How Stress Management Boosts Your Creativity and Innovation

I'm happy to share with you thought-provoking ideas, tips, research, and trends that you may find helpful in your personal, professional, and future lives; they are in a way related to innovation, human development, organizational development, and disruption of people and the mind.

Greetings and reflect on today to build the future!

According to the American Psychological Association (APA), stress affects every system in the body, including the musculoskeletal, respiratory, cardiovascular, endocrine, gastrointestinal, nervous, and reproductive systems.

Now when you think about it from a scientific perspective, just think about years ago we had hundreds of studies on the psychological predictors of disease and the breakdown of the body from stress to cortisol and the like; however, we had no studies of the mind-health benefits of stress. Although it is very important to know how to manage stress, today we do not have systematic scientific studies on how stress management enhances your creativity and innovation. Those are just basic scientific questions about human nature that we are going to partially cover in this article.

While we have learned a lot as a discipline in scientific psychology about how to get people's results on a scale of one to five (hypothetical scale - to identify if they feel stressed); however, how can we conclude that this stress is good or bad? or how to take that bad stress to good? these are essential questions to be sought in psychological science.

From here I share some of the research that I am doing about the disruption of the mind for my book "Disruptive Mind....." that will be launched at the beginning of 2024.

A simple way to understand mental stress is to understand the stress we generate in our muscles every time we go to the gym, and that after an intense workout, cortisol (stress hormone) acts at the muscle level, decreasing the amount of glucose. captured by part of the muscle If I train too much, elevated levels of cortisol are generated, which causes the breakdown of muscle tissue and possibly tears or injuries. In the same way, stress acts on our brain by secreting cortisol, which, at high levels (chronic stress), can cause dysregulation in our systems, with the possibility of a blood vessel breaking (hemorrhagic stroke) or even a stroke. Ischemic (ACV) What we have learned in the gym is that the problem is not stress, but not having adequate rest for muscle recovery.

Stress is our friend

Stress in our system is a state of alert that lets us know that we have reached our limits, the maximum of our capacities, either due to overexertion in the presence of mental fatigue or mental exhaustion; letting us know that we are in the peripheries of our mind. Now, this one needs to add a main ingredient and that is that it comes with/without negative or positive emotions. That is where we can differentiate good stress and bad stress. In this article I will focus on good stress which enhances creativity and innovation; However, I leave you this link from the American Psychological Association (APA), where it mentions in detail the serious effects caused by bad stress. Read all article APA, Stress.

Daniel Goleman in his masterclass at WOBI told us about the state of Flow and Frazzle, the impact of stress activation on performance. (see image 1). This zone of optimal performance has been called a state of neural harmony in which disparate areas of the brain are in sync, working together. This is also seen as a state of peak cognitive efficiency. Flowing allows you to use whatever talents you may have at max levels. Thanks to Damasio's study and Goleman's interpretation of emotional intelligence, he tells us that: "If you are a child who is preoccupied with worry, anger, anguish, anxiety or whatever it is that causes you stress, you will have a diminished ability to pay attention to what the teacher is saying to you. But if you can handle those emotional upheavals, your working memory, the attention span to capture information, increases. And social-emotional learning (SEL) gives you teaches how to handle these disruptive feelings." And of course, if you're an adult at work, this emotional intelligence skill set will enable you to perform better.

Stress management

One of the negative impacts that poor stress management has on each of you is the loss of creativity and innovation capabilities. We diminish the capacities of association, polarization, to evoke previously acquired knowledge, among other things; which are of vital importance to get closer to becoming an innovator with a disruptive mindset, that person who perceives the real world with greater capacity than others and who, in turn, has the ability to solve problems in a very creative way.

Richard Boyatzis and Annie McKee in their book Resonat Leadership, mention that: "a clue to why leaders lose effectiveness, a phenomenon we call power stress: the unique brand of stress that is simply part of being a leader, especially today. For today's leaders, choices are rarely crystal clear, decision-making is incredibly complex, and we must influence others through ambiguous authority.In recent years, we have seen leaders experience power stress on a day-to-day basis. , fighting fire after fire and then getting up off the ground each night." In the same way, they recommend the importance of managing stress through mindfulness, hope, compassion, among others. See image 4.

See complementary article here: Renewing and Sustaining Leadership

On the other hand, as we have already mentioned, the problem is not stress but the lack of recovery through rest. Today we know through neuroscience the benefits of sleep and its impact on strengthening the neural structure and cell regeneration among others. Tal Ben-Shahar proposes 3 Multilevels of stress recovery. Micro, based on a break of minutes and hours which can be associated with breaks between activities, every 20 minutes rest 5 minutes or every hour rest 10 minutes; Mezzo, rest of nights and days associated with sleep; Macro, of weeks or months associated with the holidays. One of the things that he mentions to us is the importance that during the macro break we should explore new places that we do not know, travel, green areas, nature and recovery does not count if you stay at home. In the same way, Jim Loehr and Tony Schwartz, in their book The Power of Full Engagement, mention to us: "The same principle applies to daily life. Too much energy expended, with insufficient rest and recovery, leads to problems. Too much rest, without expending enough energy, also generates problems. Total participation depends on the balance or oscillation between rest and recovery, recovery and rest. It is not surprising. The entire universe is rhythmic and oscillating: sunrise, sunset, high tide, low tide, full moon, new moon. The heartbeat of the heart is rhythmic. Even sleep is rhythmic." What he proposes to us is to seek emotional recovery, as well as that of physical training.

Boost your creativity and innovation

As we have already commented before, the stress in our system is a state of alert that lets us know that we have reached the limit, the maximum of our capacities; letting us know that we are on the peripheries of our mind.

S-curve jump

Many of you find yourself at your limits for long periods, because you are constantly learning, whether it is working, studying an academic degree, studying courses to expand your skills and knowledge, experiencing new things, seeking to be productive, among others. The search for the polarization and association of our previous knowledge for the development of creativity and innovation places us in a place far from the comfort zone, in a zone of constant and motivated risk. The constant practice of this, added to the acquisition of new information through perception and the influence of our environment, originate new limits or expansion, generating changes in neural structures or forming new connections in the brain, taking a leap in the S curve. See image 5.

Human disruption zone

If I asked each of you to give me 15 solution ideas to minimize obesity in children, surely many or all of you will say within your first 10 ideas, avoid a sedentary lifestyle, increase activity, eat healthy, create healthy habits in parents, eat fruits, vegetables and high fibers, avoid sweets and soft drinks, among others. These ideas have been created with our prior knowledge.

We are going to write the first 15 ideas quickly, but as we get to idea 15, surely our previous knowledge is running out, we are running out of ideas, we seek to polarize and associate, this is where we find ourselves at the limits of the "Core Zone ", See image 6. If I asked you for 15 additional ideas to complete 30 ideas, surely idea 20 onwards will take days or weeks, since it will depend on the new information that we will provide to our brain through our contact with the environment, while we bathe, drive or walk, our perception begins to work generating inputs and then outputs with new ideas that arrive at any time. This also happens if we deepen our search on the internet. This is where we get to the zone of disruption. It is in this area where we generate innovation. See image 6.

"Awakening our creativity requires a process of constant development of the imagination, the continuous practice of this process is the beginning of innovation."

The leaders of many organizations find themselves in trouble when having to make the decision to launch a new product to the market. You are presented with different innovative product options so that one of them can be launched on the market. As we have mentioned before, in the current era we find ourselves under stress, mental exhaustion and accompanying a series of emotions that can include anxiety or some negative emotions as an effect of non-chronic and controlled stress that we have. This is where stress management plays an important role in making a decision in the disruptive zone (image 6) and rationally choosing the product that best impacts the market, even though it is beyond our prior knowledge and we have less control over it. However, if our decision is subjected to emotions leading us to choose the product of which we have greater knowledge, due to a mental stimulus that makes this partial knowledge synonymous with I am in a state where I am in control, we are making the decision in the emotional zone (image 6). It is in this emotional zone where the products and services that are launched on the market fail. You have to look at the figures, 75% of the products and services that have been launched on the market during the last 5 decades have reached their second year and have failed. (Source: HBR, C. Christensen)

To be continued part 2......

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