How to Build Resiliency During the COVID Crisis
SHORT: Psychological resiliency - like physical resiliency - can be built. COVID-19 represents a form of chronic stress for many and can lead to negative health and productivity outcomes. It is possible, however to counteract the effects of chronic stress and learn how to perform better under greater stress and learn to like it. Athletes have known this for ages.
12 - 15 MINUTE READ
For many, the onset and continuation of COVID-19 represents a form of chronic stress. Wickipedia defines chronic stress this way:
Chronic stress is the response to emotional pressure suffered for a prolonged period of time in which an individual perceives they have little or no control. It involves an endocrine system response in which corticosteroids are released. While the immediate effects of stress hormones are beneficial in a particular short-term situation, long-term exposure to stress creates a high level of these hormones. This may lead to high blood pressure (and subsequently heart disease), damage to muscle tissue, inhibition of growth, suppression of the immune system,[1] and damage to mental health.
But there are ways to counteract chronic stress - to build the capacity to metabolize stress and learn to thrive under greater pressure. Most people tend to think of resiliency as the ability to "bounce back" after a difficult or stressful event. However I would propose that defining resiliency this way is like suggesting that the opposite of a negative is "neutral." The opposite of negative isn't neutral, it is positive, and, as Nicholas Taleb characterizes so aptly in his book, "Antifragile" the opposite of fragile is NOT just "strong". The opposite of fragile is what he calls "antifragile" or what I will call "resilient." Antifragility and resilience are the property that results from not just bouncing back from stress, but from becoming stronger in the process. All organic things are “antifragile” or resilient. The rest of this post is dedicated to how to become more resilient - to perform better and thrive under even greater stress.
The Yerkes Dodson Curve: Stress and Performance.
In 1908, psychologists Robert Yerkes and John Dodson articulated the relationship between stress and performance: notably, that peak performance was not a by-product of low stress, rather that peak performance came at a certain "optimal" level of stress and then trailed off above that level.
This curve suggests and reinforces the idea that we must find balance - a concept now infused into the modern psyche. "Work-life balance," "finding balance," "reducing stress," and "managing stress" are now common buzz words throughout the working world. At first blush it makes intuitive and rational sense:
However, I think there is a way to think about this differently - to re-frame the challenge - and answer a better question. This is the course of “Design Thinking” - a process and mindset out of Stanford and utilized at Apple, Google, Amazon, Cisco and many other innovative companies. The central question of "how do I reduce stress to find perform better?" is fundamentally the wrong question because it makes the flawed assumption that this curve is fixed. Based largely on the work of my friend and mentor Dr. Daniel Friedland we can understand that the curve is not fixed. Knowing this, we explore a better question, and one more apt for the modern world: "How can I perform better under greater stress (and learn to like it)?" Let's face it - this world is not getting less complex or slowing down.
"It will never be this slow again."
A daunting quote, but most certainly true. Accepting this, we can see that the better answer is to shift our stress response curve up and to the right - to perform better under even more stress.
When you think about it - this is EXACTLY what athletes have been doing for millennia: learning to shift their stress and performance curve up and to the right. When you can do that, in conditions that would previously have led to overwhelm, you could now find your best self emerging. In fact the curve looks an awful lot like a bicep. In this metaphor stress represents the strain on the bicep. The performance is the maximal weight the muscle is capable of carrying. So... how do athletes shift their curve and increase their performance-to-stress ratio? They intentionally take on more stress, and (here's the key) then they recover. They also make it a game. Episodic stress and recovery is the key to athletic performance - and, as it turns out - to performance in all walks of life. Here's where the modern "corporate athlete" often gets it wrong. In office spaces around the world, workers are doing the moral equivalent of 15 hours of dumbbell curls with no rest and little sleep and then wondering why their psychological biceps are not growing.
The key to developing resiliency (and breakthrough performance) is the same: episodic stress, followed by recovery.
So, how to apply this new model of increased performance under stress to our busy lives? Here are 4 simple steps (that are not-so-simple to implement.)
1. REDUCE
2. RECOVER
3. RAISE
4. REFRAME
1. REDUCE: Reduce current stress levels to allow for recovery. Many people I know are already to the far right on their stress / recovery curve and not in a position to intentionally take on more stress. So the first step is to reduce stress to allow for recovery - to regain initial balance. This is an intuitive step that many try in an episodic way, but it tends to form a vicious cycle of pulling back and out of things, recovering, recommitting, becoming overstressed and then pulling back again. A particularly terrible by-product of this cycle is being perceived as lacking integrity or as lacking follow through. Last minute cancellations, failure, over-promising and under-delivering are the hallmarks of this step by itself. Nonetheless it can be an essential first step in developing greater resiliency - here are 3 great ways to reduce stress:
a) Delegate tasks that deplete you. Don't like doing taxes? Hire an accountant. Bored and overwhelmed by too many meetings? Quit the council, the PTA, the homeowners association. Send a delegate to company meetings. Stop doing certain chores - hire someone to mow the lawn or clean the house. Money can't buy you love, but it can buy you time...
b) "Design for your strengths." Spend more time in your area of strengths - in "flow," "the zone," the peak performance state. Research shows that spending more time in this state significantly increases willpower. My book Design For Strengths covers this in detail.
c) Design around your weaknesses." Stop doing things that you are not good at. Not good at making project plans? Make it a stretch assignment for a detail-oriented go-getter. Not a great driver? Get an Uber, take the train, join a carpool. Not great at your current job? Identify a better role and then lobby to move into it - or quit and find a more suitable job.
2. RECOVER: According to my friend Dr. Ari Levy, stress in modern life isn't necessarily up, but our ability to recover from it has drastically decreased. He makes a really good point: 100 years ago you could die at work from heavy machinery, or die on the way to work through exposure. Your children would often die at childbirth or later from the flu, typhoid, tuberculosis, or even a snowstorm. If your crops didn't come in you could starve, if you ran out of firewood you froze. It was a cold, dark, hot, dangerous world. Fast forward 100 years and we are dying from... failure to answer an email quickly enough on our smartphones. But here's the thing... we actually are dying from a 1000 email papercuts... We are bathing in cortisol - the stress hormone - 24 hours a day, 7 days a week. Chronic stress like this causes inflammation and wreaks all sorts of havoc, not the least of which is heart attacks, cancer, and other killers. Dr. Ari had me play a guessing game to identify the top 3 ways to recover from stress. I guessed sleep, meditation, and red wine. I was wrong on all three accounts. Here, from science are the actual top 3 in reverse order:
3) Low-intensity exercise: I should have guessed this one. As an athlete, "rest days" were not spent in bed - no instead we went for a very easy bike ride, a very slow jog, or just went out on the ice without ever breaking a sweat. The Tour de France riders don't take their rest days off - they do "recovery rides" for 2 to 3 hours. We metabolize stress through movement. Physical activity is a key mechanism for handling stress - go for that walk. CO-19 can’t stop you now!
2) Social intimacy: Being around people you care about and that care about you, conversations and candor are major stress reducers. Most work situations have a competitive and hierarchical element the prevent true social intimacy, so friends, family, romance - these are the second greatest way to recover from stress, and replace cortisol with serotonin and dopamine. Feeling stressed out and want to hide out in your room or office? That is a mal-adaptive response: you are much better spending time with your friends watching a game, playing cards or just talking. In the CO-19 world make that phone call or better yet that Zoom or FaceTime call - catch up with old friends.
1) Physical intimacy: including all forms of touch - from petting your puppy to being with your partner. I didn't see this one coming, but according to research this is the number one way for humans to recover from stress. Replace cortisol with oxytocin, "the hug hormone" through simple touches, petting, handholding, cuddling, hugs, and of course, private time with the one you love: this is the straightest path to recovery from too much stress. Horrible day at work? Think that coming home and immediately firing up the laptop to put out fires is the best way to handle it? Wrong. Counter-intuitively you are better off taking a break and spending a quiet romantic evening with your significant other. Time to light the candles. If you are stuck in quarantine without a significant other or a pet, consider taking up dog walking or joining a bubble quarantine group with similarly isolated people - bonus points if they have a pet - or go to the humane society and rescue an animal - and yourself.
Back to Dr. Ari's point about our inability to recover being the culprit for current stress levels? He actually suggested to me that “real” stress is actually down compared to 100 years ago. Consider the lifestyles of millennials today vs. 100 years ago vis a vis these 3 mechanisms. 3) Exercise: 100 years ago we walked everywhere, most jobs had an element of manual labor and we were constantly active. Today the average office worker is completely sedentary nearly the entire day sitting at a desk with a computer screen. 2) and 1) Social and physical intimacy: 100 years ago more often than not we lived in multi-generational homes, and our work (farming, craftsmanship etc.) was more often a family affair. Homes were small, children slept 3 to a bed, and constant touch and interaction was the norm, not the exception. Consider today: for a single professional, most of the day, and night, are spent isolated and alone, and most social interaction - even dating - has become virtual in nature. Recovery is the key to resilience, yet many of us have lost touch with our most adaptive recovery mechanisms.
3. RAISE: Once you have regained balance and implemented stress recovery mechanisms back into your life such that you are ready for more it is time for the next resiliency step: to intentionally take on MORE stress - in an episodic fashion - in order to recover even stronger. Chronic stress can be incredibly damaging, but acute, episodic stress is really good for you. To quote my friend Steven Kotler:
“You can use acute stress to decrease chronic stress. Engaging in short, intentional bursts of acute stress can be really effective for reducing chronic stress. An intense workout. An ice bath. Deep tissue massage.”
I would add to that changing your chronic stressors into episodes of high intensity. I tried to write my first book a little at a time for almost 3 years. Then my business partner posed a challenge on Dec 8, 2017, “I think you can finish this book by January 1st". Never one to back down from a challenge, 23 days later I had a 70,000-word manuscript ready for editing. Break your big tasks into short episodic timelines, or chunk it all into one massive session.
4. REFRAME: Change your relationship with stress. Perhaps our greatest resiliency tool is what my friend Dr. Daniel Friedland calls "reappraisal" or "reframing." We can learn to reframe stressful challenges to make them into a game or an experiment, where the outcomes, uncertain though they may be, do not directly link to our self-image or self-confidence. Mindfulness practice is a particularly helpful tool for reframing - as is “gamifying.” Consider, for a moment, the Greek myth of Sisyphus: the king damned by the gods for all eternity to roll an immense rock up a hill only to have it roll right back down again. Sounds horrendous... but with a little reframing:
"Sisyphus learns to bowl"
Sisyphus' challenge was not all that different than bowling or the highlander games when you think about it. When we are able to reframe stressful challenges as a game or experiment we can begin to appreciate the process as much as the end result, reducing cataclysmic stress in the process. It also changes our biochemistry - when we view a threat as a game or opportunity our brain chemistry changes. instead of Cortisol - which causes us to hunker down and narrow our focus (and raises our blood pressure), we emit DHEA and Oxcytocin. DHEA lowers blood pressure helps you to broaden your perspective, Oxcytocin (the hug hormone) encourages you to ask for help. When faced with a complicated crisis (like COVID) what is better? To hunker down and focus narrowly on the daily numbers… or to broader your perspective on how it might shape your future behavior and business processes and to call others to talk it through? Sadly when we are stressed we tend anchor to our mammalian/reptilian brains which get us ready for fight/flight/flee.
Sisyphus could have started to challenge himself, "how quickly can I get to the top? How heavy of a rock can I move? How many times can I do it in one day? Who is the best boulder roller on the planet?” If you think about it, for a decade in a half I traveled to cold countries, in winter, to go into artificially refrigerated environments, to turn only left, in an incredibly painful stance - over, and over, and over again. This is called “speedskating.” By any measure this is far worse than Sisyphus’s curse - he was outside, in the sun, and could choose his mountain and boulder. So… why was his lot a curse, and mine fun? Because… it was a game. (BTW games have rules, you keep score, you keep track of odds of winning, and when you do, you celebrate.) I do this regularly with CO-19 - I try to calculate all kinds of potential outcomes, I anticipate the numbers, and blog about it - this his how I have gamified CO-19. How can you?
CONCLUSION: Perhaps the greatest story of reframing and resiliency comes from Victor Frankyl, author of "Man's Search for Meaning." A Holocaust survivor, Frankyl lost his wife, mother, father, and brother to the Nazi concentration camps and experienced stress and privation well beyond what most of us will ever experience. But he was able to reframe his experience by choosing to view the suffering as an opportunity to serve others AND still find meaning.
"Everything can be taken from a man but one thing: the last of the human freedoms - to choose one's attitude in any given set of circumstances, to choose one's own way.”
Here is a man who has lost everything. On the brink of starvation, freezing, tortured, his mother, brother, wife dead, his life's work left behind and in ashes and he is able to find bliss. It certainly makes the risk of getting fired or missing a deadline seem paltry. I will end with Frankyl's most famous quote, one that sums up the ultimate reward of resiliency: freedom.