In the Spotlight

We often think about attention as a kind of light beaming out from our minds. An analogy might be a torch beam that moves around in a dark room, highlighting whatever you point it at, but as with all analogies it has limitations! The most important difference is that the torch makes no response to what it shows, be it a chair or a tiger or a corpse. What our minds add to the process is perception, toned by emotion, and it is emotion that draws us to look longer or to look away. Attention might be given in an objective torch-like way, but that would be rare – our response to just about everything has an emotional tone of some sort.

The more important aspect of the process from our perspective is whether or not our attention becomes caught by what we perceive. A practical example illustrates this: you might be sitting quietly reading a book. Where is your attention? Perhaps you’re having to read it for an exam, but you’re not really that interested. The emotional tone will be tedium, and your attention will be easily drawn away to anything you can see or hear – in other words, it isn’t concentrated on the book, but diluted across anything around you or running in your mind. At the other extreme, you might be so emotionally engrossed in the story that you’re not aware of anything else, and your mind fills with the sadness or tension that the story is about. If someone calls your name you might hardly be aware of it, and will only reluctantly switch the beam of attention away from the book.

There will nonetheless always be some awareness of someone calling to you. In the Challenge of Change training we use a continuum of sleep, and only in the lowest level of deep sleep are you oblivious to stimuli – even in dreaming sleep people will make some response. To take another example, driving a car. Even when you’re really listening to music or the radio, if a car does something unexpected up ahead you’re likely to react. You could think about it as a portion of the torch beam constantly monitoring the world for change, and when that happens in the CoC model, you wake up, your attention shifts to what’s changed and you respond accordingly.

Or rather, you might respond accordingly. One of the major causes of accidents is drivers not responding appropriately or quickly enough, and one reason for that is their attention having been caught. That’s why countries ban the use of mobile phones while driving. Carrying out a conversation absorbs your attention – in other words, it is captured, and you’re no longer driving, just chatting. The problem is you could become just as absorbed in thoughts, especially ruminative ones about emotional upsets; governments can’t legislate against rumination!

We can think about attention as moving on a continuum, from being open to the world to being closed to it. You can see this for yourself: choose a word on the page you’re reading, and focus on just that word – concentrate your attention on one word. Then be aware of the writing on the rest of the page. Then be aware of the room around you. At each stage, detail is diminished but the scope of your awareness grows – it would be like a torch where the beam can be focused into a thin pencil or opened out into a wide beam.

The switch from open to closed can happen very quickly. A good example is the survivor of a ferry disaster, who described being aware of the whole rapidly-changing situation but also noting where the exits were. He also described how some of the other passengers were either rushing about in a panic or were frozen by fear. His attention remained controlled, and he showed what we would describe as presence of mind – his attention was in the present, here and now, moving rapidly into the past or future but retaining the present as the frame of reference.

What these examples include is the context. Some situations may change very rapidly, but since our reactions are governed primarily by electrical nerve signals we’re able to respond quickly enough to most things. Think back to the last time you were startled by something. How long did it take for your body to react? The link from perception to physical fight-or-flight requires a nerve signal to the adrenal glands to secrete adrenaline, but it happens so fast it seems instantaneous.

The complication is the emotional component. In the ferry disaster, the survivor reported feeling no fear at the time, whereas the attention of the panic-stricken or frozen passengers had been caught by emotion. This is not to say that emotion is wrong, and even in a detached response there will still be emotion. It comes back to the old adage of the tail and the dog – all too often we lose the detached perspective and the tail of emotion ends up wagging the dog of the mind, rather than the dog wagging the tail.

Giving names to the points on the continuum, your attention might start off switching between being wide open to briefly focussing on one feature or another. It might then home in on just one thing, and with increasing focus it becomes concentrated. Attention is still controlled and given intentionally, but the trap is allowing your attention to be snatched away and captured. It might be captured by an idle thought about your next holiday, a state we call waking sleep, but if negative emotion is added it becomes rumination. This is what stress is: ruminating about emotional upsets.

Emergencies are not everyday occurrences. Using an everyday example, your boss might give you a restructuring project to work on. You evaluate it by drawing on your experience and thinking about the outcomes, wide awake and keeping the present as the frame of reference – this is what we call reflection, and in mindfulness terms your mind is full of controlled attention. As you work on it, the project seems very much like the last restructure, same old same old, and your attention drifts off into what you’re going to be doing at the weekend. Attention has been snatched away into waking sleep, mind is filled with dreams, and work stops. Then your boss calls in to say things have changed, the restructure plan is needed for a meeting that afternoon. Panic! Mind fills with fear of not delivering, anger that you’re expected to do everything yesterday, etc. Attention has been completely hijacked by negative emotion and you feel stressed out.

The solution: wake up, take back control of your attention, put the issues into perspective, let go of the negative emotion. Does ruminating ever help? Take these four steps and do the job without the drama.

The Anatomy of Pressure

In the Challenge of Change Resilience Training we dispense with the conventional idea of ‘good’ vs. ‘bad’ stress. The distinction makes no sense – if they’re both called stress, how do you know the difference? We resolve the issue by distinguishing instead between pressure and stress, which is not mere wordplay: pressure can be defined precisely, as a demand to perform.

There is always pressure. A simple practical example that we use in the book describing the Challenge of Change (Work Without Stress – McGraw-Hill, 2017) is being woken up in the morning by your alarm. The demand is to get up and go to work – pressure, but no stress. If you oversleep and have to rush madly to get to work in time, the pressure has increased, but still no stress. You arrive late and your boss makes some critical remark in front of your colleagues. Many people would say that was stressful, but in fact it will only be stressful if you spend the next hours or days ruminating pointlessly about what your colleagues think about you, or catastrophizing about being sacked.

In other words, stress is not caused by external factors: you don’t have a stressful boss or job, they’re only experienced as stressful to the extent that you ruminate about the emotional upset you feel about them. Training participants will sometimes object, saying that we’ve made stress an entirely personal response and have exonerated management, but this isn’t the case. Management have a clear duty of care towards their staff, and we define that care as bosses not giving their people anything to ruminate about – a principle which the manager in our example had clearly ignored. Indeed, our research has shown that managers who receive the highest ratings by their direct reports are characterized by being able to deal with issues objectively while at the same time remaining sensitive to the emotional impact on their staff.

Let’s take this a step further by refining what we call pressure. It remains true that stress is an internal process of ruminating about emotional upset, but pressure can exceed an individual’s capacity to avoid ruminating about it. We described this in an earlier blog (Blog 41, ‘Carried Over the Threshold’) and illustrated it with the example of post-traumatic stress. Even after major events relatively few people actually end up suffering from PTSD, but for those who do, the emotional intensity has pushed them over their threshold. We can apply this principle to everyday stress as well. Take our simple example above. Everyone would agree that being woken by an alarm isn’t stressful, but as you progress through the stages of the story an increasing number of people (again, not all!) would say that the situation had become ‘stressful’. In other words, the fear of being late, or worse still actually arriving late and being told off, would exceed their threshold for starting to ruminate.

We can now usefully make a distinction between positive pressure, which motivates you, increases your interest and gets you going, and negative pressure which is more likely to lead to stress. Stress remains rumination and nothing else, but there is an interaction between external factors like being late and your response to them: your conditioning has determined the threshold at which you’re likely to start ruminating about the situations you’re exposed to.

Conditioning is habitual behaviour, and habits can be changed by practising different ways of responding. The Challenge of Change Training is aimed at increasing your resilience by providing the strategies to avoid ruminating; these are the four steps of waking up, controlling attention, becoming detached and letting go. Perfecting them will change the habitual way you respond. Diligent practise will steadily raise your personal threshold, and what you might once have thought was stressful will be seen instead for what it is: pressure.

Braking Good

The primary biochemical mechanism that facilitates fight-or-flight involves activation of the h-p-a axis – the link between the hypothalamus and the pituitary gland at the base of the brain, and the two adrenal glands above our kidneys. However, we’re not necessarily running or fighting for our lives – fight-or-flight is simply a consequence of the activation of the sympathetic nervous system, and it will happen even when we’ve been in waking sleep and someone calls our name. In this case the physiological effect will be very small and hardly noticeable, but what has happened is that the level of adrenaline in our system has increased to facilitate our waking up and orienting to the call.

At the other extreme, when we’re suddenly jolted by a loud bang the level of adrenaline increases dramatically.In these situations we can feel the effect on our heart – it starts to pound!This is all entirely appropriate. Adrenaline is not a ‘stress hormone’, just a hormone doing exactly what it is designed to do: facilitating a rapid response to demand.In the Challenge of Change Resilience Training we call the demand to perform pressure, and pressure is intermittent – it’s very rare to have constant sustained pressure. These bursts of demand are sometimes erroneously called ‘acute stress’, but they have nothing to do with stress – even if the demand is intense, it is still pressure.What transforms it into stress is rumination: in-between the peaks of pressure there is always the opportunity to return to rest, but continuing to ruminate about emotional upsets bridges the gap by maintaining the fight-or-flight response.

Our bodies operate on what’s called a homeostatic principle – it will intelligently return to rest as soon as possible after demand if we don’t interfere by ruminating. It does this in two ways. Think about pushing a car in neutral gear along a flat road. The movement of the car is like the burst of pressure, and you can just wait for it to gradually slow down and stop, or you can make it slow down quicker by applying the brake. This is just an analogy, but our bodies have two analogous processes in place so that it can come back to rest as quickly as possible.

The energy and movement from the push is the equivalent of the sympathetic activation system, with the increase in adrenaline. When the demand (the push!) stops, provided you don’t ruminate the adrenaline will be metabolized, heart rate slows and we gradually come to rest. The brake in the analogy is a parallel nerve system called the parasympathetic. The parasympathetic system is sometimes called the ‘rest and digest’ system, because in fight or flight our digestive process is slowed to conserve energy for action. Like the sympathetic system the parasympathetic is extremely complex, and we need to keep it as simple as possible by focusing on just one key nerve called the vagus. The vagus nerve has multiple functions, but here’s a simple demonstration of the one we’re interested in and can use in a practical way.

Place the index and middle finger of your left hand on your right inside wrist, and move them around gently until you can feel your pulse. Now take a deep in-breath, followed by a long out-breath. Do this a couple of times. Did you notice how your pulse (in other words, your heart-rate) increases as you breathe in, then slows down as you breathe out? That’s called heart-rate variability, and it is a healthy process of cardiac regulation.

Now do the same thing but instead of deep breaths just take shallow ones. There’s almost no change in your pulse. When we get anxious or upset we often don’t notice how our breathing changes to short and shallow, which is probably the reason for the old adage of stopping and taking a deep breath before you do something.

When you breathe in your diaphragm flattens and your ribs lift, which increases your chest cavity and your lungs expand to fill it.The vagus nerve passes through your diaphragm and is stimulated by these changes in your breathing.This is reflected in healthy heart-rate variability, and is sometimes referred to as ‘vagal tone’.You can’t actually ‘tone’ your nerves – this isn’t a nerve-gym! – but in practice, healthy vagal tone means regular heart-rate variability. Overall, the effect of stimulating the vagus nerve by breathing deeply and regularly is that variability is regulated and cardiac activity slows back to normal more quickly than just waiting for the excess adrenaline to metabolise.This is the equivalent of applying the brake.

So, you can make this a practice. When you find you’ve been ruminating about some emotional upset (i.e., stressed), you must already have woken up. Take control of attention, get into the loft and let the negative emotion go, then add to that a return to deep, regular breathing. Don’t gasp or strain – breathing is a very natural process, so just breathe in a deep and relaxed way.

An important caveat: the first step in the CoC programme is to wake and stay awake as long as possible. This means keeping control of attention as long as possible, and controlling attention is the key to the breathing exercise as well. So, really give your attention to each in and out breath. Notice for example the cool sensation in your nose as you breathe in and the warm sensation as you breathe out. The breathing exercise will be compromised if you continue to allow your attention to be snatched away into rumination – what we all know from practising the four steps is that rumination tends to be quite persistent! The negative thoughts will most likely keep returning, but with consistent practice of taking the four Challenge of Change steps that will happen less and less.

Resilire et Robur

The full title of our programme is the Challenge of Change Resilience Training. We chose the word resilience to distinguish it clearly from the muddle-headed approach to stress exemplified by ‘stress-management’ training, which implies that stress is an inevitable part of life that has somehow to be managed. By contrast, our view is that since stress is the acquired habit of ruminating over emotional upsets, and that habits can be changed with practice, it is perfectly possible to be free of stress.

Resilience is now widely used to describe programmes aimed at helping people develop ways of behaving that will enhance their health and well-being, and it suggests the capacity to quickly bounce back from adversity. This use of the word echoes its etymology – it was derived from the Latin resilire, meaning to rebound or jump back, so a resilient substance when bent will return to its original form when pressure is released. One of the problems for us with using resilience is that for someone to bounce back they must first have been knocked down. The Challenge of Change is aimed at equipping you to not get knocked over in the first place, so that there isn’t an upset to recover from. This is what we mean by becoming detached and letting go, being able to keep things in perspective and not be drawn into the emotional turmoil of rumination.

The principle is well illustrated in the film ‘Bridge of Spies’, which is based on the true story of the trial of a Russian spy in America, Rudolf Abel, played in the film by Mark Rylance. The charges were serious enough to warrant the death penalty, but instead the trial ended in a prisoner swap (Abel was exchanged for Gary Powers, the U2 spy-plane pilot shot down over Russia). The film ends with Abel going to an equally uncertain fate in Russia, and the lawyer defending him, played by Tom Hanks, asks him (and on other occasions in the film) why he doesn’t seem bothered or anxious about his fate; in other words, why isn’t he ruminating? Each time, Rylance replies, ‘would it help?’

Many people would say, ‘no it doesn’t help, but…’ But what? Bother doesn’t help, period. In fact, what we’ve shown is that bother – rumination – not only makes you miserable, it might shorten your life by compromising your health. The reason why the story in the film is so useful is that the consequences are much more extreme than we ordinarily face. When were you last sentenced to death for not delivering a project on time? It could only have happened once!

One way to help clarify the process is to invoke one of our earlier blogs (Blog 38, ‘Oaks and Reeds’). In it we used the well-known story of the proud oak that disdains the scrawny reed until there’s a storm wind. The rigid oak snaps, the reed bends in the wind and then returns upright afterwards. The story can be seen as endorsing the resilience of the reed, but we need to take it a bit further by adding robustness. The origin of the word is the Latin robur, strength, which is part of the Latin name for the common oak (Quercus robur) – ‘oak’ effectively means robust. In the fable the rigidity of the oak is contrasted with the flexibility of the reed, but developing resilience as we present it in the Challenge of Change reconciles the two. Everything changes all the time. We need to be able to adapt to change when needed, but to have the inner strength to not just go along with change if it doesn’t seem right.

You might say that even the strongest oak will be felled if the storm is violent enough, which in our terms would mean crossing the threshold, from day-to-day demands to intense trauma. In another blog (Blog 41, Carried Over the Threshold) we acknowledged that even resilient people exposed to overwhelming emotional trauma may end up succumbing to post-traumatic stress. One of the key messages in the CoC programme is that rumination makes you a victim of stress and, more importantly, that you have a choice whether or not you ruminate, but once that threshold is crossed there is no longer a choice. People with post-traumatic stress really are suffering, and what they need to help them recover is intensive one-on-one work, often in combination with drug treatments. The important point, though, is that post-traumatic stress disorder is rare – only a small proportion of people exposed to trauma are subsequently diagnosed with it. What’s needed to deal with everyday demands is the resilience that CoC offers, which incorporates both strength and adaptability.