Running Out of Gas

‘Surge capacity’, ‘adrenal fatigue’, ‘burnout’, are buzz-words and phrases that have no physiological validity.  There is no evidence that feeling tired is a sign of adrenal malfunction: the adrenaline that facilitates action just keeps on being produced.  The real meaning of surge capacity is in fact the reserve of hospital health care resources that can be called upon in emergencies, when up to 50% more patients than normal might need treatment.

The desire to describe quite simple things in a more trendy way seems insatiable – have you noticed that it’s no longer sufficient to just be excited, you have to be ‘super-excited!’ – but hijacking concepts and transforming them into yet more psychobabble is not helpful.  A way to resolve the confusion is to draw a clear distinction between practical and physiological processes on the one hand, and emotional responses on the other.  Sustained demand uses a lot of energy, which does need to be replenished – after a hard game of rugby, you need to eat, drink and sleep – but just stick with the game metaphor for a moment.  The losing team is despondent, the winning team has expended just as much energy, but they’re elated! 

The difference between the teams is emotional, not energetic, but that emotional effect is significant.  It also varies from player to player.  Those amongst the losing team who have to win at all costs will be grudging and critical, those who’d prefer to win but love playing the game won’t be.  Being a bad sport is toxic, and the principle applies to work teams too: in the Challenge of Change Resilience Training®, those we call toxic achievers see any means as justifying the ends, and get angry when things don’t work out the way they’d like them to. 

Being a good sport also means developing another of the Challenge of Change skills, which is letting go.  Remember the last time you had an argument that you lost, then spent the next week or so re-running it over and over in your mind, magically ending up winning every time?  You lost.  That’s how life is, win some, lose some, time to move on.  You can learn from the experience, but churning isn’t learning. 

In the Challenge of Change we call churning rumination, and this is what stress is: endless what-ifs and if-onlys, what Mark Twain called the worst things in his life that never happened.  This is not problem-solving.  All it leads to is feeling angry or upset again and again, caused by nothing more than negative thoughts.

The training programme distinguishes between pressure and stress.  Pressure is a demand to perform, and starts the moment you wake up.  Pressure provokes the adrenaline needed for action, sustained action uses energy and we eventually feel tired.  Take a break or sleep on it and you’re ready for more, but if you transform the pressure into stress by adding rumination there is no break: the activity just continues, driven by worry. 

Our research has shown that rumination can have serious consequences for your health, not because you can ‘run out of adrenaline’ but because you can’t: rumination continues to provoke fight-or-flight, even when you’re supposed to be taking a break.  Rumination overrides the break, preventing your body from recuperating and repairing.  Here’s a good question to ask yourself when you wake up from the nightmare of rumination: did it help?  This is a first step towards developing a resilient mindset.

Buyer Beware

There’s a lot of speculation about what working life will be like in the future.  One option is a hybrid arrangement, with more of us working at least part of the time from home.  Some large corporates are insisting that their employees must work from company offices once the pandemic has eased, but setting aside speculation about the pros and cons of working from home or office, whatever your work environment, everyone is affected by the two intertwined constants in life: pressure and change.

Pressure is a demand to perform.  There is always something to be done, and a lot of it is pretty routine until the parameters change.  Imagine you’ve been asked to produce a project outline for a meeting.  You’ve done this many times before, and since the meeting isn’t until next week the pressure of the task is low.  Later that day there’s a change of plan: the meeting’s been brought forward to tomorrow.  Your manager reminds you that the contract depends crucially on your outline, and that you’d better get it right!

Many people would describe this scenario as stressful, but that’s not true.  All that’s happened is that the pressure has increased.  Pressure can be turned into stress, which happens by ruminating about the negative emotion the situation provokes.  In other words, churning over how little time you have to do the job, or how you might be sacked if you don’t deliver on time.  None of this churning helps.  In fact, because your attention is hijacked by rumination you’re even less likely to get the job done properly, and at the same time you’re prolonging the physical demand on your body that pressure brings.

Pressure can be highly motivating, and being able to adapt to the pressure of change without turning it into stress is what resilience is about.  Some people just seem to do it naturally, but they weren’t born with this capacity – resilience is a learned behaviour, which means that with the right training, anyone can acquire resilience skills. 

Training programmes have been significantly compromised by remote working.  They can be run via Zoom, but all the participants still have to be available at the same time.  An alternative is to use online training.  Apart from the financial advantages, there is no requirement for everyone to attend together, and people can complete the course in their own time and at their own pace.  The downside is that online programmes can unfortunately end up presenting just superficial accounts of the topics, and not really be effective in changing behaviour.  Caveat emptor: before you take this route, look very carefully at the evidence!

We now offer the Challenge of Change Online Resilience Training®, which is a comprehensive version of our face-to-face evidence-based programme.   The Online provides

·         A full account of the four-step resilience process

·         A specially-designed version of the psychometric Challenge of Change Profile®

·         Access to all of the support materials, including the mindfulness exercise, the printable download offering further strategies for addressing Profile scores and the Challenge of Change Refresher® video available 90 days post-training.

Contact us to find out more.

Taking a Chance

Evolution is often thought to be a process of trial and error.  In fact, it’s the other way round: evolution proceeds by error and trial.  Every cell in your body contains your DNA, which is replicated whenever a cell divides.  Inevitably, in the countless divisions there will be occasional errors in transcription – mutations.  Those errors are then ‘tested’ to find out whether or not they confer an advantage over the unmutated form.

For the most part, advantage here means being better at attracting mates or defending a scarce food supply, which is why there’s a debate about whether human animals are still evolving.  After all, as we’ve said in an earlier blog (Blog 52, ‘Be a Bonobo’) you don’t normally have to fight off other shoppers for things on supermarket shelves, or beat up rivals to gain a partner!  Despite these arguments, we can’t not evolve.  One simple example: the seasonal colds and flu that most of us easily survive would once have been as deadly as Covid-19, but or immune systems have adapted and evolved to deal with those particular viruses. 

What mutations incur is risk.  Over time and generations some will prove adaptive and be retained, but within a lifetime others might be the starting point for cancer.  While we have no control over the process of mutation, the way we decide to behave does make a direct contribution.  Cigarette smoking, for example, significantly increases the risk of developing lung cancer.  Personality differences are also involved: some people are clearly more risk-averse than others.  Extraverts are known to be far greater risk-takers than introverts, which is explained by a synonym for extraversion, stimulus-seeking. 

Extraversion is one of the measures of personality that has a relatively strong biogenetic basis, which in turn means that it is resistant to change.  What the research has shown is that seeking stimulation is a consequence of having relatively low levels of resting brain arousal.  The extent to which our brains are aroused by stimulation varies, with extraverts requiring a greater degree of stimulation than introverts – hence their need to seek out stimulation, and their tendency to act impulsively.

A digression into the model that explains these differences (stimulus intensity modulation) is beyond the scope of this blog; suffice to say that the evidence for it from procedures likes anaesthetic susceptibility is substantial.  However, the extraversion-introversion dimension is distributed as a bell-curve rather than a simple dichotomy – in fact, most people are in the middle, neither strongly extraverted nor introverted. 

The scales comprising the pre-training Challenge of Change Profile are similarly bell-curved, so most people would tend to cluster around the mid-score of 5 in the 10-point range.  Unlike extraversion, though, they are primarily habits, and can therefore be changed by implementing the Challenge of Change Resilience Training programme.  There is also a preferred direction for these scales: the higher your score on rumination for example, the greater the sustained demand on your cardiovascular and immune systems.  Churning over upsets will also make you feel miserable, and hence the lower the score the better. 

Apart from the physiological effects, rumination will also compromise our response to risk.  We often think of risk in the context of danger and seek to minimise it, but life always incurs risk because of uncertainty.  Uncertain situations involve the risk that they could go either way, and life is certainly uncertain!  Planning and drawing on experience help to mitigate the risk, but deciding how to act can all too often be dictated by overwhelming emotion rather than reason.  It isn’t possible to be emotionless, and sensitivity to emotion is an important part of resilience, but only if it is moderated by being able to maintain perspective. 

This is the reason for combining the measures of sensitivity and detached coping in the Challenge of Change programme: individuals with high scores on both are described as having detached compassion, which ensures that they can empathise with how others feel but can nonetheless maintain their perspective and not be drawn into negative emotion.  Risk always involves making judgements about costs and benefits, and the more we can keep issues in perspective and avoid ruminating the fewer costs we’re likely to incur.            

Global Woe

Here’s the bad news: real GDP in the UK dipped to -10.3% in 2020, and unemployment rose from 3.7% to 5.4% across 2019/2020.  Similar grim figures have emerged across the globe as a result of the Covid-19 pandemic – GDP growth for the EU was -7.4%, and unemployment rose from 3.7% to 8.9% in the USA – and with the inevitable emergence of viral mutations there is still a hard road ahead.  The (sort-of) good news is that vaccines were produced in record time, and approved just as quickly in many countries.  The dark cloud behind the silver lining is that the availability of vaccines will for some time be limited, and will disproportionately benefit rich countries at a cost to poorer ones: unlike trade, altruism is definitely not global.

There are also significant differences in how effectively countries have responded to the pandemic.  Take New Zealand, where an early and rigorous response has led to just 2,295 reported cases and 25 deaths so far; by contrast, partly as a result of indecisive government bumbling, the comparable figures to date in the UK are over 3.5 million and 100,000, respectively.  NZ has fewer than 10% of the UK’s population, but it isn’t a function of size: China, with a population of 3.4 billion, had 89,000 cases and 4,636 deaths.  Unlike other large economies, China’s GDP actually grew by over 2% in 2020.  

There are hot debates about the reliability of the incidences reported by different countries, but despite the discrepancies, the fact is that we live in an economically interdependent world.  No country is insulated from the effects: New Zealand has coped better than most, but GDP there had contracted 11% by the middle of 2020.  Covid-19 has undoubtedly resulted in a global recession, and as you might expect, there has been a substantial increase in perceived stress: overall, 67% of people surveyed across Australia, France, Germany, New Zealand, Singapore, the UK and the USA reported feeling more stressed since the pandemic began. 

Sounds ominous, but what do the figures actually mean?  The tragic deaths of friends and family members will surely have contributed to respondents’ perceptions of stress, but so will having to home-school children in lockdowns.  The demands are hardly comparable, and are distinguished by a threshold.  When the emotional demand exceeds someone’s ability to cope, as may happen with bereavement, they may cross the threshold and end up suffering from post-traumatic stress.  It would be very hard to claim that having to home-school led to PTSD.

Let’s put these examples into perspective.  The diagnosable stress that might result from bereavement will need intensive one-on-one counselling or drug treatments to address it, but PTSD is thankfully relatively rare.  Almost all of the other everyday issues that people regard as ‘stressful’ are not at all; they simply reflect an increase in pressure.  In other words, the demand has increased, but it will only be stressful if you continue to ruminate about the upset it causes.  It is rumination that prolongs the misery and sustains the demands on our cardiovascular and immune functions that might well lead to illness.

What’s needed to adapt in an agile way to the changing world we live in is resilience.  Resilient people don’t stress themselves out churning over emotional upsets, and the unqualified good news is that you really can choose to not suffer from everyday stress – rumination is a learned behaviour, not a hard-wired one.  The new Challenge of Change Online Resilience Training offers a comprehensive, tried-and-tested programme for acquiring resilience skills which incorporates a validated psychometric assessment of how resilient you are and what you need to do to enhance your skills.  Being online, it can be completed in your own time and at your own pace, and it includes detailed follow-up documents and videos to consolidate the learning.  There has hardly been a more important time to develop the effective resilience skills the programme offers.

Running a Marathon

Races are run over a variety of distances, but if we were asked to name the shortest and the longest we’d likely say the 100-metre sprint and the marathon.  In much the same way, predictions about the duration of the Covid-19 pandemic have ranged from it petering out by the end of the year to being with us permanently.  Whatever the outcome, though, there won’t be a rapid end without an effective vaccine, which is some way off, so the world is in for a marathon rather than a sprint.

Sprinting demands a short but massive burst of energy.  For corporates the energy was provided partly by the injection of government assistance like the furlough scheme, but just as it would be impossible to run at sprint speed for the full 26 miles this support is unsustainable, and is gradually being reduced.  Marathons require sustained endurance, and firms will increasingly have to fall back on their own resources.  This is in part about regaining financial health, but just as important are the reserves of personal resilience that staff can call upon. 

How resilient are your people?  Another way of phrasing the question is how well your staff are coping with the effects of the pandemic: have they adapted to uncertainty about their jobs, working from home, anxiety about contracting the virus?  What compromises resilience – and in turn, productivity and job satisfaction – is stress, but we need to remind ourselves of what stress actually is. 

Changing circumstances are the one constant in our lives, but stress is not inherent in any of them: stress is the way we respond to change, not the change itself.  What change does is to increase pressure, but pressure is not stress, it’s just an increase in need or demand.  This happens independently of crises like pandemics: when you wake up in the morning there is a need to get up and start work.  If during your morning Zoom team meeting your boss wants to know why you haven’t finished the project you’re working on, the demand increases. 

It will increase further if your colleagues all chime in to say they can’t get on with their part of the job until you’ve delivered, but none of this is stressful unless you ruminate about the emotional upset it causes.  In other words, if you go on churning over what-ifs and if-onlys, like imagining you’re going to lose your job and your family will be on the streets.  These are the worst things in his life that Mark Twain said actually never happened – they’re just ruminative thoughts.  The simple fact is that stress is no more or less than ruminating about emotional upset: no rumination, no stress, just changes in demand.   

The good news is that the resilience that results from not turning pressure into stress is a learnable skill, and the Challenge of Change Resilience Training provides four logical steps to do so.  The crisis could of course incur tragedy, if someone close to you is infected and dies. You might then cross the threshold from daily demand to post-traumatic stress, where the choice is no longer available, but these kinds of situations are thankfully rare.  For the demands we face on a day-to-day basis, the Challenge of Change programme provides a clear set of strategies that our research has shown to impact significantly on participants’ well-being. 

Even better news is that the Challenge of Change is now available as an online programme spread over three modules.  During the pandemic live training is impractical, and although Zoom training can work well, it is constrained to specific schedules.  The Challenge of Change Online can be completed in your own time and at your own pace, and it offers a comprehensive package that covers all of the key components of the full-day version, including the psychometric Challenge of Change Profile and the follow-up Challenge of Change Refresher video.  To see more about the Online, click here