Thinking about Failure & Risk the Healthy Way

Previously we discussed the powerful impact that just being a little more logical about stress at work could have. We then looked at the law of attraction and at how this makes you far more successful over time as people look at you as the person who is calm and in control.

But why is this? Why is it that most people aren’t better able to control their emotions and stay calm? Why is ‘panic’ our default response?

The answer is that our emotions have evolved in a much more dangerous time than we live in today. We are naturally risk averse because that is the attitude that would have given us the best chance of survival out in the African Savannah.

Let’s say you see an animal on the horizon and you don’t know if it’s a cat or a lion. In the wild, it really wouldn’t make sense to treat the unknown as a cat. Rather, it makes much more sense to assume the worst and to run.

But today that’s just not the case. Today, the ‘worst case scenario’ is really not that bad and is certainly not severe enough to put you in physical risk. The worst case scenario is your boss shouting at you, or a short period of financial hardship.

Risk aversion then is what gives you your advantage once you can get over it and it’s what will help you to seem the calmest and to make the ‘brave’ decisions. At the same time, it can be very beneficial to apply a little cognitive restructuring in order to change the way you perceive risks and challenges more generally. Think of these as opportunities to learn and to grow, to become stronger, and to give life some interest and excitement. When you look at them like this, you’ll be able to thrive rather than collapse under pressure.

Very often, it’s taking risks to ask someone out, invest in money, quit your job and start your own business, propose to your partner… all these things that give life meaning and color. And even if they go wrong, at least you tried.

And if you don’t learn to perceive challenges this way? Then the stress will never go away. There’s always an underlying sense of stress because that’s human nature.

The hedonic treadmill is a state of perpetual discomfort that we all tend to fall back to, even when times are good. It’s what is believed to keep us working and trying but an unfortunate side effect is that we are never quite content and never able to really try anything bold and brave. The REAL risk is that we stay frozen by fear, or that we stayed weighed down by all the admin of everyday life. The real danger is that you stay doing the same job that you don’t enjoy every single day and that you never experience the contentment, the challenge or the beauty that life has to offer. That’s what you should be stressed about and you should use that to push you towards your goals – even when life is hard and life is stressful. As the old expression goes: it’s easier to ask for forgiveness than permission. There’s never a good time. So just bite the bullet and go for it! 

Next week we'll talk about going after what you want.

"Dressing" for Success

Earlier we discussed how to become less stressed at a situation at work – by using thought challenging to break down the worst case scenarios and by coming up with contingencies. You’ve changed your perception of the situation by applying a little logic and in doing that, you’ve become much more calm and composed. We’ve also seen how we can change our response to new social situations, making ourselves incredibly calm and relaxed when talking to new people so that we come across as fearless.

This is where things start to change.

In the introduction, I mentioned very briefly the ‘law of attraction’. We saw how simply changing the way you feel about yourself would also change the way that others react to you. Let’s take a look at that in some more detail… 

What is the Law of Attraction?

It might seem strange but most of us will buy more expensive gifts for our wealthier friends. This is proven by statistics and surveys and it’s surprising seeing as you’d think we’d want to buy more expensive items for the people who couldn’t afford them on their own.

But the reality is that wealthier people have more things and have a more expensive quality of item on display. To get them something they’ll like and to get them something that will fit in, we need to spend more on them. That and they probably spend more on us than our poorer friends, so we feel obliged to reciprocate.

This is an incredibly simple example of the law of attraction working. When you have more nice things, you actually attract even more nice things to you.

The same happens with money – you have to spend to accumulate and simply having more money means you’ll make more investment.

But it also works with what you believe about yourself and how you act. If you believe you’re highly capable at your job, if you genuinely aren’t stressed by things going wrong and if you act accordingly; then you’ll quickly find yourself rising through the ranks and getting to the top. When you have belief in yourself, so do other people.

One reason for this is that confident people tend to look more confident thanks to the way they dress and act. If you are very confident you might walk with a straight back and chest puffed out and you’ll probably buy nicer clothes and spend more time on your hair.

Simply doing this will make you look like someone who is more important and who is more successful. Now other people will assume you are more important and more successful and unconsciously your bosses will be more inclined to want to give you more responsibility.

They’ll also feel more confident sending you out to meet clients, while your colleagues might start turning to you for advice – because you look like you know what you’re doing. It doesn’t take long until doing all these things will make you the ideal candidate for that raise or promotion and then you become more successful.

The same is true for a guy approaching a woman in a bar. If he doesn’t believe in himself and hasn’t trained himself to be calm and relaxed, then he’s going to be sweaty, nervous and unattractive as a result. If he comes over and he believes in himself though and can control his stress response, he’s going to seem fun, confident and therefore attractive.

On an unconscious level, he is sending a signal to the woman that he is a good genetic bet for her offspring – he must be or why would he be so confident around her? There’s obviously something about him that makes him confident, whether that is wealth, strength, health or intelligence. This makes him more attractive and the woman’s neurotransmitters do the rest. Hello oxytocin, hello testosterone! 

Change from the Outside In

We’ve focused a lot so far on how to change your mindset from the inside out but you can also change it from the outside in. How? By simply treating yourself a little better – dressing better, looking after your health and investing some cash in your own happiness and your own development – you can help yourself to feel more confident and look more confident to others.

There’s an old saying that you should ‘dress for the job you want’. Likewise, it they say that the amount you spend on your haircut directly correlates with the money an employer is likely to entrust you with.

So spend that bit of time in the morning to make sure you’re looking your best. Exercise. And take care of your health. Women – try wearing a bold shade of lipstick to show that you’re not shy and not content to shrink into the corner. Guys – don’t go into work without bothering to iron your shirt, it just sends a signal that you don’t respect yourself enough to bother – or that you’re so disorganized that you couldn’t find the time or the energy to do it.

Changing from the outside in is never enough on its own. But when you change both inside out and outside in, then you’ll find the change is even more astonishing.

Next week we'll talk about healthy failure and risk.

8 Quick Strategies to Optimize Your Sleep

I want you to get the best night’s sleep possible, and since at least fifty people have asked me, I decided to give you my best advice and put together these eight quick sleep strategies... 

1. SOAK IN SOME WARMTH 
Try taking a hot bath a couple of hours before bed.  The rapid cooling that happens when you leave the warmth of the water is like a memo to your body that it’s time for bed.  For a relaxing and detoxifying bath, fill the tub with hot water and add two cups Epsom salts, one cup baking soda, and 1/3 cup hydrogen peroxide.  Soak for twenty to thirty minutes.  You will sweat in the tub and lose toxins.  It is important to drink plenty of water while you soak.  Take a lukewarm to cool shower after getting out of the tub to rinse off the salts or you may itch. 

2. LOWER THE LIGHTS 
Melatonin is the chemical that is naturally released by your brain to help you sleep.  Encourage its release by dimming the lights as bedtime approaches. 

3. PREPARE FOR THE NEXT DAY 
Develop a nightly routine of laying out your clothes for the next day, pulling back the covers on your bed, and other simple tasks to signal your body that bedtime is near. 

4. WATCH YOUR CAFFEINE INTAKE 
To encourage better sleep, try setting the caffeinated beverages aside in the early afternoon. 

5. DITCH YOUR DEVICES 
Electronic screens may also be keeping your mind overstimulated and causing you to lose sleep.  Instead, try reading or listening to music to relax before bed.  I personally like to listen to podcasts. 

6. COVER YOUR TOOTSIES 
Believe it or not, keeping your feet warm has been linked to improved circulation and better sleep.  Slip on a pair of socks before climbing under the covers to get these benefits. 

7. RESIST THE SNACKING URGE 
Eating right before turning in can cause your digestive track to kick into overdrive.  Try and avoid snacking at least two hours before bedtime.  If you must have a snack, have a one two ounce high-protein snack such as a hard-boiled egg, some cheese, an ounce of meat or fish, or a handful of nuts.

8.  TRY USING A HERBAL SUPPLEMENT MIX 
If you experience poor sleep quality, try using an herbal mix designed for sleep support.  Look for herbal formulas that contain ingredients such as theanine, Jamaican Dogwood, wild lettuce, valerian, passionflower, and hops. Contact me for a specific product recommendation.  If you have trouble falling asleep, use a product called Sleep Tonight! 

Follow these eight quick and easy sleep strategies, and you’ll be rewarded with serene nights and more productive days! 

John is a Health Educator, Family & Consumer Sciences Educator, Master Educator, Certified Holistic Life Coach, and Fibromyalgia and Fatigue Wellness Coach.  He neither rejects conventional methods nor accepts alternative therapies uncritically. Instead, he has been taught that good solutions are based on good science; they are inquiry-driven. He is open to new modalities. Effective solutions that are natural, less invasive, and more cost-effective should be used whenever possible. Alongside the concepts creating a balanced and appropriate plan of action for optimizing peoples' health, he believes the broader concepts of health promotion and the prevention of illness are paramount.
For more information please visit his website at www.OHealthO.com.

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Mindfulness & CBT

By using the techniques from last week, you’ll find you’re able to increase your wakefulness, your mood and your general performance on a regular basis.

But now we come to the next trick – changing your mood instantly and switching from one mental state to another. What we really need to be able to do in order to perform at our very best is to switch to a stressed and motivated state when something requires our attention, to become angry in a controlled manner when we’re arguing and to switch off and relax from work when we get home in order to allow our brain to recover and to actually enjoy ourselves. Having an understanding of our neuroscience will help and so will having a good foundation of health. But now we’re going to take full control of our mental state and our attention.

It’s All About Perception

As mentioned earlier, our experiences are largely what control our emotions. Simply seeing a lion is enough to trigger a cascade of different changes in the brain that ultimately result in us becoming highly aroused both mentally and physically.

When tired, you could wake yourself by taking that cold shower or by seeing a lion!

When you’re drunk, it’s because you have excess GABA in your brain. But if your friend gets hurt, the rush of epinephrine and dopamine will be enough to actually make you feel sober and sharp again so that you can deal with the crisis.

But what if the lion wasn’t there and you only thought the lion was there? What if the lion was there and you didn’t see it?

Ultimately, it is not the actual lion that triggers the response but rather your perception of that lion and your beliefs about the lion. Put it another way: if you were to see a lion and you didn’t know what a lion was, then you probably wouldn’t have the same fight or flight response – you might even think it looked cute and get an oxytocin release instead!

It’s your understanding of the situation that impacts on the way you react to it and this in turn changes the way you feel and the way you behave. And this is actually what happens all the time throughout our lives to a lesser extent. This is why some people are calm and relaxed all the time (we call them ‘laid back’) while other people are constantly stressed and anxious.

Let’s imagine you’re in your office and you have a very bad deadline that you don’t think you can meet. Some of you might now feel incredibly stressed and thus experience that fight or flight response. But others among you might not have that response at all and you may instead find you’re able to stay very calm and collected.

There’s of course an ideal middle ground here – being too stressed is bad for your health and can actually cause you to become less productive in some cases (the response is sometimes actually referred to as the fight, flight or freeze response!) while being too relaxed as mentioned can cause you to end up not actually doing anything about the situation.

The simple fact of the matter is that in these situations, some people see a lion and some people see a cat. The scenario is the precise same but their reaction to that situation can be very different. This is based on your life experiences, diet, health and personality – but you can take control of it once you know how.

The Idea Behind CBT

CBT is ‘cognitive behavioral therapy’, which in turn is a type of psychotherapeutic intervention that is based almost entirely around the concepts we’ve just discussed. This asserts that our behavior is a result of our associations (this is behaviorism) and of our thought processes that actually allow us to reinforce an idea in our heads.

So when faced with a stressful situation, you will be stressed partly because of the beliefs and associations you hold regarding that situation. At the same time, you’ll then start playing out what you expect to happen in your head and when this happens, areas of the brain fire almost as though that thing were really happening. You might imagine getting fired, having your house repossessed, or being injured depending on the scenario.

This then causes the release of even more stress hormones, just as though you were really in those situations and you can end up anxious, aroused and potentially less effective. This is where a lot of phobias come from but it’s also what can make us less self-confident, less likely to take positive risks and generally less successful than we otherwise could be.

So CBT aims to change this, partly by creating new associations and partly by changing the way you think and changing what you’re visualizing. There’s more to it than that of course but this is the central concept and the tools used to this end are collectively referred to as ‘cognitive restructuring’.

So let’s say that you want to be calmer at work, or you want to overcome a fear of heights. How might you do that using CBT?

The first step would be to become more aware of your existing thoughts, beliefs and emotions. You can do this in a number of ways. One common tool is journaling, whereby you keep a journal of your thoughts, feelings and emotions pertaining to the thing that frightens you. This way, you can really deconstruct the thought process that is leading to your fear.

Another option is to use mindfulness. This is a form of meditation that doesn’t focus on making your mind blank but instead focuses on letting your mind become detached while you watch the contents of your thoughts. This process in itself is very calming and can help to prevent a fight or flight response.

Once you have the thoughts that make you stressed though – or you’re aware of what you’re visualizing – you can then go about deconstructing them. For example, if you’re afraid of public speaking then this might mean that you picture yourself stuttering and being laughed at. If you’re afraid of heights, you might think things like ‘I’m going to fall’.

What you don’t realize is that simply thinking these things is strengthening those neural connections and coding the experience as ‘bad’ and ‘dangerous’ making the response stronger in future.

So now you’re going to unravel those beliefs and try to remove them. One way to do this is with ‘thought challenging’. Thought challenging essentially means that you’re going to really analyze your belief and decide if it might actually be true or not. So if you’re afraid of being laughed at on stage, you’re going to think about how likely people really are to laugh at you and whether or not this is something that you would do in their position. The reality? Most people are kind enough and mature enough to just politely wait for you to get it back together. If anything, they’ll probably only sympathize.

You can also help this process by coming up with contingency plans. In other words, if you do stutter, what can you do to make it less devastating? Probably just make a joke of it to ease tension!

Also: do you really care if these strangers who you’ll never see again think any less of you?

Another scenario might be low level anxiety that you’re holding about your job because you’re afraid of being fired. Let’s say you made a big mistake on a report that won’t come to light for two weeks – now you’re worried you’ll be severely reprimanded.

So let’s address this situation logically with thought challenging: is your boss really that harsh and unfair? Aren’t there laws that would protect you? Can’t you explain that it’s an honest mistake? Could you blame it on your tiredness or stress at the time? If you really did get fired, wouldn’t you be able to land back on your feet? Now picture the way it’s much more likely to go and let that sink in. Suddenly, it’s not so scary.

In both these situations you have taken that mental lion and turned it into a small kitten! You’ve neutered the dragon and you can thus remain much calmer thanks to your new perception of the situation. And the more you practice this, the more you’ll find you start to adopt it and it starts to become a part of who you are. Suddenly, you’ll be able to stay calm and collected during all kinds of crises at work and eventually people will start to turn to you for advice whenever something goes wrong!

Another tool is even more powerful than this and it’s called ‘hypothesis testing’. The problem is, that in order for you to really be able to overcome a fear or phobia, you have to really believe what you’re thinking and visualizing. It’s not enough to just keep saying that it’s a cat and not a lion – you have to really believe it right in your heart.

So the next logical question at this point, is how you can convince yourself of your new thoughts and beliefs. And one way to do that is to use hypothesis testing – simply proving to yourself that your old beliefs were wrong and your new ones are right.

In the case of a person afraid of public speaking, such as myself (wrote about it in 2013), what would that mean? It would mean actually making a mistake in public on person – or even standing there not saying anything for a while. You’re facing your worst case scenario, trialing the worst outcome and hopefully proving to yourself that there’s actually nothing to be afraid of. In doing this, you should find that no one laughs and people just wait politely. At this point, you now know that your fears were unfounded and you will find they bother you much less in future.

This is also a little like re-association or exposure therapy. By consistently exposing yourself to the situation you used to be afraid of, you can create new associations and remove those old negative ones. You can even eventually become desensitized as you learn that there’s nothing to be afraid of. A paratrooper's heart rate can remain at 60bpm throughout the entire jump. Why? Because he’s done it hundreds of times before and his body knew that this was nothing to be afraid of.

You can work your way up to this if you’re unsure but just exposing yourself to these dangerous situations will eventually be enough to help you overcome an unwanted physiological response.

One of the most powerful and effective uses for this? Becoming socially bulletproof; this is what I'm working on. Almost all of us have some kind of natural anxiety when talking to strangers and this causes us to have a minor stress response. As mentioned, this then makes us appear to lack confidence and sends the signal that we are the inferior party in the interaction – again, it all dates back to our evolution.

But if you keep exposing yourself to new social situations and even make them purposefully awkward, then eventually you can completely get rid of any anxiety you previously felt at all. Try going to a shop (not one near you) and ordering your items in a funny accent. You’ll find they politely nod and give you your things without saying anything. Try chatting to people you don’t know on the street – even picking up the phone a bit more and calling people by typing in random numbers. The more you do this, the more accustomed you’ll become to speaking with strangers and the less of a stress response you’ll have in future. By the end, you’ll find that you’re perfectly able to speak with complete, calm confidence in almost every situation!

Has anyone done a challenge for being purposefully awkward?

 Next week we'll talk about "dressing" ourselves for success.

Improving Your Mental Health with Healthy Eating and Sleep

It’s not just our thoughts that lead to changes. Just as important is our biology and our lifestyle and, as I've mentioned before, our bodies and minds exist in a tightly linked cycle of activity.

For instance, when you eat this results in an increase in serotonin. Why? Because foods – especially carbs – contain an amino acid called tryptophan. When blood sugar increases, the body responds by releasing insulin which triggers the absorption of glucose from the blood to be used for activity or stored as fat. But tryptophan does not get absorbed and as such, it remains in the bloodstream. This then gets circulated to the brain, where it is converted into serotonin – that’s because tryptophan is a precursor (building block) for serotonin. This is why your mood tends to improve when you’ve eaten. And this then results in the release of ghrelin to signal that you’re getting fuller and to prevent you from over eating.

Later on, that serotonin converts into melatonin – the sleep hormone. This is why everyone falls asleep after Christmas dinner! That melatonin reduces activity in the brain and this then triggers the release of other inhibitory neurotransmitters like GABA.

Did you know that darkness also triggers the release of melatonin?

And meanwhile, the longer you stay awake, the more adenosine (another inhibitory transmitter) builds up in the brain. This is partly what gives us ‘brain fog’ after a long hard day because it is a by-product of the energy process used in brain cells.

What all this means, is that after a long day and big meal, you are sure to start getting sleepy at the end of the day and find it harder to wake up and do something productive. That’s not you being lazy or disinterested, that’s you being at the whim of your biology.

Now let’s say that we want to wake ourselves back up. What do we do? One simple option is to go outside or shine a bright light – sunlight triggers the release of cortisol, which along with nitric oxide will help to wake us up. This is why we should avoid looking at phone screens when we’re getting ready for bed.

Or how about jumping in a cold shower? This stimulates the release of epinephrine, norepinephrine and testosterone – waking you up and making you much more focussed. It’s the adrenaline that causes the hairs to stand up on your body.

Loud noises can create enough shock to wake you up and so too can hunger. When we’re hungry, we have low serotonin in our brains which in turn increases the cortisol – stress hormone – ratio. That’s why we get anxious when we’re hungry and it’s why some people also get ‘hangry’.

There are all kinds of other interactions like this that can have a huge effect too. For instance, as pain is linked with anger, this explains why we’re cranky when we have aches and pains. It also explains why if you keep flicking your dog’s ear, it will eventually turn around and bite you…

Making Use of Your Biology

So what can we take from all this?

For starters, it’s useful to recognize the role of your natural ebbs and flows and your biology. In other words, try not to get too alarmed if you find yourself feeling very stressed or very tired. Likewise, try not to let anger cloud your judgement. Often we will shout at our loved ones when we’re angry or stressed partly because our perception of events has changed and had a negative slant. We might even find ourselves thinking things like ‘all they do is take advantage of me’. Remember: that’s angry you. That may well simply be the result of cortisol, of testosterone or of all three. Try not to put stock in what you’re thinking.

This also means you can ‘fix’ your mental state in all manner of ways.

You can wake yourself up with a cold shower and some blue light (blue light being the term used to describe light with the same wavelength as the sun). If you’re in a bad mood, then you should try to increase serotonin which you can do with food – or more sensibly by increasing vitamin C. Something else that triggers the release of serotonin is exercise! This is what causes what we know as the ‘runners’ high’.

How do you like to wake yourself up or improve your mood?

If you want to perform at your very best, then use this information to try and improve your sleep. This will help you to wake up with your brain feeling far more refreshed and with much less ‘brain fog’ slowing you down and making you groggy.

Another tip is to sync your routine to these natural rhythms. If you’re going to feel tired and content after a meal, then it’s important to make sure that you’ve already done everything you want to do before you sit down to eat. Want to be more productive in the evenings? Shift dinner back half an hour! Likewise, recognize that you’re less likely to be productive straight after you’ve eaten at lunch. Conversely, if you’re going to try and think creatively – do it when you’re relaxed and calm.

Combating Stress

Also useful to know is that you can use your body to calm stress and event eliminate what would otherwise be a panic attack. That’s because our sympathetic nervous system – which controls our fight or flight response (as well as our opposite ‘rest and digest response’) – is tightly linked with breathing and heart rate. When you breathe quickly, it makes you more stressed and increases your heart rate.

Conversely though, if you breathe more deeply and more heavily, this helps to encourage a much calmer response and puts you more in the rest and digest state. Breathing deeply is thus one of the best ways to calm yourself down and one of the best ways to prevent serious anxiety.

How to Upgrade Your Mental Energy

What’s more important of all though, is that you ensure you have the right diet and that you are in good shape. This will transform the performance of your brain by drastically increasing the ability to create neurotransmitters as needed and by increasing the amount of energy your brain receives.

One way to do this is to consider using some form of multivitamin tablet. This should contain vitamins like B12 and B6, which are used to supply the brain with energy as well as to help create a large number of neurotransmitters. Also used in the creation of many neurotransmitters and hormones are vitamin D, vitamin C, magnesium, zinc and more. If you make sure you are getting these in your diet, then you will find it easier to switch from being highly focused to being relaxed and creative and you will find your brain lasts longer before getting tired. Also particularly important is choline, which is a precursor to acetylcholine found in eggs – this can help improve your sensory perception, your alertness and your memory all at the same time! Amino acids found in protein are also critical for a wide range of neurotransmitters.

What is your favorite multivitamin?

Other nutrients that are very important are those that improve the energy and function of the brain. Any vasodilators for instance, such as garlic, will help to get more blood and more oxygen to the brain helping you to stay alert for longer. Creatine is a bodybuilding supplement also found in red meats and this is great for reducing adenosine and also increasing mental energy – studies show that this alone can be enough to boost IQ! Omega 3 fatty acid improves cell membrane permeability, which means that neurons are better able to communicate with one another. Exercising regularly will help you to create more neural connections in your brain, increasing your ability to learn via heightened plasticity (and brain derived neurotrophic factor). This will also increase your body’s energy efficiency and help you to experience less stress.

What supplements do you take?

In short, it is highly important to eat a nutrient dense diet and to train hard if you want to perform at your mental best. Get more nutrients and substance, avoid junk food and ‘empty calories’ (which spike the blood sugar and throw our entire system out of whack), sleep well, and exercise. As you do this, your brain will instantly start to become hardier, more efficient and less groggy on the whole. And your performance and productivity will also grow to reflect that. 

Next week we'll look at using mindfulness and cognitive behavior therapy for improving your mindset.