I was amazed at the consequences that stress has on our lives.  Did you know that long term stress can be associated with diabetes, heart disease, eating disorders, anxiety, immunity deficiencies and much more?  Learning healthy ways to handle stress can even help us in weight loss, resilience, improved ability to sleep and better concentration.I found this information on a  Master Class by Dr. Rangen Chatterjess on the Calm app, while I was waiting to board my plane to come home from vacation.  Calm is the number one app for mindfulness and meditation.  You may think that I’ve gone off the deep end, but practicing mindfulness really helps me slow down my life, which can be difficult for a task-oriented person.   This Master Class had a portion on stress and I thought you may benefit from this information as well.

You may already know this, but our stress response has been a part of us since prehistoric days.  It’s the fight or flight response that  protected us from attack from natural predators.  This is the response where  the hormones adrenaline and  cortisol  kick in.  Adrenaline  increases heart rate, blood sugar and the availability of substances that repair tissues. Cortisol curbs functions that would be nonessential or detrimental in a fight-or-flight situation. It alters immune system responses and suppresses the digestive system, the reproductive system and growth processes. This complex natural alarm system also communicates with regions of your brain that control mood, motivation and fear.

The challenge with this fight or flight response is that it can’t tell the difference between a lion attack and the daily stressors in life…email inbox, heavy traffic, family and/or job situations and those pesky phone notifications.

We’re designed to experience stress in short bursts, but when stress becomes chronic it may cause the problems listed above.  Most of us live our lives in stress mode all the time, when relaxation mode should be the primary way in which we live.

Dr. Rangen suggests some healthy strategies to deal with stress and turn off that fight or flight response:

1. Practice daily 15 minutes of “me” time. He says we have to be alone without phone, tablet or computer. Guilty feelings for having this time are not allowed. Find something we absolutely love and do it. If you don’t have time, Dr. Rangen found that people could find the time by dumping their time spent on social media. He said to make this time a priority by scheduling it.

2. Cultivate a daily practice of stillness. This time should be quiet, with eyes closed and maybe soothing music, but no email, social media or TV.  Even five minutes of stillness helps.  John Maxwell says that reflection or quiet time turns experience into insight.

3. Change the way we use technology, as it has a tendency to enslave rather than empower us. His suggestion is to remove notifications from our phones, from social media and from our email. That way we control it, it doesn’t control us.  Those notifications have also proven to decrease our ability to concentrate for longer periods of time by interrupting our trains of thought.

4. We could take a vacation. I’m adding this idea because I just spent a week with my kids at my son’s lake house. We spent most of the time on his boat, swimming and enjoying the beauty of the lake and being together.

You may be thinking. “What does this have to do with leadership?”  I don’t know about you, but the hardest person to lead is myself. I find that relationships can go south in a hurry if I am feeling stressed.  As a leader, I can’t give what I don’t have and stress puts a lid on my capability to give.

Dr. Chatterjee’s content online is very helpful for experiencing healthier lives. You may want to check him out.

Have a stress-less week!

Jan

Jan McDonald
The John Maxwell Team

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