Think About How You Think
Key Points:
1. Life can be stressful; but, when we take the time to really slow down, we can mitigate our stress levels and find a healthy balance.
2. Stress activates our immune system as our body prepares to fight off any perceived threats - this can be draining when we are stressed chronically, as our body become susceptible to illness and infection.
3. By taking time each day to turn off our sympathetic (i.e. fight-or-flight) system and activate our parasympathetic (i.e. rest-and-recover) system, we give ourselves the opportunity to rest, reflect, and learn.
“Your unique power of reflectiveness—your ability to look at yourself, the world around you, and the relationship between you and the world—means that you can think deeply and weigh subtle things to come up with learning and wise choices.”
For many of us, life is stressful. Too stressful. There just doesn’t seem to be any time to take pause to reflect on our experiences let alone strategize how to move forward. But deliberately taking that time out can help us improve our mental and physical health, perform at a higher level, and, ultimately, alter the course of our lives. We need to take the time to slow down and reflect on our experiences so we can we set ourselves up to appreciate life and learn new things. To use a driving analogy, we need to take our foot off the gas and press the brake more often.
Stress is a cascade of events within your mind and body. It can be positive, such as when you receive a compliment from a co-worker—this is known in the scientific literature as eustress or good stress. Negative stress, such as when someone criticizes you, is known as distress. Believe it or not, both types of stress are essential for good health, but an excess of either can be dangerous. Too much positive stress can cause boredom and too much negative stress can cause burnout.
When we perceive something as threatening, the brain will activate the body’s immune system, which fights off invaders like viruses, bacteria, and other microbes. From an evolutionary perspective, a direct threat often meant that we would end up fighting or hunting, both of which could result in an injury. If we’re injured, those breaks, tears, and cuts expose our bodies to the risk of infection. The stress response evolved to keep us alive and healthy.
Inside our bodies, the sympathetic system activates our bone marrow and thymus to move white blood cells that fight infections into our blood. The lymph nodes and spleen, which filter our blood for invaders, are also activated. Hormones like adrenaline and cortisol further activate our white blood cells to make them stronger. Overall, it’s like preparing for battle inside the body, with all the body’s defences mobilized and put on high alert.
This is fantastic for surviving short-term threats, but the problem is that we can’t keep this system active all the time. If we’re in a state of chronic stress, our immune system gets depleted and we become susceptible to more illness and infection. Many types of cancer are kept in check by our immune system, so if it is weakened for extended periods of time, our risk of cancer increases dramatically.
When you are in a state of fight or flight, with stress hormones coursing through you, it’s nearly impossible to settle into a state of reflection or increased awareness. The key here is to make sure that each day you take some time to break the stress cycle and activate your parasympathetic system to rest. This will allow you to cycle through periods of reflection throughout the day, which is required to develop understanding of all the experiences and data we’re taking in—in other words, to learn.
Let’s explore how we can use stress to our advantage while opening our minds to reflection, awareness, and learning.
Today’s Words of Wisdom: Dr. Mark Rowe on The Impact of Chronic Stress
I had a great chat with Dr. Mark Rowe on my podcast all about how we can take a more holistic approach to optimizing our health and our lives. One of the key barriers Dr. Mark talked about what chronic stress:
“Unfortunately, in the frenetic world we’re living in, there’s so much noise and so much negative stress. People aren’t giving themselves a chance to recover from that level of stress. And they’re suffering from toxic stress and that’s having a very negative impact on all aspects of their health, and their relationships, and well-being.”
Today’s Call to Action: Three Deep Breaths
The breathing centres in your brain are closely linked to the breathing centres that control your stress response. So you can actually manage your stress response simply by breathing.
Today, make an effort to take three, deep, slow breaths a few times per day. This can be when you’re in the middle of a stressful situation and you need to take a minute to regroup. Or it can be proactive. Every time you sit down at your desk, that will be your cue to take three, deep, slow breaths to get your mind and body prepped for the task at hand.
Let us know how that goes!
Today’s Bonus: Dr. Greg Wells Podcast
Click Here for a bonus podcast with guest Dr. Mark Rowe, an expert on health and well-being. If you enjoyed that, also check out this podcast Here with leadership expert Keith Macpherson on taking control of your life.
The information and advice provided in this program is intended to assist you with improving your performance, as well as your general health. It is not intended and should not be used in place of advice from your own physician or for treatment or diagnosis of any specific health issue. By participating in this program you acknowledge that undertaking any new health, diet and/or exercise regime involves certain inherent risks, that you assume such risks, and that you release Wells Performance Inc. from any responsibility or claim relating to such participation.