3 Mistakes to Avoid if You Want to Beat Burnout.

The prevalence of burnout has reached alarming levels today.

This is true for all of us, but even more so for our fellow human beings who dedicate their lives to caring for others.

Therapists, addiction professionals, doctors, nurses, social workers, and first responders appear to be paying a high cost for their commitment to helping others in their healing journeys.

We are all aware of the problem. The lifetime occurrence of compassion fatigue and burnout reaches a staggering 85% in helping professionals, creating a workforce crisis, but also impacting their well-being and the health outcomes for those whom they care for.

My examination of my personal experience of burnout and the long journey of recovery has revealed some mistakes I made, which contributed to my burnout.

I am hoping to inspire you to assess your current situation and be more proactive in safeguarding your well-being and happiness, as well as your job performance and satisfaction, from compassion fatigue and burnout.

My burnout mistakes

1. I perceived the symptoms of burnout as weakness so I decided to “fix the problem” by keeping quiet about it and working harder. 

If you are a driven person with high expectations of self, maybe you too perceive exhaustion, stress, irritability, or even anxiety, as simply the price one has to pay to be successful.

Perhaps you even view these cumbersome symptoms as signs of weakness, so you attempt to hide them under the rug and work harder to make them go away.

You work late, give up time with your loved ones, skip a meal, or sacrifice your gym ritual in order to “fix the problem.”

I urge you to rethink this approach!

Do you recognize any of the symptoms below in yourself?

Burnout Signs & Symptoms—Gradual onset and slower recovery.

  •   Physical, emotional, and mental exhaustion. (Signs: forgetfulness, insomnia, frequent illness, irritability & anger, anxiety & depression).
  • Cynicism and detachment. (Signs: Negative outlook, isolation, disengagement, loss of employment).
  • Feelings of ineffectiveness and lack of accomplishment. (Signs: Hopelessness, increased irritability, diminished productivity, and poor work performance).

Compassion Fatigue Signs & Symptoms—Rapid onset but faster recovery

All of the burnout symptoms above, as well as the following:

  • Nervous system arousal resulting in anxiety, sleep disturbances, and heightened sense of fear.
  • Overall increased emotional intensity.
  • Decreased cognitive ability and impaired judgment.
  • Loss of hope, meaning, and sense of self-worth.
  • Isolation, depression, PTSD.
  • Depersonalization (The feeling that you are observing yourself from outside your body, or you have the sense that things around you are not real, or both).

These signs and symptoms are the ultimate notification that you have exceeded your capacity to meet the demands of life without harming yourself, which is what burnout is.

Compassion fatigue is a type of burnout, which has a more rapid onset of action, characterized by secondary traumatic stress when caring for individuals in distress. (Charles Figley, 1992).

Although it is normal to sometimes feel out of sorts—especially after giving your all to a big project—no title, salary, or career advancement is worth jeopardizing the well-being of your body, mind, and spirit.

The good news is that we can prevent and overcome burnout and compassion fatigue as long as we recognize them promptly and do something about it.

I know that I did not recognize these symptoms for what they were until I was forced to as a result of a major health crisis.

If you are concerned about your level of burnout or compassion fatigue, you can assess where you are by using Dr. Beth Hudnall Stamm’s Professional Quality of Life Screening Tool, which you can access here: www.proqol.org.

Here are some simple things you can consider doing today if you identify with any of the signs and symptoms of burnout.

Recognize that these symptoms are not normal and speak up about them. Early recognition and seeking help are the first and most critical steps in preventing the development of burnout.

Take a purposeful break. Getting off the hamster wheel for a moment and doing something that helps you relax will give you the opportunity to reset and get back to a balanced state from which you can make wise decisions.

Resist the urge to isolate and work harder. As much as we may perceive exhaustion as a sign of weakness, the high prevalence of burnout in our world clearly indicates that you are not alone.

After you re-charge your batteries, re-prioritize your life to provide opportunity for ample self-care in between sprints of intense work. Uncover and challenge any unconscious, limiting beliefs that place a negative connotation on self-care, like believing self-care is self-indulgent. Let the robust research remind you that the most critical predictor of your clients’ outcomes hinges on how well you can care for yourself first.

Create an ongoing inventory of all the activities that help you relax and make sure you dedicate time to do some of them every day. As much as you think working late will help you catch up, a thirty-minute walk in nature will boost your productivity and enhance your mental clarity a lot more than working late.

2. I relied on organizational change for relief of my symptoms, overlooking my personal power to prevent burnout. 

The American Institute of Stress reports that job pressure is the #1 cause of stress in the United States. 

Without a doubt, there are many steps organizations can take to protect their employees from burnout. Decreasing work load, increasing support, cultivating a positive culture where employees feel valued and cared for, and increasing environmental wellness are all great initiatives. 

However, nobody but ourselves can safeguard and maintain the necessary state of balance we need to function properly.

In fact, one of the most effective recovery programs for compassion fatigue substantiates the critical importance of self-directed interventions toward rebuilding professional and personal well-being. (Accelerated Recovery Program for Compassion Fatigue.Gentry, Baranowsky, and Dunning, 1997).

From the standpoint of neurobiology, the stress-related negative effects we experience are a result of our perception of our workplace circumstances as threats.

This does not negate the impact of unreasonable workloads or poor leadership skills that use harsh criticism or motivating by fear as a way to improve work performance.

However, only we can control how we respond to stressors. By associating work demands to perceived negative outcomes and seeing them as threats, our nervous system shifts to the “fight or flight” stress response. When we are in that state, we lose access to our optimal functioning, such as reasoning, decision-making, wisdom, judgment, self-control, and so forth.

How do we re-gain access to that optimal functioning? We can become scientists in our own lives by training our minds to shift our perspective and stop viewing work and life situations as threats. This action can intercept the unnecessary activation of our stress response. Instead we can access the part of our nervous system where we grow, repair, restore, and access invaluable higher-functioning skills and strengths. (Parasympathetic branch, known as our relaxation response.)

Our mind is an effective portal to regulate the energy and information flow that will determine which part of our nervous system we are tackling life from. (Dan Siegel, Mindsight, 2010). 

Here are some practical ways we can cultivate our ability to quiet the over-activation of our stress response and mitigate the development of burnout.

  • Practice mindfulness. Increasing our ability to direct the focus of our attention from imaginary threats to the reality of the present moment has shown incredible benefits in reduction of emotional exhaustion and depersonalization in as little as six weeks. If you are not sure how to begin a mindfulness practice, you can read my last article by clicking on this link: https://myndzen.com/the-solution/the-positive-perspective/the-magic-of-mindfulness/ and even try out a guided practice I recorded by clicking on this link: https://youtu.be/zAavQ4aSzko
  • Cultivate your emotional intelligence (EQ) by working with difficult emotions. EQ has been researched extensively and has been correlated with robust, positive outcomes in all areas of life. Asking yourself powerful questions to assess the nature and validity of your emotions redirects your energy back to your thinking brain. For example, you can simply ask yourself, “What am I afraid will happen? What is the feedback my fear is trying to give me?”
  • Take back control. One of the predisposing factors of burnout is the perceived loss of control. When we depend on outside factors to become healthier and happier at work, we give away the control we have over the situation.

It is our responsibility to cultivate the skills we need to ensure our well-being, our performance, and the quality of life we all deserve. Not to mention that by taking ownership, we take back control of feeling more content and calm and no longer generate the negative symptoms of burnout.

3. I did not realize the long-term recovery time and consequences of burnout.

Once upon a time, I was considered a force to be reckoned with. For the majority of my life I was “untouchable.” I was an athlete with incredible physical strength. I had a sharp intellect that could solve any problem. And I was a ferocious leader and top performer with a proven track record of success. I could literally solve any problem and exceed every goal I set my mind to, even synthesizing cancer drugs that surpassed the efficacy of existing treatments at the time.

Burnout replaced all those traits with brain fog, memory loss, difficulty concentrating, panic attacks, fainting spells, self-doubt, and a painful spinal condition.

From my usual driven and high-achiever stance, I thought I could conquer burnout all on my own.

I did not realize the long-term consequences of operating at such high levels of stress or how long the journey of recovery from burnout is.

Research shows that chronic stress actually causes structural changes in our brain in non-favorable ways. Our invaluable pre-frontal cortex, which is involved in motivation, problem- solving, reasoning skills, and mediation of rewards shrinks significantly under prolonged exposure to chronic stress. The hippocampus, which is involved with memory and learning, has been shown to reduce in size as well. And our amygdala, the alarm that goes off in the presence of a threat, actually increasesin size, which then makes us more susceptible to recognizing events as threatening.

Furthermore, the long-term effect of the over-exposure to neural, endocrine, and immune system stress mediators associated with our stress response can cause organ system damage leading to disease.

For example, when facing a threat, our blood pressure and heart rate rise and insulin and blood sugar increase in our blood stream in order to provide us with the necessary energy to address the threat. In the case of acute stress, these changes are short-term, adaptive actions that are protective. (McEwen & Wingfield, 2003).

However, chronic stress can result in our body having to make too many changes to be able to return to normal levels so that abnormal levels of blood glucose and blood pressure continue. The amount of this effort to return to normal levels is referred to as allostatic load and this effort can lead to disease. (Allostatic load, McEwen 1993).

For example, when the allostatic load becomes too high and our body is unable to shut off the increased blood glucose level this can lead to the development of Type 2 diabetes.

High allostatic load has also been linked to cognitive, skeletal, endocrine, immune, and cardiovascular disease.

I am the poster child of the long-term organ damage that can occur as a result of the great amount of work my body had to perform to reinstate the equilibrium of high functioning. There are several studies exploring the mechanisms of how stress may affect the physiological processes involved in musculoskeletal disorders, such as the one I was diagnosed with.

But as I continue my work to reinstate not only my physical health, but also my self-concept, I came across a profound epiphany.

The debilitating effects of burnout in my life became an incredible catalyst to restructuring my self-concept and identifying and cultivating undiscovered resources, skills, and meaning that have the potential to result in unfathomable growth, transformation, and improvement of the quality of my life.

Dr. Joyce Mikal-Flynn’s trauma research underscored concepts of stress-resilience and post-traumatic growth, resulting in a revolutionary framework to guide one in recovery from traumas, challenges and personal life crises.

Her extensive research, led to the development of Metahabilitation, a new structure and clinical pathway of rehabilitation that supports and guides survivors to move beyond a simple restorative state to a heightened existence, not despite our crisis but as a direct result of our crisis (Mikal-Flynn, 2012).

You can learn more about metahabilitation and the research of Dr. Mikal-Flynn by visiting www.metahab.com

My personal review of Dr. Mikal Flynn’s work and research helped me choose a different way of dealing with my crisis based on the characteristics of metahabilitated survivors.

  • I embrace personal control – cultivating self-compassion and refusing to see myself as a victim of my circumstances. Instead I choose to practice self-compassion daily, extending kindness to myself as I would to my best friend.
  • I continually practice and work toward cultivating and maintaining an optimistic outlook, refusing to live in anger and despair, instead focus on creating a new life plan armed with the insights I have uncovered about myself.
  • I practice gratitude daily, including the recognition of my burnout adventure as a catalyst for positive growth.
  • I have chosen to live my life driven by a new mission: Serving others and giving back by transforming my experience and science into guideposts for positive growth.
  • Burnout can wreak havoc in our lives, the way we view the world and how our life unfolds from it. However, it can also be an incredible opportunity for transformation, growth and unimaginable meaning and quality of life. If only we see it that way!

Final thoughts

Burnout and Compassion Fatigue are significant problems, affecting up to 85% of care-giving professionals.

Central to this problem is the propensity to suffer silently, hoping external circumstances will change to relieve the cumbersome symptoms of compassion fatigue and burnout.

No matter how great your workplace is, chances are it will demand more and more of you the more you give.

However, by recognizing the signs and symptoms early and taking an active stance against the inevitable health consequences of burnout, we can prevent and overcome these devastating coping mechanisms.

There are several practical ways we can conquer the insidious impact of burnout in our lives.

If you want to learn more skills that can help you build resilience and become burnout resistant, I am here for you.

You can book a free 15-minute consultation, by emailing me at tzeli@myndzen.com, or calling me at 916-212-3042. You can also join the Myndzen community by clicking on this link http://bit.ly/JoinMyndZen to be notified of new resources and courses that will help you take your power back from burnout.

However you choose to proceed, never forget this one truth: There is only one you in this universe. Don’t let burnout and compassion fatigue overshadow your true potential!

The Truth About Love and Heartache.

Love is a powerful shield against the inevitable bumps in the road of your life’s journey.

We all know the warm and fuzzy feeling we experience when we are in love.

But beyond that, research from various scientific fields has linked love to tremendous benefits in our emotional, mental, and physical health, our happiness and even our career and financial success.

Healthy lovers help each other recover faster from illness, reduce stress, depression and anxiety and grow brain regions involved with creativity, emotional intelligence and resilience. No wonder most of the movies we watch, songs we listen to, and commercials we see are all stories of love. 

But why do so many of these stories talk about heartache?

For decades, researchers from all across the world have tried to answer that question. 

The problem is, when our love life suffers, we lose our parachute that keeps us safe during the falls of life. Relationship distress leads to responses to threatening and stressful events that make things worse, reduces our immune function, and leads to depression.  And it leads to us being too jaded to invest in love again.

The good news is that research has also opened the door to recognizing barriers to a healthy relationship and effective strategies we can employ to overcome them and harness the power of love. 

In light of the highly-commercialized Valentine’s Day, which at least places love in the forefront of our mind where it should be, I wanted to share a handful of myths about love that we need to be mindful of in our quest to make love a positive aspect of our life. 

I am hoping my insights will inspire you to assess your current perceptions and perhaps consider experimenting with these principles to enhance your own experience of love. 

“Love is the only sane and satisfactory answer to the problem of human existence.” 

― Erich Fromm

Myths about love

1.    We think Love is something we “fall into.” 

We are constantly bombarded with an idealized version of what love is all about. According to movies, commercials, and songs, when we meet “the one” we will know it, bring out the best in one another, and walk into the sunset in eternal bliss.

This notion is flawed, as it sets us up for failure. 

In reality, we cultivate love through committed actions and hard work to rise up to a disciplined way we choose to interact with another, so that together we can build a safe haven that makes us stronger in dealing beautifully with the ups and downs of life. 

No matter how good our love relationship is, it is always a work-in-progress. 

The work involves choosing to do all the little things daily that keep us attuned to our partner, reflect that we are there for them, and show that we will emotionally respond to them in good times and, especially, in bad. 

Here are some tips from the experts to incorporate in your labor of love:

  • It is the small things you do daily that allow you to strengthen your bond and build trust. Answering the question:“What does our relationship need from me?” is a great way to uncover what these daily small things your relationship needs to flourish.
  • Increasing your tolerance for differences, and gentleness in how you approach your different points of view, allows you to feel more connected.
  • Conflict is not the real problem as long as you are mindful of keeping the positive to negative interactions in a five to one ratio.

Once the foundation is set and we have done the hard work of planting our garden with all the right fruits and vegetables that we need, we then don’t have to work as hard anymore.

We can enjoy feeling more assured, assertive, and confident and view life in a more adventurous and expansive way.

“If you have a responsive love partner, you have a secure base in the chaos. If you are emotionally alone, you are in free fall.” 

—Dr. Sue Johnson

 

2.    We don’t give love the respect and priority it deerves.

We all want to be happy in love, but sometimes it seems that we don’t realize how sacred and powerful love is.

As a consequence, we often sacrifice love in the name of other important elements of our life, such as our career or our finances. Interestingly, the Grant study, Harvards longest study in human development researching the factors that contribute to life fulfillment, reveled that secure relationships were by far the biggest contributing factor to career and financial success! 

What we don’t realize is that the bond we share with our primary mate, when nurtured adequately, gives us access to superpowers!

Research shows that healthy, attuned lovers are able to reduce each other’s stress response, heart rate, and trigger the release of a potent hormone called oxytocin, which actually turns off fear.

Fear prevents us from expressing our full potential in all areas of our life.

If we tend to play small in life, chances are, our primary attachment bonds in childhood did not arm us with the confidence to expect positive outcomes, so we are more fearful. Negative models from past experience create unconscious limiting beliefs and anticipatory responses that prevent us from being bold in life.

Love can actually reshape our brain and replace old wounds and limiting beliefs with confidence, courage, and grit.

And the well-documented way our brain activates to diminish threats that is associated with a secure attachment, leads to incredible physiological and psychological benefits. 

So how do we harness the power of love in a more practical sense?

The next time you experience internal discomfort, remember that your partner is the solution and not the enemy. Instead of shutting down or turning away from him/her, reach out to them instead. Identifying our emotional needs and sharing them with our love allows them to respond to us and offer us the comfort and support we need.

“The power of love can help to free us from the trappings of past experiences and to live in the true sense of joyful wholeness.” 

—James Van Praagh

3.    We perceive depending on others as weakness.

We are hardwired in our core to meet our powerful need for intimacy. Yet, we experience great discord in life because we define dependence as a weakness. 

Central to this issue is our fear of vulnerability and our confusion between healthy interdependence and co-dependency. 

The critical difference of interdependence from unhealthy forms of dependence is how we show up in the relationship. When we have a solid sense of self and self-worthiness, we don’t engage in maladaptive behaviors, such as people pleasing, manipulating, or blaming. We instead balance our own needs with the needs of the relationship and work toward the beautiful balance of giving and receiving without fears of being abandoned or losing our identity.   

We then feel free to be vulnerable and create true intimacy.

As we have learned from world renowned vulnerability expert, Dr. Brene Brown, there is immense power in creating wholehearted connections where we allow ourselves to be fully seen. This includes the courage to go out on an emotional limb to ask for help when we need it.   

Far from the conventional view of this as weakness, being able to reach for our loved ones as a resource to calm and comfort us is a strength.

“It seems to me that if we, as a species, are to survive at all on this fragile blue and green planet, we have to learn to step past the illusion of separateness and grasp that we truly are mutually dependent. We learn this in our most intimate relationships.” 

—Dr. Sue Johnson

4.    We blame love—and our lover—for our suffering.

Every love affair begins with an incredible cloud nine, fairy tale sort of feeling. But sooner or later, pain shows up, right when the initial honeymoon phase ends. It is at that point that we tend to blame the relationship and the object of our affection for our suffering. 

What is actually happening below the realm of our conscious awareness is that once we have allowed ourselves to get swept in by the strong force of love, our nervous system regurgitates our historical sensations of what happened in the past when we depended on another.

If our past did not leave a positive imprint on our neurobiology, our automatic response is to become fearful. We may be afraid of being rejected, losing our self, losing our independence, being abandoned, and the list goes on.

And then what happens is all the things we are afraid of saturate our body and our mind and in the process of fighting these old memories, we project them onto our love!

John Gottman’s 40-year research, which predicts divorce with 90% accuracy, has identified four hallmark behaviors that will absolutely drown even the best relationships. These are: criticism, contempt, defensiveness, and stone-walling. 

Here are some questions you can ask yourself any time you feel you are beginning to go down one of these poisonous reflex responses. (You can also receive a cheat sheet of these questions along with a feelings inventory in your inbox when you join the Myndzen community by clicking on this link: http://bit.ly/JoinMyndZen)

—What am I feeling right now?

—What about this makes me feel this way?

—How much of it is true and how much of it is a story based on the past?

—What can I do differently that is within my control?

 Reaching out to our love for comfort instead of blaming them for our suffering will not only help us reduce our internal negative arousal in the moment, but it will also strengthen our bond. They can then become a resource as we grow toward emotional intelligence.

“We are born in relationship, we are wounded in relationship, and we can be healed in relationship .”

— Harville Hendrix

5.    We expect love to complete us. 

There is no bigger disappointment than the rude awakening of our beloved asking us to make a change in ourselves right after we believed this was the person for whom we could do no wrong. After all, this one was supposed to be “the one” who would bring out the best in us, right?

Not exactly.

The relationship which protects us from all dangers and threats in life, which gives us the freedom to be ourselves, and supports our growth and our dreams does not work like that.

Rather, it requires two complete, whole individuals who are each committed to personal evolution.

That does not mean that the ones of us who experienced adversity in childhood, wounds, or traumas are destined to miss out.

We all have issues, some of us more and greater than others. However, the difference for our personal evolution is how we handle those issues and what we are committed to do toward our own individuation and self-actualization.

The path to our own healing may seem daunting and we may avoid it by simply changing partners in hopes that our issues will disappear by magic.

But the truth is, until we love ourselves wholeheartedly and commit to our own healing and growth, we will not be able to see the love of a partner and feel safe. This is true even if the archetype of our ideal partner falls in love with us.

After all, the greatest truth about love and heartache, is that until we find harmony within, we cannot create it with another.

 Final thoughts

Love is a powerful shield and a disciplined way we commit to interact with another to powerfully address the ups and downs of life and reach our full potential.

A healthy love relationship has a positive effect on our well-being, our happiness, and our life expectancy. 

To be happy in love, we may want to revisit some current perspectives and default responses that are myths, and not true.

We can recognize and commit to the hard work that is required to rise to love.

We can embrace the power of love and actively engage in doing the “small things often” that will resist the conditioned ways of expressing our pain.

We can learn to speak a new language—the language of emotions—and strengthen our bond through exposing our vulnerabilities.

We can let love be the mirror of our soul and our guide down the path of our own personal development and healing.

Because the truth is, only when we heal ourselves, can we be happy in love. 

Notes: The information in this article was informed by my personal review of studies, my participation in Drs. John and Julie Gottman’s “Art and Science of Love Workshop,” Dr. Sue Johnson’s Emotional-Focused Therapy, and the application of this research in my own life.  If you enjoyed this article, you might want to review an earlier article I wrote listing some of the most significant benefits of love. You can find it by clicking here.


The Magic of Mindfulness.

If you are looking for an effective way to stop the impact stress has on your life and well-being, mindfulness is your ticket!

But does the popularity of the word mindfulness intimidate you?

Please don’t let it!

Mindfulness, is simply the practice of being a non-judgmental observer of your thoughts and gently directing them back to the present moment. We all have the intrinsic capacity to change the focus our attention. 

Simple but not so easy to do.

Our mind hangs out in the present moment less than 50% of the time, as happiness researcher Dr. Killingsworth discovered through his postdoctoral research at Harvard University. As if that is not bad enough, his research also showed that a wandering mind leads to unhappiness in life. 

By practicing mindfulness, we can lessen the time we are lost in thoughts and be healthier and happier.

 In fact, over the last few decades, research from all around the world has proven that in addition to happiness, mindfulness leads to numerous physiological and psychological benefits, as well as peak performance.

With such strong evidence, why do less than 10% of us take advantage of this wonderful way of living?

A little over a decade ago, I was one of those people. 

I remember vividly when the book A New Earth by Eckhart Tolle was the book selection at my book club. I recall rolling my eyes hearing that this book was about “awakening to a new way of being and a new level of consciousness.”

I did not feel I had the time to “let a flower show me the way back home to my true self!”

All was seemingly going well in my life at the time. I was mostly unconscious of the great level of anxiety that I lived with, or accepted it as part of the price I had to pay to be successful. 

As it turned out, the seeds that were planted by that coincidental opening to mindful awareness grew into my lifesaving jacket shortly thereafter. When my unconscious state manifested in my life in the form of a series of unfortunate events, mindfulness became my beacon of light, my anchor, and my way home.

To this day, practicing mindfulness provides me with a safe place to find refuge in difficult times, keeps things in perspective, and helps me regain access to my evolved brain so that I can make wise decisions.

But how about you? What are your thoughts about mindfulness?

Are looking for ways to experience more balance and peace in your life?

Do you wish to enhance your ability to prevent work challenges from coming home with you at the end of the day? Would you like to become better at making intelligent use of your emotions?

What if I was to tell you that incorporating a mindfulness practice into your life will open the door to all of the above and many more inner strengths and states of being?

If you are anything like me, you may think that it sounds too good to be true, that you do not have time for it, or that you simply tried and cannot do it.

I would like to challenge your perceptions by sharing with you what I learned from the world’s most prominent mindfulness teachers about my points of resistance to mindfulness.

My goal is to inspire you to open the door to the ultimate form of freedom by welcoming mindfulness into your life.

“Mindfulness is a love affair with life and a possibility for healing.” John Kabat Zinn

1.    “The mindfulness hype is simply too good to be true.” 

It is hard to believe that mindfulness can transform our life. Even if the strong scientific evidence impresses us, we cannot conceptualize how incorporating even as little as five minutes of mindfulness meditation three times a week can increase our immune system cells or our happiness.

 Yet, even with all the scientific evidence aside, we know that our current way of being often does not feel good.  We appear to be stressed out and more addicted than ever; we have a hard time sleeping; we are overweight.

What we are not fully conscious of is that our mind’s attention—our thoughts—determine the way we feel, which leads to our actions that create our life experience. Everything in your life today is the result of your thought process. Your career, education, and your relationships are all the result of the decisions you made based on what you think.

The problem is that when we are thinking over and over about events that appeared threatening or made us feel defensive, we neurobiologically lose access to the intrinsic strengths we have to make good decisions.

The reason for this is that fear-based thoughts place us in survival mode. This is good when we are chased by a cougar, but not so good when we are ruminating over and over about a harsh criticism by our supervisor.

Here is why intercepting our thoughts has such a robust benefit on our wellbeing: 

When we are in survival mode, this little structure in our brain, called the amygdala, orchestrates our body’s response to threats.  Our body is flooded with stress hormones and literally shuts down our higher brain functions to allow energy to fuel all the systems required to survive in the face of a threat. 

Let’s face it, if you are being chased by a cougar, you really don’t need access to your innovation and critical thinking skills that allow you to discover a cure for a disease or develop an invention. You need to deal with the immediate threat of the cougar. So, instead, your energy is directed to the appropriate organs and functions that will allow you to fight, flee, or freeze.

However, the more we think about the harsh criticism we received from our supervisor, the more we live immersed in the chemistry of stress—sometimes for hours, days, or even years. Multiply that by several challenging events per day times the 70,000 estimated thoughts we have per day, and maybe you can begin to see why stress is now linked to more than 90% of today’s disease.

This is the power of our mind at work—inadvertently not allowing us to get out of our stress response when our unconscious thoughts perpetuate the need to protect our selves by perceived threats.

And allowing our unruly thoughts to keep our stress response over-activated long-term changes pretty significantly structures and functions in our brain that originally were intended to help us live the most amazing, healthy, and happy life. 

Research shows that it takes a minute and a half for a negative emotion to run through our neural circuitry. Yet by interpreting the situation as a threat, we let the negative emotions linger unconsciously, placing us in a compromised state for most of our daily lives. 

So, how does mindfulness help? Mindfulness helps us to make our thought patterns conscious. By sorting through our unconscious thoughts and emotions, we are able to become our own neurobiologists and regulate our inner response.

Mindfulness simply allows us to interrupt the stream of thinking about a situation that has activated our fear circuitry and return to our peaceful home base. By bringing awareness to the sensation of the fearful experience, and purposely returning to the present moment, we stop the release of cortisol. We can then redirect our energy to fuel the parts of our brain that are critical for our optimal performance. Further, through repetition of bringing mindful awareness to all that we do, we contribute to growing the parts of our brain that are linked to positive traits such as resilience, confidence, and self-control.

Although mindfulness cannot prevent us from experiencing negative emotions, it enhances our ability to take a break from the negative thoughts and emotions we experience and turn inward for a sense of peace and calm. From there, we can choose our response using the incredible strengths and inner capabilities that we have but that we can only access when we are calm and centered.

2.     “I don’t have time to do it.” 

It is true that time is a precious commodity these days. Technological advances once designed to improve our efficiency have resulted in a dysfunctional relationship with our devices, which we use to bring work and our to-do lists home, even on weekends or in bed at night! It is natural to present resistance to adding one more thing onto our already full plate. 

But how much time do you currently waste in either thinking about the past or worrying about the future? 

How much time do you lose waiting for others to do things for you so you can feel fulfilled? 

Based on the Harvard research mentioned in the beginning of this article, we waste about 50% of our time in the virtual reality of being lost in our thoughts.

Without conscious attention, which is what mindfulness is all about, our thoughts and the emotions they generate, run our life on auto-pilot.

Our thoughts determine how we respond to life. When our thoughts regularly revolve around fears and worries, we will experience anxiety.  

It takes a few minutes to connect with the mental content of our thoughts and the bodily sensations of our emotions. Even investing only five minutes every morning in a formal, mindfulness meditation practice will, over time, allow you to regain control of your mind’s focus. And then the real magic happens, when we bring our new capacity to modify the attention of our thoughts when real life situations take us off balance. 

We can then prevent the unnecessary activation of our stress response no matter how many stressors we have to deal with in life.  We simply deal with them from a space of wisdom and confidence that can only be found in the present moment. 

And what ends up happening is we have more time because:

—We stop living life waiting for something to happen. We’re more focused on our internal world as opposed to external rewards.  

—Our creativity and imagination flourishes because our mind is no longer cluttered by negative thoughts.  

—We are more resilient. A better regulated mind allows us to bounce back quicker from uncomfortable events such as negative criticism. 

3.     “I have tried to practice mindfulness, but I am just not good at it.” 

In our busy, hyper-connected world almost everything is associated with the need to perform. So, we expect we must perform mindfulness perfectly. 

However, mindfulness is this magical break from the never-ending race of meeting expectations.

It is a practice that does not require perfection.

Recognizing the point when our mind wanders is what the magic of mindfulness is all about. The practice is to shift from judging and condemning ourselves when our mind wanders, to recognizing that the moment when we recognize the wandering mind is the moment of power. 

We don’t have to be Zen masters to use life as our practice in nudging our thoughts back to the present moment, one thought at a time. Every time we intervene in reactive thinking and choose our response instead strengthens our ability to do so in the future. Additionally, research shows that gray matter increases in the pre-frontal region of our brain. This region of our brain, known as the executive functioning part of our brain, is what allows us to make sound decisions and access valuable data that we can use to bounce back quicker from adverse situations and improve our life experience.

Jack Kornfield, best-selling author and Vipassana teacher, has helped me simplify the concept of practicing mindfulness. Far from a mystical practice, it can be mastered by viewing our thoughts as a puppy that we are trying to train to stay. We tell the puppy “stay”; in a moment it wanders away; we call it back and tell it again to stay. We repeat this process over and over again. We don’t get angry at the puppy. It is simply learning how to stay in one place, just as our wandering mind is learning to stay in one present moment. 

Contrary to almost everything in life the benefits of mindfulness are reaped in our moment to moment experience without the need to arrive at a destination. Mindfulness opens us up to a new way of approaching life that shifts our default mode of getting distracted by old stories that our mind has hung onto and are not here right now. The present moment is where happiness, contentment, optimal performance, and life satisfaction can be found.

Final thoughts

Our thoughts are incredibly useful as they form the genesis of our emotions and lead to actions that create our reality.

However, often times, the power of our mind results in us becoming servants of our thoughts because of imaginary threats, which activate our stress response and deprive us of our inner capabilities, our creativity, and our natural capacity for resilience and happiness.

When we begin to bring mindful awareness to our thoughts and change the focus of our attention, we expand our perception in all areas of our life.

We realize that when we worry about a staff meeting, a presentation we have to give, or the potential of a relationship break-up, we allow our thoughts to take us to a virtual reality that is not here right now.

With mindfulness, we can begin to cultivate a better relationship with our thoughts. By practicing conscious awareness of our habitual thoughts that do not serve us, we can begin to become the compassionate observer. We can recognize that these fearful thoughts are just habits and become better and better at directing our attention to the present moment. 

Although there are plenty of reasons to shun this well-substantiated practice, many of our objections are also just thoughts!

The evidence of the benefits of practicing mindfulness is compelling. You can expect to improve your immune function, blood pressure regulation, and cardiovascular risk, as well as your mood, concentration, focus, problem-solving and self-regulation.

These benefits will improve your work performance, your relationships, and your sense of happiness.

When beginning to learn mindfulness meditation, it is often helpful to practice using a guided meditation. If you would like a guided practice to try, you can click on this link : http://bit.ly/JoinMyndZen to join the Myndzen community and receive a guided, mindfulness practice delivered to your inbox.

By joining a mindful community, you can access the resources, support, and accountability that can help you harness the power of your mind to create a more fulfilling life experience.