“Your heart starts beating fast, your lungs start bringing oxygen into your body. Blood is diverted from vital organs to muscles,” he explains Aditi Nerurkar, stress expert at Harvard. This is what happens to our body when we experience a stressful event and in our brain, a tiny almond-shaped structure, the amygdala, plays a key role. “Its only purpose is survival and self-preservation”, So stress is an evolutionary biological phenomenon as much as are emotions such as fear, laughter, crying, pain. Our body defends itself to survive.
The healthy break
But today, stress and burnout (a syndrome of chronic stress in the workplace) are both at “unprecedented levels,” Nerurkar points out, and “our brains and bodies were not designed to sustain this high level without respite.” , he adds. “Rest and recovery are not just nice luxuries. They are essential for our brains and bodies to thrive.”
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Chronic stress
But most stressors today are chronic. “The fight-or-flight response is always active,” explains the expert. Our amygdala is in overdrive mode. The Velcro effect, when we are stressed our perception of a negative event increases
“The same amount of good and bad things can happen to you at the same time, but when you feel a sense of stress, you hold on to those negative experiences (like Velcro) and there is a greater sense of negativity, because your amygdala is trying to keep you safe,” adds Nerurkar.
When someone is already stressed and overwhelmed, change “can feel impossible and hopeless,” Nerurkar says. But this condition is a normal response to stress.
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Stress changes your brain with the ‘popcorn’ effect
Second a survey published on the Peole Nerds platform, We touch our phones (taps, swipes, and clicks) an average of 2,617 times a day. Over 50% of people pick up their phone within five minutes of waking up, and some even before their second eye is open.
Do you know what happens to your mind when you do this? Your brain is ‘bursting’, overstimulated by the constant barrage of information coming at us.
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Multitasking is a myth
Our brain is programmed to do one thing at a time, but multitasking, “a scientific misnomer”, underlines the expert, is something we all do, because it is part of modern working life. “It’s become the norm,” Nerurkar explains.
What we are actually doing is task switching, that is, we are performing two separate tasks in rapid succession,” specifies Nerurkar. This keeps the brain on a high level of stress.
His new book, ‘The 5 Resets: Rewire Your Brain and Body for Less Stress and More Resilience’, is a handbook: 5 small changes to make in our daily routine, to recover from chronic stress and deal with it better in the long term.
Here are his 5 ‘resets’ to live more peacefully. Because a life without stress is not feasible, so let’s rather learn to manage it.
Expert advice: Regardless of which of these ‘resets’ you might choose for yourself, only choose two at a time. It’s the ‘rule of two of resilience’, i.e. “the way our brain responds to change. Change is a stressor”. Even the positive ones.
So, choose two of the resets at a time, so your success is more achievable, and make those changes into daily habits. “This is how we work with our biology rather than against it,” Nerurkar emphasizes.
1- Ask yourself: “What matters most to me?”
First, each of us must understand what our goal is and why it is important. “What matters most to me?” When people focus on what matters most to them, “it increases their feeling of: Hey, I can do this!”
A rule. Better to set small goals, achievable in a few months and aimed at something that matters a lot in our lives.
2 – Stop ‘shaking’ your phone and set aside some time
“Try not to spend more than 20 minutes a day scrolling on your phone,” he advises. Not only. At night, keep your phone, not on your bedside table, but somewhere out of reach, to avoid looking at it just before falling asleep or first thing in the morning.
“When you open your eyes, you give your body and brain the ability to open the other eye and rest in the moment, ‘acclimating’ you to the morning, to the light,” Nerurkar says. Because giving yourself that little moment of pause at the start of the day can be a game changer.”
3 – Breathe and take a walk of at least 20 minutes a day
“When I had a very intense clinical practice and was a medical resident, I saw 30 patients a day,” Nerurkar says. “I knocked on the patient’s door and, before entering, I stopped, breathed and centered myself. And I said it to myself in a low voice: Stop, breathe.”
Among the different types of deep breathing exercises, he has been using one called stop-breathe-be for many years. “It takes a few seconds to do this once,” she says, “but repeated many times throughout the day, it can significantly reduce the daily experience of stress.”
The same goes for daily movement which is not only good for the brain and body, but on the contrary not moving enough or at all is harmful.
“Adding movement to your daily life doesn’t have to involve paying for a gym membership,” he points out. It can be as simple as a “20-minute walk once a day or shorter walks several times a day.”
4 – Give yourself a break between one activity and another
For many people today, “constantly working and not taking breaks has become the norm,” says Nerurkar. How much more wrong for our brain. Breaks improve cognition and performance at work.
Monotasking and regular breaks between one task and another: here is the antidote. It means “doing an activity for five or 10 minutes and then taking a short break,” he explains. “Then you do another task for five, 10, 20 minutes and take a short break and then do the next task. And so, at the end of an hour, you’ve completed all four of your tasks, but you’re not doing them all in one run”.
When we take a break, we allow new information, ideas, and things we are processing during the workday to “consolidate, form, and cement in our brains.” The mind needs a break, a rest and a respite.
5 – Write 5 things you are grateful for every day
And proven way to make the brain less ‘clinging’ to negative experiences is the daily practice of the ‘gratitude diary’: write down five things for which you are grateful every day. This habit improves mood.
“There will be days when you might want to think of 20 things to write,” Nerurkar says.
But there will be days, especially when you’re stressed, that you may have fewer things, or very simple things to write like “I have two arms and two legs, I can breathe without a car. I have a roof over my head. I have food in my refrigerator and in my pantry,” suggests Nerurkar.
“Gratitude shifts the brain from Velcro to Teflon,” Nerurkar explains. What was previously a negative thought that ‘glues’ now ‘slips’ away. And it does so through the scientific principle of ‘reframing’: it is a cognitive process that helps to change the ways in which an event or problem is perceived. It helps to change perspective on the problem. “What you focus on, grows” in your brain.