Healthy Brain, Happy Life (28 page)

There was also a physical component of my strategy in dealing with stress. I was becoming more aware of exactly what was happening in my body as I react to stress. An understanding of the physiology and neuroscience of stress helped me change my relationship with stress and how I dealt with it. Back in those early days, I was thinking, worrying, and stressing over whether what I was doing was good enough or big enough or important enough to get me tenure and the respect of my peers. In fact, I believed that the level of stress and worry in my life was directly proportional to the value of the work I was doing. The most important people doing the most important things had the most stress and worry, right? Of course, I wanted to do highly valuable work so I worried and stressed over every detail to be sure everything would go exactly as I planned. In other words, I linked my level of stress and worry to my level of self-importance. I wasn’t contributing something worthy or important unless I had a hefty and continuous amount of stress and worry in my life. At the core of this theory was my belief, which I described before, that I was only as good as the next paper I published or the next grant that I won. I published many papers and won millions of dollars in grants, but the stress and worry never ended because I was always working for the next one that might or might not be won. On top of this, I let my level of success as measured by papers and grants and invitations in my highly competitive field define my self-worth as a scientist and a person.

My regular exercise was showing me how powerful it could be to live in the present, focused not so much on mental worries but on what I was doing and how I was feeling, in my mind and in my body. I started to become aware that my constant focus on future and past worries and especially on letting outside forces define my self-worth had to change. I realized I was letting my whole life slip by without ever being able to truly appreciate it because I was never in the here and now. How did I do that? I gradually started to shift my focus on all the outside criterion of success and importance (how many invitations to talks, how many invitations to write book chapters) to my own criterion of what made me happy, including a shift toward paying more attention to myself. This might sound strange because wasn’t I getting tenure and publishing all those papers for me? Wasn’t it my science reputation that was boosted with every paper and every grant? Yes, I did love science, I always had, but what got lost was an appreciation of my enjoyment in science rather than simply checking off a step on my way to becoming successful in science. I had started to neglect my own joy in these things and blocked off too many other avenues that could bring me joy, like a strong social network and art and music and laughter.

It was this shift toward a much deeper inner self-awareness and self-love that started to change my previous approach to stress forever. This is what gave me the desire to evaluate and the motivation to eliminate all the unnecessary forms of stress in my life that I could find. I want to be clear that for me this was not an all-out campaign to minimize stress. Instead, it was a powerfully focused intention to bring more joy, love, and happiness into my life. I was inundated by stress and, in fact, defined my success and importance by how much stress I had and could endure. What a shift to declare that I no longer wanted all that stress and instead wanted much more joy in my life!

It didn’t happen overnight. I was battling forty years of theories and beliefs that kept a healthy amount of stress in my inbox at all times. But slowly and surely, I shifted my attitude about myself and toward myself and started throwing old sources of stress away. This does not mean I suddenly let go of all goals and deadlines. Instead, I became even more productive and energized because I focused more clearly on the goals that made me happy. For example, this allows me to say no much more easily if the request, however noble, does not align with my own life goals. This ability to say no without guilt has eliminated an enormous amount of stress in my life.

I always used to experience a lot of stress when I had to speak out in public. Not in lecture and prepared public-speaking situations, but in a town hall or faculty meeting where you had to fight to get your voice heard. While I was generally successful in speaking out in these kinds of situations, I was always worried about how my comments would be received or if my words might offend. This caused a disproportionately high level of stress and worry relative to their true importance. I still have a little jolt of adrenaline in these situations (the “good” kind of stress) but I have all but eliminated the more serious worry because I am clear about what I want and why I want it. I am far less concerned about how others perceive what I say and more focused on saying what I really mean in a clear and concise way.

As I got rid of more and more stress in my life, I found that I tolerated the unnecessary stress that remained less and less. I have described the difficult and awkward conversations I had, which essentially transformed my relationships with my parents, a doorman, and a student. Those three conversations helped shift my whole world from one where there was always a little stress oozing from the background—always hanging around the edges and hard to get rid of like that musty smell in your home after a flood—to one in which I could truly relax and let my parasympathetic nervous system kick in. I was able to have those conversations because I have become more tuned in to my own truth. In fact, the key to those conversations is simply being able to say your truth without anger or pride or ego getting in the way. I could have easily let my ego get in the way of asking my parents if I could say I love you to them. Why should I have to ask them? They are adults too, aren’t they? But the truth was, I was the one who realized I needed to say it to them, so it was up to me to make the request. Similarly with my student, it was clear that I knew and he knew and every single person in my lab knew that we had a difficult relationship. I could have easily ignored it for the remaining months he had in the lab and simply blamed him for the whole mess. In fact, at an earlier time in my life, I could have easily seen myself doing this. But the truth was, I wanted a lab where everyone felt part of the team and felt respected, including me. I wanted to have a lab where all my students felt supported and could do good work, so instead of letting my annoyance or my ego get in the way, I simply told him how I wanted to be able to support him and asked him how he thought I could be able to do that better. I had to admit out loud that there was a problem and acknowledge that I was not only half of the problem but that I was fully responsible for solving the problem as head of the lab. That was a big hurdle to get over because it felt like I was admitting weakness. Instead it was simply acknowledging the truth.

TAKE-AWAYS: PROTECTING AGAINST STRESS

•  The three biological systems available to combat stress are the voluntary nervous system; the autonomic nervous system, including the sympathetic (fight or flight) and the parasympathetic (rest and digest) subdivisions; and the neuroendocrine system.

•  Too much chronic stress is toxic to both your body and your brain.

•  The dirty little secret of the stress system is that it responds to and is activated by psychological stresses of modern life (say, high taxes and low salary) in the same way it responds to physical dangers (like a charging elephant).

•  Long-term constant stress, including long-term psychological stress, has serious long-term health risks on cardiovascular function, digestion (ulcers), and reproduction.

•  Long-term stress also affects widespread brain areas, including the hippocampus, the prefrontal cortex, and the amygdala.

•  Moderate amounts of stress may help inoculate us and make us more resilient.

•  According to the adult neurogenesis theory of major depressive disorder, exercise helps combat stress and depression by increasing adult hippocampal neurogenesis.

•  The four major factors that cause psychological stress are (1) the feeling of having no control over a situation; (2) the feeling of having no predictive information about what might happen; (3) the state of having no social, leisure, or fun outlets; and (4) the feeling that your situation is only going to get worse.

•  By reversing those four factors, you can decrease psychological stress on a situation-by-situation basis.

BRAIN HACKS: ANTISTRESSING
NOW

Stress is an emotional response. Knowing this, we can interrupt its effects on our brains and bodies to lessen its impact. Here are some quick ways to combat stress.

•  Hug or kiss someone you love. This could be an adult, a child, a baby, or a pet. Feeling the love can immediately combat even the most serious of stressful situations.

•  Take some mindful alone time for yourself, such as a four-minute break for a quiet, relaxing cup of tea or coffee. Savor every drop of the drink and the alone time; make sure you don’t look at your phone at all during this time.

•  Call your funniest friend just to say hello.

•  Dance by yourself or with a partner to your favorite song.

•  Do any one of the exercise Brain Hacks from Chapters 5 and 6 (a jump rope or Hula-Hoop would be particularly good).

•  Get or give yourself a hand or foot massage (this might take longer than four minutes but is one of my favorite treats).

•  Write someone a thank-you note, e-mail, text, or Facebook message just for being them. Giving back can be one of the most powerful destressors around!

•  Watch a viral talking animal video on YouTube. I love the one with the dog talking about bacon.