How to Stop Running on Stress
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All the clients I’ve worked with as part of my coaching training this year have three things in common: pervasive stress, the feeling there is not enough time, and challenges managing social media. We will get into the second two items in depth in a later post. For this week, let’s focus on how to stop running on our stress response, and how we can learn to more frequently restore our reserves.
Not exclusive to Silicon Valley, but typified by Valley work culture, is the habit of living in a bubble of caffeine-laced, stressed-out reactivity. Blurred lines between work and life, and collaborating across time zones often mean responding to messages or calls well outside what were once quaintly known as “normal work hours.” And this behavior is held as a kind of badge or status among many, with the common sentiment “Yeah, today has been back-to-back since 7:30” or similar conveying a sense of overwhelm, but also self-importance.
Interestingly, we don’t have to experience a real stressor for the physical costs to accrue: the simple act of anticipating a stressful event can throw us into the stress response, and consistent anticipation of mishap can keep us stressed out indefinitely, even if the circumstances do not warrant such stress. Now consider how many regular work items in your day consist of “fire drills.”
Research by Dr. Richard Boyatzis and Dr. Melvin Smith at Carnegie Mellon point to the long- term damage this habituated stress mode can cause to our bodies, and why they say it is biologically unsustainable. Fortunately their research also points out specific practices we can adopt that put the body into a renewal state.
First, let’s look at what happens to our bodies when we run on stress response 24/7.
We lose cognitive and emotional processing capability
Neurogenisis, the growing and connection of neurons in the brain, is inhibited
We lose creativity and openness to new ideas
Our immune system is downregulated
Stress hormones such as cortisol cause blood to leave our organs and move to our extremities (fight or flight) meaning we are not properly resting and digesting
Heart rate is set at a higher level, and our breathing becomes both shallower and faster
We may feel “stuck” in reactive loops, and lose the ability to think creatively
The loss of cognitive and emotional processing only adds to our stress as we hit overwhelm, and recognize our inability to problem solve out of our situation. The loss of access to our creative functions limits our choices for action, leading us to feel stuck. We may even act out, as we are unable to regulate our own emotional state.
The immune costs as well as the toll on our cardiovascular system are part of why Boyatzis and Smith assert that “without regular and periodic renewal experiences, chronic stress will make your performance unsustainable.” Boyatzis and Smith also assert that emotions are contagious, which means our stress spreads to everyone we contact throughout the day. So, what do we do about that? Establish what they call consistent renewal practices. Renewal gets us out of the Sympathetic Nervous System (SNS, fight or flight) and back into the Parasympathetic (PNS, rest and digest, also known as tend and befriend).
Renewal helps provide the opposite type of hormones to those that are released during stress (oxytocin primarily in females, and vasopressin primarily in males). These relaxation hormones help us lower our heart rate, restore deeper, slower breathing rate, and re-engage the immune system fully. Relaxation and renewal activities also re-establish access to our faculties of vision and creativity. Which means relaxing into and activating this neural network can help us see new options to help where we felt so impossibly stuck when we were solely operating in crisis mode.
As well, if we are practicing renewal and becoming relaxed, we spread that relaxed and open mindset to everyone we contact -- instead of spreading stress.
Boyatzis and Smith collated at least five key experiences (and are currently identifying more) that have been shown in published studies to activate the parasympathetic nervous system (PNS, rest and digest). These practices include mindfulness, hope, compassion and playfulness. They portray as one example of how you know you're really in the relaxation and renewal zone, if you feel sort of “how you feel when you get a new puppy.”
Mindfulness can include a full range of activities from seated meditation, to movement-based practices (yoga, tai chi, chi gung).
Compassion, including being in a loving relationship, spending time with your pet (dog, cat, etc.), volunteering to serve others, helping family members, etc.
Hope, spending time talking with others about future dreams, and generally being hopeful about the future. Talking with others about shared value and purpose.
Play, laughing with others.
Walking in nature.
We can become addicted, or at least habituated, to the pace and stressed-out mode of being to the point where relaxation feels somehow unsafe. This is because spending too much time in the Analytical*, or Task Positive Network (the neurobiology term for the part of our brain and nervous system devoted to crisis-control, logic and problem-solving) makes that dominant mode of being feel the most secure. Thus it may feel irresponsible or scary to spend any time in relaxation and renewal, which involves the Empathetic, or Default Mode Network (the part devoted to relationships, emotional self-awareness, creativity, moral reasoning and social functioning). This dynamic may cause some people initially to feel less safe relaxing than if they stayed in crisis mode.
With this issue in mind of being habituated to the stress response, we can recognize the need to take better care of ourselves through renewal experiences, and while doing so also recognize it may take some time to remember how to truly relax in a way that doesn’t feel somehow irresponsible or unsafe. But with practice, we can rest in the recognition that establishing these new habits is the only way to reconnect with a biologically sustainable way of being.
You may say: That sounds great, but easier said than done. With work and everything, I don’t have time to establish renewal habits like that, much less do them frequently. We will cover that topic next week.
*Note: As Boyatzis et. al. outline in their latest book Helping People Change: “Both [neural] networks play important roles, but in dramatically different ways. We need the Analytical Network to solve problems, analyze things, make decisions, and focus (i.e., limit our awareness to direct attention on a task or issue). We need the Empathetic Network to be open to new ideas, scan the environment for trends or patterns, be open to others and emotions, as well as moral concerns (i.e., truly understanding others’ perspectives, not the more analytic activity of making judgments about right and wrong).”
This article is part of a series of posts on life and coaching, with particular focus on the intersection of coaching with our sense of meaning and fulfillment, aligned with what the world needs, and how we can embody leadership (as defined by Master Somatic Coach Amanda Blake: leadership “… as a process of connecting to what matters, envisioning what could be, and taking action to bring that vision to life. When you care about something enough to ask others to care about it with you and you effectively collaborate with others to co-create a new future, then you are leading.”)