In January, Pfizer the world’s largest pharmaceutical company in sales, searched for someone unique and impactful to explore neuroscience-oriented strategies to dealing with employee stress. They discovered Dr. Fleming and invited him to film an e-learning product on “Stress and the Brain”. Click here for some samples:
Dr. Fleming Invited to Speak at Pfizer on The Brain and Wellness
Neuroscience of Stress—A Talk on Executive Wellness@ Pfizer, NYC
Stress. Having trouble sleeping. I was really sick. Ubiquitous. I can’t cope. I’m having trouble focusing.
Stress is a real living problem on your life and if you don’t recognize it and manage it, you’re going to get sick. Stress does not have to be the new normal.
Stress – independent of how we define it, we are all impacted by it. In fact, it is well understood that work place stress is as bad for the heart as smoking and high cholesterol.
Tony Ricci: Today, I am honored to be joined by Dr. Kevin Fleming. Dr. Kevin Fleming is trained in neuro-psychology, he is an executive consultant and he is the CEO of Grey Matters International. Dr. Fleming is going to talk to us today about just what stress may be, some of its possible causes and offer us some new insight and perspective on how we may manage stress. Dr. Fleming.
Dr. Fleming: Thanks Tony. good to be here. Stress – we know that word quite well. In our day, we probably use it tons and tons. Right now I want to put you guys to the test with your knowledge of stress. Get a picture of someone right now in your brain, a man or a woman who is stressed, and tell me some words to describe that person right now.
Female: They look drained.
Dr. Fleming: Drained, that’s a good one.
Female: Impatient.
Female: Jaws clenched.
Male: Sweating.
Female: Frustrated.
Female: Worried.
Female: They have a lot going on inside of their head.
Dr. Fleming: Yeah, you guys are nailing this. This is really, I think, the common picture of stress when you try to define it. The common denominator that you guys all shared is that it’s physiological. You guys gave a lot of words about what goes on in the body and how it show itself on the face or in the gut or wherever. This is partly true, about 1/3 true. What I’m going to share with you right now is what we call the clinical scientific definition of it. The three factors of stress are as follows: 1) it has to have physiological arousal for the activity to be stressful and you guys nailed it. You picked up a lot of signs of the body when it’s aroused. 2) It is deemed oversive by us, so if we actually have the choice we would turn down the little knob on its severity or completely avoid it all together and that’s sort of your way of checking out if something you’re involved in is oversive. So in other words, somebody may go sky diving and have arousal, but it’s not oversive to them. They have the adrenalin flowing, the cortisol kicking in. They find it lovely and joyful. 3) Do you have a perceived sense of lack of control over that? You put those three together, arousal, oversive and a sense of lack of control and you’ve got yourself a perfect storm for something very interesting to happen in the mind and body. What is that interesting thing? Well, it’s a blurring, it’s a confusion of an acute stresser, someone slaps you in the face, a mosquito bite or if someone cuts you off on the road or whatever, those are acute stressful events. It confuses that with what we call chronic stress. What happens is something acute moves silently and sneakily into this realm of chronic stress. The real culprit for this confusion is resting in that three pound organ in your head on your shoulders – the brain. The brain wants to be right. It doesn’t want you to be stress relieving in your decision making. It loves patterns. It just loves what it knows right now and grows that and so that’s something to really keep an eye on because that is a deception piece of the brain and it becomes a bit normalized for us.
I’m going to tell you a little study that will put a picture right in your head about what chronic stress really is. There’s a man named Marty Seligman at the University of Pennsylvania. He’s a psychologist and he was doing a study on rats, go figure. He had these rats in a cage and it was divided by this barrier and they had put these rats on one side and a little barrier. It wasn’t a complete closure. They had enough room to go over the barrier, but they put these rats on one side or one half of the cage and then they started randomly shocking these rats, but there was no pattern to the shocks. They were very random. You couldn’t predict if it was going to happen here, here or here so you basically had the crazy nature of these rats dancing around trying to avoid the shocks. Well, something was fascinating after awhile. The more they were doing that, the more the rats actually stayed on one panel and didn’t even move even though they were glancing at their freedom over the fence so to speak. They were staying put on one panel. This was fascinating and Seligman realized that these rats were learning helplessness because of the loss of control and peace they were feeling. They could not predict the pattern.
Tell me. Does that sound like your work life at times? People feel that. Go left, no go right, no go straight, go back, turn around, now touch your head and turn right, whatever. You have a lot of patterns you’re trying to decipher. The trick with stress and why learned helplessness becomes really what the big picture of what stress is, is the brain loves patterns, even if the pattern is just to decrease energy, increase efficiency and just stay put. That’s why those rats were doing that. It was just going on auto pilot, survival mode and too much energy to try to solve it. We are like that at times. We have chronic pressures coming at us so learned helplessness is very interesting from a psychological perspective because it disconnects us from truth. It disconnects us from reality. With this learned helplessness part of us, what happens is we disconnect from ourselves, we disconnect from others and ultimately from what’s real. That’s the toughest part about this and we end up getting very diluted. So what happens?
I’m going to give you some stats of what happens. Just last year, 550 million work days and that’s just an estimate were lost due to work place chronic stress. Five hundred fifty million work days of absenteeism were related to this. Another fact, 80% of doctor visits are actually related to stress. The other piece, one out of every two employees at our work place these days are actively or passively looking. In other words, if you plopped a job offer right in your cubicle that was better than what you’ve got, most people would jump or at least half of the folks. That’s pretty interesting especially when you link that desire to leave to a burnout statistic of about 70% of people. That’s amazing. Really what we’ve got here is we’ve got a very grim situation with stress that is more than just “I’m stressed”. It’s such a common word now. I think we use it as “yeah me too”. There’s a real underlying dynamic here folks that is bordering on reality testing problems. End all be all so we’ve really got to do something about it and so the main points I will be talking about with stress is there are a lot things we can do, but cannot do those things until we understand what’s going on up here, so I’m going to talk about some brain tips about how you get your brain comfortable to change even before you do a stress management tip or idea. The brain needs to be woken up so that’s what we’re going to talk about today.
Stress
So I’m really here to tell you what you guys have got to do so take note. Visualize. Breathe easy. Get a massage. Try a tonic. Smile. Stop gritting your teeth. Compose a mantra. Get a puppy. Practice some mindfulness. Stretch a little bit. Make some plans. Tip toe through the tulips. You get the idea, right?
We can have these things thrown at us all the time from people. These trite little motivational mantras and things that people tell you to just kind of figure out and how to fix your stress. It’s not that these things don’t have their place in someone’s life. The question is what is the fit for you and when and what does your brain feel about changing in general? What can we do to get our brain to change so we can receive new information and actually do maybe some of those tips that fit our lives?
The first thing is try something different. Do a new routine. You go to work a certain way on a certain route, go a different one. You like bananas, eat apples. It can be as trivial as that. You should have a bunch of new things going on every day, up and down that normal curve that are really consciously inter-switched into your routine. That really will shake up and bring on what we call “neuro-plasticity”. This is a new cutting edge of neuro-science that’s basically saying you can change your patterns and neuro-patterns that have wired. Neurons that fire together wire together. You may have heard that or maybe I just say that with my nerdy friends, but anyways what we want to do is actually break those cycles of patterns that are wired.
The second thing is you really actually see more online, these online brain games. They’re technically used when I was practicing neuro-psychology. We’d put a lot of people who had brain injuries on these sites to work memory, retention, executive functions, some of the things that were impaired by a stroke or what have you or a concussion, but these we were finding is good for the normal person as well because it is getting the brain pretty much, it’s taking the brain and going to the gym and it’s working out it’s own biceps and such so that can be really critical as well to getting new neuro-networks firing.
The other thing that has a little more philosophical edge, but it really does shake up the brain is to call bs out on yourself. This is a very interesting brain tip because one of the deepest and darkest parts of stress in my opinion as most people’s are, is that we’re locked into a narrative ourselves, a narrative of the world, a way of seeing things. If you look why we’re sometimes staying inside pain and suffering chronically, it’s not that we don’t want relief. Sometimes it’s that we want pride more and the greater prison at times for stress problems is that we’re tied to ourselves narrative. We’re tied to the story that we tell ourselves. That really counts in my sort of off the record opinion for stress and so how do you break that? Literally turn around stories. Turn around narratives. Turn around your perceptions of people. If you have a person in your life who you had a conflict with, what if you turn it around on Monday, Wednesday and Friday and wore their perspective? This is really big in chaging the brain because sometimes we are more connected to our pride than to the hope and change that we’re actually seeking, so that can be very helpful. What you want to do is constantly challenge your thinking.
Another thing I talk about with my clients that can help change the brain and see new thinking is a concept we call “boundaries”. What it is is a psychological line for where my sense of self stops and someone else begins. We really blur that line. If you guys have kids, you know how this is blurred rather regularly in your home every day when you tell them to take down their laundry. Most of the times we are actually seeking something verbally so we’re saying “I want my child to take down laundry”. Well what happens when it’s not done? We violate the boundary so to speak and we go do it and then we get mad at them for not doing it in the time frame you wanted in the way you wanted so we’re in this almost neurotic cycle of breaking the natural law of boundaries. If they don’t do it, that is a choice and that stress that I’m feeling is because I’m hopping in their backyard now and calling that a problem. We do a lot of that in our life and I think learning boundaries is huge for stress management relief.
The final tip I want to give out is the mother of all tips in my opinion, which is exercise. What I love from my side of the fence about exercise is it creates something we call a brain derived neuro-trophic factor in your brain. That’s a mouthful, but what it does is basically it’s a warrior in your brain that is fighting cortisol and all the stress hormones from chronic stress from work and life. When you’re doing something over and over and it’s not good, the cortisol and the stress hormones are increased, but these warriors are going to sit there and knock out all the cortisol because you have been exercising all the time. Very, very good thing to do and a very big thing to throw into your routine.
These again I think are some really interesting yet very helpful tips to get the brain to change first before you try any of those stress tip mantras that we started this segment with. Again they have their place in your life, but it has to have a place in the brain first because the way I see it, a healthy, healthy lifestyle is a free one where your life truly is free. I’m amazed by the stories day after day of people who are “successful”. At the end of the day they’d trade it in a heartbeat. When you’re dealing with chronic stress, it’s about honoring freedom again and looking at this idea of sort of doing more of what you want and not doing what you don’t want while hopping into this life of expectations because that is just a part of reality and this idea of control and expectations is a dance that really is run by the man behind the curtain we call the brain and it’s time for you guys to take back your brain.