walked on the moon; and created masterpieces of art, like the Sistine Chapel. But we continue to fall short at practicing self-care, which is a major obstacle to realizing self-mastery.

Why is taking care of ourselves so hard for us to put into practice?

Here is a small collection of guidelines about self-care—possibly the most critical component to realizing all noble human pursuits:

  1. If and when the cabin pressure drops, you have to put on your mask first before you can help anyone else that may need your assistance!

Isn’t it time we got over the conditioned way of thinking that we are selfish if we take care of ourselves before we take care of the ones we love? If we have people we love in our lives, we need to remember that we cannot be there for anyone in our lives if we become ill.

  1. Re-think your “number goals,” and change them to ones that truly matter.

We often sacrifice self-care for the goal most of us make number one on our numbered lists of goals: money! But which of these number-related goals might be more important than money: Thirty minutes a day of physical activity? Five servings of fruit and veggies everyday? Twenty-five grams of fiber per day (if you are a woman) or thirty-five grams (if you are a man)? What unique, beautiful, body number goals should you be considering? Do you need to have a blood pressure goal, or an HbA1C goal if you are a diabetic? Re-think your number goals.

  1. When it comes to your physical health, strive for balance versus perfection.

If you don’t get your thirty minutes of exercise today, can you add an extra ten minutes per day over the next three days? Events happen that take us off-balance. Becoming good at reinstating our balance when it’s lost is one of the most important and impactful things we can do to take good care of ourselves. After all, we cannot eliminate the myriad of life situations that will often challenge us and in significant ways. However, becoming better at how we land back on our feet after each setback and regain our balance is key to arriving at desired outcomes.

  1. Nurture your mind everyday.

Self-care goes above and beyond the American Medical Association’s recommendations regarding our physical health. Challenging yourself to find one way to nurture your mind everyday will increase the grey matter in the parts of your brain associated with inner strengths like resilience.

It only takes a few minutes to listen to a TED Talk or a short, guided meditation, or to read a few pages of a powerful book. But the benefits of re-sculpting your brain toward a happier you last forever!

  1. Self-talk matters.

How do you talk to yourself? Often, we are our self’s worst critic. We camouflage self-criticism under the label “high standards.” A helpful antidote is to picture yourself as your BFF (your best friend forever). How would you talk to them? If your self-talk does not pass the “BFF test,” it’s time to revamp the elements of your internal dialogue. Reframing is a fabulous way to calm our nervous system and bring us back home. For example, if we try something and fail, we can look at it from this perspective: “We are a fabulous person simply having an experience of failure.” Although it may seem like semantics, the act of reframing a negative to a positive is enough to allow us to support our nervous system to work with us towards our health and not exhaust it by employing it for our defense from imaginary threats.

 

  1. Give yourself the gift of connection and human touch everyday.

Regardless of how many ups and downs each day may bring, make the time to hold your loved ones up close and personal. When we hold or touch a person we love, the hormone oxytocin floods our blood stream. Oxytocin is a potent modulator of critical nervous system functions involved with anxiety, depression, and pain perception. If you feel that life becomes a little too much at times, don’t forget oxytocin—the most natural and potent anti-depressant, which is free and has no side effects. All you have to do is reach out and touch the ones you love!

  1. Take an active stance against negative thoughts, words, and people.

We don’t often consider the negative consequences of the vibrational frequency of any type of negativity. But if you think of a time in your life when you nurtured a plant, you know how toxic it would have been if you had chosen to water your plant with an acidic fluid, like bleach or vinegar. We, too, are delicate flowers easily taken off our optimal levels by any threat that sounds our alarm! There is nothing more alarming than negative thoughts, words, and people.

Each and every one of us has a very special purpose, regardless of our background, history, or humble beginnings.

We often believe that the economy, unique life situations, or circumstances outside of our control are responsible for us not living the life we want and deserve.

The truth is that we have everything we need to arrive at all our desired outcomes.

All we have to do now is focus on effectively closing the gap between the optimal results we expect and the quality of care we provide ourselves.

As it turns out, the love we put into anything important at work or at home will determine our results.

But the one thing we need to always remember is that we cannot love anyone anymore than we love ourselves.

The time to start loving yourself more is now!

The Most Profound Way to Make Friends and Influence People

We invest much energy and time in trying to become a popular person. We beat ourselves up at the gym to have a nicer body; we starve ourselves to lose weight; we go under the knife to change physical attributes; and we go into debt to buy designer clothes and other material trophies. And what is the outcome of all of these efforts? We are more isolated and lonely than ever.

Do you want to know a secret? The key to being the most likeable person at work or at home is to be the person who is best at establishing safety with others!

 Why is safety the only quality that truly matters?

Our nervous system is built like a sounding board. Much like a mirror, our neurobiology perceives and reflects the internal state of the people around us. Research shows that when we see someone else in pain, the regions of our brain associated with pain get activated. We don’t have to be neuroscientists to witness our mirror neurons at work. Just notice how we tear up while watching a sad movie, although the sad story is not actually happening to us. Emotions are indeed very contagious.

When two people are interacting and one person’s internal state is not calm and balanced, it will activate threat-related neurons and the stress response in the other.

In fact, our nervous system appears to play a very important role in how we feel and behave without us even realizing it. Steven Porges, who developed the polyvagal theory, specifically uncovered compelling data on the role our autonomic nervous system plays in the regulation of affective states and social behavior. Most of our physiological responses occur without our awareness, due to neuroception—a sub-conscious process of threat and danger detection.

When we define others in a negative way, are critical and or contemptuous towards them, their stress response gets activated. The stress response shuts down the brilliant, thinking part of our brain and slows down critical functions, like our immune system. Needless to say, being under the emotionally hi-jacked state of our stress response does not feel good.

We will have a very hard time making friends and influencing people if we elicit the stress response in others when we interact with them.

Three million years have passed since the Stone Age, and we now seem to reside in the threatened brain era, where it is estimated that we activate our fight or flight response over ten times per day. Six hundred million years of evolution have yielded us a brain that has the propensity to assume the worst. What can we do practically to intercept our built-in negative bias and master the art of building safety with the people that matter in our world? Here are some ideas:

  1. Say what you will do and do what you say.

This is one of the best-kept secrets describing the quickest and most effective way to build trust with anyone. It appears to be challenging in the midst of it all to prioritize and remember all the things we said we would do for all the people in our lives. But if you wish to be more popular at work or at home, being the person others can truly depend on is gold. Knowing our own limits and not over-promising and over-extending ourselves is critical too. It is much better to say “no,” than to say we will do something and not do it. Being a man or a woman of our word is a potent ingredient in being liked and having influence over others and, may I say, it is extremely rare.

  1. Replace judgment and resistance with compassion. 

When another behaves in a way that rubs us the wrong way, we take it personally. At that point our threat-related neural activity increases and the right hemisphere part of our brain, which governs our relational ability, shuts down. It is then easy to slip and slide into becoming judgmental, defensive, and resistant to connection. What if instead we choose to focus on feeling compassion for the other person’s temporary inability to relate to us in a healthy way and take the high road in reinstating the sense of safety between us? Research from Stanford University’s Center for Compassion and Altruism has uncovered that nothing releases bursts of dopamine (our “feel good” neurotransmitter) in our brain as much as compassion does. If you become associated with dopamine release in another, you can actually become addictive in a good, positive way!

  1. Practice having power over your mind.

When something in another triggers negative emotions in you, redirect your attention to identifying at least three positive things about them. Although not visible on the exterior, emotions are perceived under the surface through contagion neurons. And if you have any concerns that thinking positive thoughts about someone who is upsetting you is letting them off the hook, think again. Redirecting our attention from a threatened brain state to a calmer state will allow us to have the clarity of thought to handle this, and any other, situation effectively. In addition, this practice is critical to the mastery of self-control, a rare skill that everyone admires and is attracted to.

  1. When emotions run high, use “I language.”

Communication between two people is nature and science at work. Since it is natural for two people to have differences, we must exercise caution when expressing any discomfort we feel and not put our fellow human beings down. When we do, safety is immediately removed, and the person across from us is no longer interested in resolving our differences. They are now busy defending themselves.

When views, perceptions, and understandings are shared with “I language,” they do not trigger defenses. We feel honored and special when someone shares their feelings as opposed to defining us in a negative way. Think of your last, heated discussion with another. How would that conversation have ended if you had expressed your feelings and needs instead of blaming the other person for how things turned out?

  1. Invest wholeheartedly in your healing!

We don’t typically like to admit it, but we are complicated, powerful systems that come with no directions, driven most of the time on autopilot from procedural memory. As much as we prefer to be known as easy-going, we all have varying degrees of wounds, past pains, and baggage we carry along with us, which frequently get triggered when we least expect it.

We are hot beds of emotions driven by our never-ending efforts to get further away from pain and closer to pleasure. Nothing is more powerful than being the admired person and role model we strive to be. We do this best by processing, unpacking, and making coherent stories of our past experiences that otherwise hold our spirits hostage and disrupt and sabotage every effort and good deed we make toward connection and belonging.

As it turns out, it is not the perfect exterior but a well-regulated interior that appears to be the most attractive attribute we can bring to our personal or professional life.

Although we can continue to play the part, use the right words, wear the right clothes, and do things the way others like us to, we know that maintaining a status quo façade is an ineffective way to create authentic connection and trust with the people in our microcosm.

If we want to make a difference and be part of a small revolution, nothing can set us apart from the crowd like being people who are predictable, accountable, reliable, and who say what they mean and do what they say.

You can be the person others know they can depend on, no matter what. You can be the one they always feel calm and safe around.

And I promise you, a person like that is definitely the one everyone wants to be around and everyone wants to follow.