Navigating Crisis, Challenge, and Change (Part 2): 3 Steps to be Resilient in the Moment
By?Ali Shalfrooshan, Head of International Assessment R&D
In my second blog about navigating crisis, challenge, and change (read the first one here), I am focusing on how we can be resilient in the moment. As important as building and enhancing our resilience is, what we do in the moment when a crisis, a challenge, or a significant change strikes can be especially critical. Our ability to think clearly enables us to achieve the positive outcome we are looking for and maintain our well-being.
What is stress?
Since the beginning of the pandemic, discussions about stress and well-being at work have never been more open and transparent. The experience of lockdowns, economic uncertainty, isolation, home schooling, ill-health, and grief have all been significant sources of stress, with many of us trying our best to navigate these situations while dealing with increased responsibilities at work.
Stress was a term originally coined in physics in the 1800s. Since the 1930s, biologists have used the terminology to explain how potentially threatening external circumstances can elicit both a physiological and psychological reaction in us. Like any topic in science, there are many views of how stress is defined and experienced, but at a fundamental level, most believe it to be a dynamic process that is experienced when the environmental demands exceed the capacity of an individual.
Our personal experience of being stressed is typically not positive, characterized by a state of fear, concern, and anxiety. Despite this, stress is useful for our survival and is very helpful in the short term. Once we appraise a situation and identify a stressor in our environment, our central nervous system prepares our body to overcome challenge and change. The body releases adrenaline, which regulates many of our physiological processes and puts our minds and bodies in a focused state, enabling us to better navigate crisis, challenge, and change. Therefore, the core goal of stress is to help us perform better when we really need to.
However, extended periods of stress are ultimately a significant issue for both individuals and organizations, as it takes its toll and depletes our resources. On a physiological level, repetitive and prolonged stress leads to a range of negative health outcomes. On a psychological level, academic research has shown that stress is related to lower job performance in a range of contexts (banking, healthcare, hospitality, and education, to name a few academic research studies on the subject). Prolonged and excessive stress can lead to burnout, an issue that can have a long-term impact on our physical and psychological well-being.
Resilience, stress, and the survival state
Higher levels of resilience have been shown to be related to lower levels of experienced stress in a variety of contexts and situations. It has also been shown to act as a buffer against stress and to help moderate the relationship with performance. Therefore, our resilience can provide some answers around how we overcome excessive levels of stress and ensure that we can overcome challenges in the moment.
The challenge with needing to be resilient in the moment is we do not have the benefit of time. As a consequence, we cannot reflect and think as clearly, which are key techniques to help build our resilience. Typically, the stress response sends us in a “survival state.” This prepares us for action, but can limit our ability to deploy our executive functioning which is responsible for our more rationale thinking.
In this survival state we are more likely to advocate action that supports short-term success rather than long-term. This may include being more judgmental of yourself and others, more defensive, more rigid, and more likely to blame others. Therefore, our tendency to use more automatic thinking – rather than deliberate thinking – enables us to think more quickly, but also means we are more susceptible to using shortcuts and making decisions based on assumptions.
This type of automatic thinking has been very useful for ensuring our survival throughout history. However in the new paradigm of the workplace, these instincts may be less helpful, and in some cases may have a significantly negative impact on our well-being. Therefore, in addition to us needing to overcome a challenging situation in our environment, we also need to overcome some of our own physiological mechanics that can impact our ability to deliver a successful outcome.
What can help you in the moment?
Step 1: Understand the mechanics of stress and how it impacts your feelings
Understanding the mechanisms by which stress manifests itself can provide us greater awareness of how we process information and its impact on how we feel. Accessing this information has never been easier and there is a growing body of research showing the direct link between our physiology and our psychology.
Being mindful of when we are experiencing stress enables us to both acknowledge it and then proactively reduce it. Stress is easily observable (increased heart rate, faster breathing, and high blood pressure) and since it has a very direct impact on how we behave, it provides a very noticeable and important mechanism to understand.
Step 2: Employ the power of breathing
Modifying our breathing patterns have been shown to have a huge impact on our physiology and feelings. The use of “breathing instructions” has been commonly recommended to both individuals with ordinary levels of stress and patients with anxiety disorders. Typically breathing instructions are used as part of cognitive behavioral treatment, meditative approaches, or somatic therapies.
Fundamentally breathing is a very easily accessible tool that can help us regulate our emotions and how we are feeling in a very direct manner. Once we are consciously aware of feeling stressed, we can use deep breathing or other breathing techniques/methodologies to help us in moments of stress and enable us to think more clearly when needed.
Step 3: Utilize the right narrative
Typically, in moments of significant stress it is hard to reframe your thinking without extensive practice. However, in the moment, after you have become aware of the stress and used breathing to calm yourself down, the use of narratives can help you overcome the challenge. These can be unique to the individual and the situation that they are facing, or it can be as simple as reminding yourself of the following three statements:
There are many other ways we can navigate challenge and change in the moment and techniques that can maintain our well-being. However, I hope these three simple steps provide a very quick and intuitive means of helping us calm ourselves down and give us the clear thinking needed to overcome a crisis. By doing so you will be on your way to building not only long-term resilience, but can train yourself to be resilient in the moment as well.