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To Better Cope With Stress, Listen to Your Body
By GRETCHEN REYNOLDS
JANUARY 13, 2016
To handle stress and adversity more effectively, we should probably pay closer attention to what is happening inside our bodies, according to a fascinating new brain study of resilience and why some people seem to have more of it than others.
We live in difficult times, as readers of this newspaper know well. Worries about the state of our world, our safety, our finances, health and more can lead to a variety of physiological and psychological responses.
“When faced with stress, whether it’s giving a talk in front of a hundred people or feeling pressured to get a second gold medal at the Olympics, we experience changes in our body,” said Lori Haase, a clinical professor of psychiatry at the University of California, San Diego, and lead author of the new study. Our heart rates rise, breathing grows shallow, and blood levels of adrenaline and other stress chemicals soar.
While this stress response can have desirable results — “I need anxiety to motivate myself to write a grant,” Dr. Haase said — it can easily can get out of hand. Remaining in a state of heightened arousal undermines physical and mental performance, she explained. So while our bodies should respond to dangers and worries, our stress reactions also should dissipate as soon as possible afterward.
This is where resilience comes in. In scientific terms, resilience is the ability to rapidly return to normal, both physically and emotionally, after a stressful event.
Scientists and therapists long have known that some people are more resilient than others but had not known precisely why.
In recent years, Dr. Haase and colleagues have begun to speculate that part of the answer might involve whether and how people listen to their bodies.
To reach that conclusion, the researchers had been examining how adventure racers and elite special-operations soldiersdevelop resilience in the face of the frequent and often extreme physical and emotional demands of their jobs. The researchers had asked those men and women to lie in brain scanning machines while wearing face masks that, when the researchers touched a button, made it difficult to breathe, conditions that the brain and body find quite stressful.
The scientists soon noticed a common pattern of brain activity among these volunteers. Portions of their brains that receive and process signals from the body, such as changes in heart rate or breathing, were very active when the volunteers thought that their masks were about to close. But despite this heightened awareness, the flow of messages from those parts of the brain to areas that intensify bodily arousal were fairly slight.
In other words, the brains of these highly trained men and women closely monitored the beginnings of bodily panic but dampened the response. They experienced stress but didn’t overreact. They were resilient physically and mentally.
They also, of course, were outliers; most of us are not elite athletes or soldiers.
So for the new study, which was published this month in Biological Psychology, the same researchers recruited 48 healthy adults and asked them to complete a standard questionnaire about their self-perceived emotional and physical resilience. Based on their scores, the scientists assessed them as having high, average or low resilience.
Then they scanned the men’s and women’s brains while the volunteers wore the same type of face masks the athletes and soldiers had and, like them, underwent periodic moments of breathlessness.
The people whose scores had showed that they were highly resilient displayed brain activity very similar to that of the elite athletes and soldiers, as did, to a lesser degree, people with average resilience.
But the brains of those people with low resilience scores behaved in almost the opposite way. As their face masks threatened to close, they displayed surprisingly little activity in those portions of the brain that monitor signals from the body. And then, when breathing did grow difficult, they showed high activation in parts of the brain that increase physiological arousal. In effect, they paid little attention to what was happening inside their bodies as they waited for breathing to become difficult — and then overreacted when the threat occurred.
Such brain responses would undermine resilience, the scientists concluded, by making it more difficult for the body to return to a calm state.
Of course, this study was based on people’s own assessments of their resilience and on a one-time snapshot of brain activity. It can’t tell us why the brains of the different groups of volunteers worked differently or whether we can change our brains’ responses to stress.
But the researchers found the results compelling. “To me, this study says that resilience is largely about body awareness and not rational thinking,” said Dr. Martin Paulus, the scientific director of the Laureate Institute for Brain Research in Tulsa, Okla., and the senior author of the study. “Even smart people, if they don’t listen to their body, might not bounce back” as quickly from adversity, he said, as someone who is more attuned to his or her physiology.
Improving internal communications with our bodies may be as simple as spending a few minutes each day in focused breathing, Dr. Haase said. Quietly pay attention to inhaling and exhaling without otherwise reacting, she said. Over time, this exercise should “teach you to have a change in breathing when anxious but be less attached to that reaction,” Dr. Haase said, “which may help to improve your reaction in a stressful situation.”
Questions!
1. What are the main causes of stress in your life?
2. How well do you handle stress?
3. Do you have good coping mechanisms?
4. Is stress an important part of life?
5. When do you feel most stressed?
6. How can stress damage you physically?
7. Do you think technology eases stress or brings stress on?
8. What’s the difference between stress and anxiety?
9. In what circumstances do you think stress is important?
10. Do you know anyone who has suffered a nervous breakdown due to stress?
11. What do you think the number one cause of is stress for most people?
12. Most people feel very stressed about public speaking. How do you feel about this?
13. Do you think it’s your responsibility to help friends reduce stress?
14. Do you think religion reduces stress or causes it?
15. Do you think most married people feel stressed because of their spouse?
16. What is more stressful, raising children or having a job?
17. Do you think taking medication to reduce stress is a good idea?
5 Evening Habits of Successful People
Many have heard the phrase “The early bird catches the worm,” and that may be true, but the truth is that highly successful people have habits for both the morning and the evening that make both time frames more productive. The evening is a crucial period of resetting, and maximizing the use of that time can do wonders.
To ensure you never fall behind, I’ve compiled a list of the evening habits of a few highly successful people. Incorporating these into your daily routine will give the strength and introspection to make a real difference.
1. President Barack Obama’s next-day preparation
Whether due to his nature or the demands of his job, President Obama often spends a few hours each evening analyzing the following day’s schedule and tasks. He gets a thorough idea of the next day’s run down so that he can be as prepared as possible to make smart, informed decisions on a repeat basis the following day. If tomorrow is known to be a hectic day, go through your schedule the day before and visualize what success means in each scenario.
2. Fashion designer Vera Wang’s free associative period
After checking emails from her staff, Vera Wang allots a portion of her evening to simple free-form thinking about design. Because of its unguided nature, this allows her to simultaneously decompress while also providing opportunity for that “Aha!” moment that many creatives constantly pursue. At the end of the day, you would do well to allow yourself to unwind. You may naturally think about work, but try not to take action unless a major epiphany strikes.
3. Buffer CEO Joel Gascoigne’s walking habit
Each evening, regardless of the day’s events, Buffer CEO Joel Gascoigne takes a 20 minute walk, one that he has worked to associate with shutting his mind and body down for sleep. Gascoigne uses walking to, “reach a state of tiredness,” so think of a way to incorporate activity to bring your mind to a state of rest. Many great minds have used walking as a tool, and it could easily be incorporated into any schedule.
4. Microsoft CEO Bill Gates’ reading habit
Bill Gates spends an hour before bed reading every day. Doing so helps to relieve stress levels and to boost cognitive function, all the while creating new knowledge from which the next great innovation might spring. Spend some time every night before bed reading on any subject. The stimulation can work wonders for creating new connections between work and play, bringing you one step closer to the next big break.
5. Ariana Huffington’s shutting down of her phone
Many workaholics have a hard time turning off their phone for the night, but the ones that do advocate for this process. After passing out from exhaustion on one occasion, Huffington has become an advocate for leaving the phone off and away from her while sleeping. Others, including Facebook leader Sheryl Sandburg, would agree with Huffington’s habits. It is often said that the bright lights of cell phones trick the human brain into thinking its awake, so shut it down unless you want to be up all night.
6. Podcaster Alex Blumburg’s family discussion time.
In an episode of his new hit podcast “Startup,” former NPR producer Alex Blumburg speaks of his desire to spend a significant amount of time with his young wife Nasneen. The entire series is a collection of the insights and work it takes to start a business, and Blumburg, while desiring more than anything to succeed at starting his own company, also makes sure he carves out time to discuss how his work is affecting his family and his wife. Make sure that your choices about work incorporate the opinions of your family, and you will be better off.
What habits do you have that kick start your next day? Is it a certain exercise routine? A specific time frame in which you must brush your teeth? Share it with us, we are always looking for feedback from our community.
Articel source : http://www.lifehack.org/articles/productivity/5-evening-habits-successful-people.html
<Questions>
Q1. Are you an 'early bird' or a 'night owl'?
Q2. What time do you wake up in the morning? Please tell us your morning time routine.
Q3. What habits do you have that kick start your next day?
Q4. Do you have preparation time for following day's schedule and tasks?
Q5. In your whole day, when is the most creative or productive time? During this period, what are you doing mostly?
Q6. Have you ever read a book before going to bed? How many books do you read per year? What is the biggest advantage of reading a book?
Q7. Do you turn off your cellular phone while sleeping?
<Part 2>
Most people hate change, especially if it is ‘done to them’. Yet, if nothing were ever to change, how might anything ever improve? In this article, Jeremy Thorn, Non-Executive Director and coach to several fast-growing companies, offers some more detailed tips.
Managing change is an essential part of any manager’s role. Making improvements without change are clearly not possible. But deep change is rarely achieved without deep understanding all the dynamics of the sort of change you want to achieve, or the probable obstacles you may face, discussed in Part 1 of this article.
Here are some tips that may help you further.
1. Establish trust
It is, self-evidently, very hard to introduce deep change in any organisation where mistrust abounds. In smaller organisations, this trust may often be presumed, not the least because distinctions between organisational hierarchies and their different ambitions can often be minimal or even non-existent, and with fewer people, it may be much easier to deliver change collaboratively.
But as organisations grow, this becomes much harder. So well before you ever choose to embark on any major programme of change, if it is not too late, build, believe and behave, as follows!
2. Build, Believe and Behave…
The essence of achieving deep change in any organisation is a) to build clear agreement by all of its core mission and purpose, with an appealing vision of the future that all can aspire to and core values that all espouse in practice, to guide all management decisions and communications; b) to believe in this passionately; and c) to behave utterly consistently in support.
In particular, for these values to be at all credible, management behaviour must be coherent, consistent and applicable to all, without exception, and most certainly not ‘just fine words’. This is a leadership challenge, to offer clear and unambiguous behaviours as exemplars to others with consistent and demonstrable conviction. This can be a demanding challenge, because leaders are always ‘on stage’, always in view of their colleagues, and your colleagues will be the first to spot and deride any inconsistencies.
Any senior manager can inadvertently kill a change programme stone dead by a misguided throw-away comment or negative body-language, far quicker than almost anyone else. So forewarned may well be forearmed!
3. Change must be driven from the top.
The reasons for change may be internal or (often) external, and may apply to any part of an organisation. But accountability for the actual management of change must always stay with those at ‘the top’. You can be sure that if a senior management team does not believe in the reasons for change and the changes proposed, first of all these changes will almost certainly not be implemented, and secondly, any change on the next occasion will be even harder to achieve.
This does not mean that senior management must take all the decisions, let alone do all the work! It is very important to devolve responsibility for detailed change to whomever may best discharge it at the point of delivery. But the senior management task is to make sure that agreed initiatives are properly supported, that the requisite resources are made available, to keep track of progress, to help resolve any problems and remove obstacles, and provide acknowledgement of others’ successes.
4. Establish teams of local Change-Champions
Few like having change ‘done’ to them, and certainly not imposed from the top if it can be helped. A very powerful tip is to set up and empower local Change Champions to help plot and deliver specific parts of the overall change programme. And if you can, do encourage to seek some quick, easy gains early on, to help build momentum?
It is important your Champions have clear remits and are properly supported with training and funds if needed. It is often best if your Champions can volunteer for this work, but you do need them to be quite knowledgeable about ‘how things work’ at the moment — both good and bad — and preferably be seen to be opinion-leaders within their peer-groups. Interestingly, some of the very best change champions can be those who may strike you as being amongst the most change-resistant — as there can be nothing so powerful as a ‘poacher turned gamekeeper’!
5. Plot where you are now
Before you change anything that is at all radical, you will need to recognise just where you are already, most especially in terms of your colleagues’ own understanding and attitudes. Regular surveys of employee attitudes and your organisation’s overall culture will not only help you to avoid ‘throwing the baby out with the bathwater’ when it comes to implementing such change; they will also help you to monitor and manage progress in times of change and no doubt deep uncertainty.
Most especially, you will want to survey your colleagues’ own fears and aspirations about their workplace, their own ideas of what works well and what needs to improve, and probably even what drives and rewards them. As these are inevitably quite sensitive questions to ask many workforces, any survey may well raise both genuine concerns that will need to be addressed corporately, and some matters of ‘special, partial pleading’ that must of course be acknowledged locally – but may not perhaps influence far wider matters.
Such exploration will almost certainly require the guarantee of individual confidentiality and impartial feedback to your respondents, and of course mutual trust. So conduct such surveys regularly and ethically if you can, as a mater of good practice, preferably long before any major change is actually necessary, and feed back the results honestly so they have integrity.
6. Change needs a reason
The prime difficulty with managing change is that too many colleagues may see no good reason to abandon what may appear to them to work perfectly well already. ‘If it ain’t broke — why fix it’ might well be their motto. (And if they have been around in the same organisation for a while, almost certainly they will have experienced plenty of new ideas before that didn’t make things better!)
So in implementing change, it is vital to have every good reason why it is necessary, and to understand that maintaining the status quo is not an option.
However, as many of us may only listen selectively to what we really wanted to hear when given such explanations, there are two other ancillary steps you also may find particularly helpful if you can help these come alive:
a) make sure that colleagues really do experience that the old world is actually less attractive than they would like;
b) make sure their new world is as attractive for them to live in as you can.
7. Communicate these reasons!
Whatever the planned change, small or large, never assume ‘overpowering logic’ and the reasons for it (such as “it’s great for us”, or even “it’s great for you”), will persuade your troops of its benefits alone. You will need to appeal to both the heart and the mind!
So a good place to start is with your organisation’s avowed Mission, Vision and Values, and having communicated them consistently with passion, from the top, get to work in understanding what these mean to each of your colleagues or work groups.
And note? First, this communication must be two-way, not just top-down, and secondly, as you will well know, it should be regular, consistent and often.
8. Acknowledge the past
It is important to recognise that most people have a great emotional engagement to how they have done things in the past, often with great pride, and this is especially so for those who feel they have no control over any changes being proposed. Asking them to change can be a huge emotional wrench, not the least because it can suggest of sense of futility of all their past hard work, and raise great concerns for the unknown future.
Identifying, recognising and dealing openly with historic barriers to change in your organisation is critical. Some concerns may appear to be quite irrational, and then appealing to reason is most unlikely to work. And ignoring them is also most unlikely to be very productive either.
But what you can do, and should do, is to acknowledge these concerns, even if the reasons that created them may be buried long in the past.
9. Build a transition phase into your change-programme
Because responses to change can so often be emotionally driven, especially with long-standing colleagues, a very powerful aid is to consider allowing a grieving period to value the past as part of a transition phase, before changing to the new.
A short amount of time invested here may save much more time in resentment and resistance later on.
10. Reward change
Finally, acknowledge successes regularly (for nothing succeeds like success!) and give others the credit. This does not necessarily mean you need to offer financial rewards for success — and often you may feel you shouldn’t. But you can at least offer non-financial rewards, such as peer recognition however delivered, increased security, promotion, affiliation and much more. But do beware of the impact on others who may not be included?
Successful change-management does not happen over-night, and requires careful planning, a lot of talking and listening, and some very clear objectives. I wish you all good fortune!
Jeremy Thorn, Non-Executive Director and Business Coach, offers some further tips for entrepreneurs and business people that have successfully stood the test of time.
Jeremy is the author of the tips booklet ‘115 Essential Tips on Pricing’ and a frequent public speaker and workshop presenter on business topics to a wide range of organisations internationally.
Article source : http://www.freshbusinessthinking.com/10-top-tips-for-managing-change-recognising-the-obstacles/
<Questions>
Q1. Do you know the definition of 'Boiling frog syndrome'? What do you learn from this story?
Q2. Have you ever read the book 'Who moved my cheeses'? What did you learn from that book?
Q3. Due to the gradual changes of something, sometimes it drives you to act nothing, ultimately you were stuck in detrimental situation and those smacked you down to coming to almost death. Have you ever felt like that you got stuck in those situation?
Q4. Generally, how do you react to the changes ? Are you a sensitive person or numb person to changes?
Q5. If you face the uncontrollable changes originated from external world, do you react to change or try to hold the security of past times?
Q6. Do you have any change management strategies?
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