Why Meditation Helps Performance

You're here because you have already achieved some outer success and reached your current executive leadership position. But growth doesn't have to stop here. There is a thrill and satisfaction in challenging yourself, stretching and seeing how much you can achieve. Have an impact and make a contribution.

The talents, skills and tools that have got you to this point will not necessarily take you further. Or the approaches you've used to achieve this success may have been expensive in terms of time, energy, stress and effect on your relationships. You need new or upgraded power tools to make sure you can sustain or advance your position more easily.

The High-Performance Executive Newsletter introduces these tools, so that you can level up, as video-gamers would say. It draws on many areas of solid research into high-performance in business, including neuroscience, psychology, physiology, trauma therapy and flow-state study.

The three essential areas for high performance are neuro-regulation (to get and stay calm), clearing the negative self-talk and the beliefs that create them (including imposter syndrome), and creating new success habits.

This week we're looking at meditation and neuro-regulation.

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Meditation as a Performance Power Tool

In 1986, my mother was worried that I’d joined a cult.

Less dramatically, I’d been on a weekend course to learn meditation, advertised as a tool to reduce stress.?

Back in those olden times, meditation was firmly in the realm of the weird, hippy or cultish here in the UK.

These days meditation has moved on, and it has become a power tool for peak performance used by CEOs and executives throughout the world.

There are meditation courses galore, teachers everywhere, and of course, there’s an app for that.

What happened to convince people that meditating is a seriously good idea?

Research.

Thousands of studies on the effects of meditation on the physical body looked at heart rate, blood pressure, respiration, relaxation.

More studies about its impact on the brain using EEG and fMRI scans.

Long term studies of meditators vs non-meditators.

And even more studies on the effects of chronic stress on the body.

Results published and popularised in many books, all telling us that meditation is good for you.

In 2012 the ESADE Business School in Spain published a study on ‘neuro-regulation’ – the ability to regulate your nervous system so that you stay calm under stress.

ESADE determined that the most effective, transformational leaders are those who have the best?neuro-regulation.

And so meditation is now officially ‘in.’

Why is meditation effective?

Meditation is effective in three areas simultaneously - your body, your mind and your nervous system.

Simply sitting quietly in a calm space starts to relax your body. The quiet space reduces the amount of information that your brain needs to monitor - noises, people talking, your own movement and changes in the environment.

When such external stimulus is high, then your brain works hard to filter from all this input what is important and what is potentially dangerous. Sitting still in an unchanging place reduces the input and the unconscious reactions to it and allows your brain to relax a little.

Deliberately not thinking about anything is calming too.

There are no thoughts to act upon, no urgency, no demands.

Your thoughts are also an input for your brain's information processing. So again, less input, less possibility of a thought triggering fear and needing a response.

Both calming the body and calming the mind work to calm the nervous system.

Your Nervous System

In your brain, your amygdala filters all information coming into the brain from your external senses, internal sensing and your thoughts.

The amygdala looks out for dangers, just like a virus checker scans your email for potential threats.

When the amygdala detects a threat it triggers your nervous system into ‘emergency mode’ and your nervous system can trip into a fight, flight or freeze state.

This is called an amygdala hijack because this emergency mode prepares your body to respond to life-threatening dangers by taking over your nervous system.

When this happens, the blood flow in your muscles, digestive system and brain change to give you the ability to respond to the threat and survive.

It’s an automatic, ancient, primal reaction to a perceived threat. It’s the body doing exactly the right thing in response to a perceived threat.

When your nervous system is triggered, the blood flow in the brain changes and is reduced in the pre-frontal cortex - the strategic thinking and planning area of the brain. This change in blood flow reduces your capacity for good decision making, and your IQ temporarily drops by 13 points.

This means that you need to stay calm and think clearly if you want to perform at your best. And this explains why neuro-regulation is such an essential skill for top business leaders.

The problem for us modern humans is that the amygdala determines what is a threat - automatically and without your awareness or agreement.

Your Amygdala

Your amygdala learns through a combination of experience and emotion. If you have an experience that creates pain (physical or emotional) it flags that situation as a potential threat to your survival.

When it encounters a similar situation another time, your amygdala will trigger your nervous system into the fight/flight/freeze state.

This 'emotion-memory' combination forms part of your brain's model of the world. That is, it is the beliefs that we act upon without necessarily being aware of them.

For example, the belief in your conditional worth is stored in the amygdala as an identified threat. In ancient, tribal society to be found unworthy of care and unacceptable could lead to rejection and expulsion from the tribe. Almost certainly a death sentence, according to your amygdala.

This means that when you feel that you're not good enough your amygdala can see that as a threat to your survival and trip your nervous system into fight/flight/freeze states.

Chronic Stress

Over time, the repetitive triggering of your nervous system creates chronic worry, stress, anxiety and overwhelm.

Stress is cumulative, as we know from many more research studies.

So meditation can bleed off some of the stress by bringing your nervous system back to a calm state. Regular meditation gives you the means to de-stress and reset the accumulation of stress.

It can help, which is why it’s so popular with people in high-pressure positions. Especially as being calm means that you have access to your full mental capabilities - that extra 13 points of IQ.

Meditation is also healthier than other coping mechanisms used to relax, such as alcohol and smoking.

You can meditate daily, and a typical recommendation is to meditate for 20 minutes twice a day.

Although meditation makes your nervous system less reactive through regular soothing, it does not change the beliefs that trigger the amygdala in the first place (unless you’re a Buddha, but that’s another discussion).

Happily, modern neuroscience research has pointed the way for an effective process to change beliefs.

Once that happens, your calm comes from the amygdala not being triggered.

It’s a permanent change that doesn’t need daily upkeep.

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Of course, once you’ve changed that belief you can still do meditation if you want to.

It is still a power tool.

But now you're using it to deepen the calm and improve your neuro-regulation further, rather than to try and dampen the impact of unhelpful beliefs.

I certainly enjoy it, even if my mother still thinks it’s a bit weird!

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What I’ve loved this week:

Headspace Meditation App

The Headspace App is one of several meditation apps available. It takes you through many kinds of calming, breathing and meditation exercises.

The brain responds to a calm soothing voice and it can take you from a triggered nervous system state to a calm state.

So meditation guided by a soothing voice can be excellent.

Headspace has short and easy guided meditations and calming exercises. Well worth checking out, especially if you've tried and struggled with meditating in the past.

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An action step you can do today…

Shake It Out

Standard meditation practices of releasing or ignoring thoughts, or focusing on one object can be hard to do when your nervous system is already activated into a fight/flight/freeze state.

Your body feels jumpy or weighed down and it is very hard to concentrate. You're not calm enough to get calm!

Here is one great practice before you meditate to help move the stress hormones out of your bloodstream.

Stand up and vigorously shake your hands and arms like you’re flicking off sticky mud.

Do this for 30 seconds, and then shake out each leg in turn in the same way.

After 30 seconds, shake your back like a dog shakes off water.

Finally back to shaking your arms for another 30 seconds.

Slow your breathing by breathing deeply.?Do a big stretch and then sit down to meditate.

Notice how quickly you become calmer or how much easier it is to meditate.

If this improves your meditation, then use this power tool every time you meditate.

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We'll cover more on meditation and neuro-regulation in future issues.

Do subscribe and share!

I’m Dr Tara Halliday, Imposter Syndrome Specialist.

I’ve been a holistic therapist and high-performance coach for over 21 years.

I'm the creator of the Inner Success for Execs programme - the fastest and best solution to imposter syndrome.

My book, Unmasking: The Coach’s Guide to Imposter Syndrome was an Amazon #1 bestseller in 2018.

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Check out the Inner Success for Execs programme for fast 'up levelling' of your internal leadership tools.

https://www.completesuccess.co.uk

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Have an excellent, refreshing and recharging weekend!

Tara

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