This one’s personal – and powerful! I’ve been a ‘you can do better’ kind of person my whole life. As life got super busy – and stressful - I was on top of all the Top 10 lists to stress-free parenting, meals, and life. Say no, delegate, simplify. Yet the result was often more stress – was I doing it right? It was all about behaviors - what I should do and not do and, if I’m being honest, how I could get others to change so I could have fewer stressors. I could peel back the stressors of having a challenging career, raising kids with differing needs, a struggling marriage, aging parents, increasing costs of life and lifestage, and so on.
Yet, what I understand now, is that the stress was in me…in my nervous system. It was rooted in my inner shifts of (or lack thereof) autonomic state. The adaptive, safety-serving behaviors learned earlier in life were still running the show, not my brilliant thinking as those lists wanted me to believe. And what had been adaptive became maladaptive and ineffective as life changed.
As behavioral health moves mainstream, there’s something eons more powerful at its heels that is worthy of early adoption. As a leader in bringing reframes and new paradigms to others, I can hardly contain myself on this one! Yet I have also learned to work with that part of me that, out of responsibility to be helpful, puts others into overwhelm!
What’s the new paradigm? Stress is not cause-effect. Stress is a circular phenomenon that involves the stimulus around you, your neuroception, the autonomic state change it creates within you, and your learned behaviors to protect while in that state, the cues you put into the environment, which leads to more stimulus around you. To continually critique your behaviors (and those of the people around you) is only fueling your internal system to experience more stress and sending cues that layer stressors on those around you. Complying with the latest stress-busting list is appealing to our one-size-fits-all linear-thinking cortex, yet when it comes to stress we are each a unique nervous system.
Who knew?! Turns out really smart neuroscientists, psychiatrists, and therapists did. Now through the ongoing passion of innovators, we can move new paradigms from scientific community through clinical practice and into your hands (heart and mind, more importantly!) Remember the days when nutrition science and healthy eating was known only be knowledgeable experts? Now we are all capable of mastering what we uniquely need. We’ll get there with autonomic state regulation, yet we can only be where we are.
So -
The first opportunity is to challenge the blanket belief that stress is bad and that the goal is to rid your life of it. It’s not possible. The human design has features to elicit experiences of ‘stress’ that have biological purpose. The new paradigm is to lean into this design and work with it, to support growth towards a healthier you, healthier connections, and a healthy culture of perpetual growth.
The next time you feel stressed, pause and take note of the sensations. Then tell yourself, “That’s not stress, that’s stimulus for growth!”
With this mindset, you can be curious about the context and cues in the environment and how they are interconnected to your inner experience of autonomic state change and subsequent thoughts, feelings and actions to be more intentional rather than reactive. You can more effectively manage the growth of your internal dynamics to be connected and effective in your dynamics with others. Using this internal monitoring system, we can individually and collectively identify what we need to learn and how to create safe environments for that learning to happen. That said, if the intensity of distress is unbearable or those now maladaptive learned behaviors put you or others at risk of serious harm, seek professional help now.
We are each shaped by every human interaction we have had since your nervous system was formed. It is the root of our commonality and our uniqueness! Over the recent decades, we have been shaped to think anything except the ideal is stress. Yet we know life is expected to have challenges. Imagine growing in ways that frees you to move in and out of a state of stress with ease? In ways that brings you into your most creative and connected space more often? That sends cues to our team and your customers of trust and safety to be in it together? This is not only for your health, but also for growing as a leader, mastering collaboration, innovation, and solving the complex problems that require the best minds to engage together.
If you are curious how this fundamental human dynamic holds the solution to organizational challenges of innovation, productivity, decision-making, and morale, I would be honored to serve as a conduit for your growth. Through the Institute for Systemic Growth, we offer courses and coaching in harmonized growth to support your unique journey from the inside out, to the things that matter most.
Missed the earlier two segments? Find them here -
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