Why stress is bad for your health, and how sleep can help. W/ Dr. Helena Boschi

Dr. Helena Boschi is a Pshychologist and a Neuroscience expert with a remarkable communication ability that helps her audience understand, and put into practice, the latest findings of Neuroscience, a relatively new science, which investigates the brain both as an organ, and as a mind.

During the interview she gave me for LUX & TECH, the Podcast, she has shared various gold nuggets related to decision making, influence, neuroscience in business, and the importance of keeping a healthy brain.

In the extract that follows, you can read her take on stress management and sleep. A life changing reading.....

"Stress is something that we again were designed for, but we're designed for acute stress, we're designed for short term bursts of stress and this is our fight/flight response that bursts into action to give us the strength to fight something that's in our world, or to run away from it.

And we also have another stress pathway, which releases cortisol. So our fight /flight response releases adrenaline and cortisol is released from another part of the adrenal, the adrenal gland, which sits on top of the kidney and these two work together. So courtisol always had a really bad press, but it's really important for us because it helps to dumb down and dampen the immune system., because if we fire our immune system very quickly, too much, it becomes toxic to us. So cortisol is like a hydrocortisone cream, it's anti-inflammatory. So these two adrenaline and cortisol work to keep us going, but they're designed for acute real stress. What they are not designed to do is activate for the modern world all the time, social, modern, anticipated stress.

Even if it's not real, the brain will respond as if it's a real stressor, and so this is being switched on all the time.

Now, adrenaline isn't so bad because it leaves us quickly, but cortisol stays and the effects are longer lasting and over time cortisol builds up and this is very, very dangerous for us.

So there's long term stress that's being switched on all the time, but for something that's not even there, you know, we're imagining what might happen is far more stressful than what did happen. So an uncertain future is horrible for us. This is something that's happening to us at the moment. So we need to be able to release the chemicals.

Physical exercise is critical right now, more critical than ever, getting outside into nature. We need to move and if we don't move, we don't release these chemicals and we need to feel we've played an active role in our survival. So, this is something that we have to remember.

Sleep is probably the number one and most important thing in our life and if we don't focus on getting good quality sleep, everything else is impaired. So for example, if were not sleeping but we're exercising, it's fake exercise, if we're not sleeping but we're eating good food, it's fake nutrition. We've got to sleep, and we need about seven to nine hours a night because what happens during sleep is we have non-Ram, where we are accessing slow wave sleep, which is where our tissues repair themselves physically it's critical sleep, but every 90 minutes we go into rapid eye movement REM sleep and over the course of our sleep, this REM sleep lengthens. and this is why people are having locked down dreams at the moment because they're allowing their systems to sleep longer.

So we start off with REM sleep for of around 10 to 15 minutes, then we move on, it can be up to an hour later, to a sleep cycle. This is really important and REM is critical because it helps us focus on our thoughts, it helps to compartmentalize things and it also helps to remove painful memories.

So, if we're managing stress, sleep is really, really critical. And the other thing about sleep is we squeeze out the toxins, this is called our glymphatic nervous system, the glyal cells in the brain squeeze out the toxins that have built up during the day, the proteins that we need to get rid of.

And if we don't get rid of them, they can really cause us problems"

The full interview, is available below:

• ITUNES: https://cutt.ly/PgWoq8i
• GOOGLE PODCAST: https://cutt.ly/TgWoyM4
• SPOTIFY: https://cutt.ly/JgWi7sX
• BUZZSPROUT: https://cutt.ly/jgWi2Jl

Dr. Helena Boschi is a psychologist who focuses on applied neuroscience in the work place. Her particular areas of interest include the brain and behaviour, our emotional and rational neural networks and how to improve our cognitive abilities in order to get the best out of our own and others’ brainpower. Helena has also researched the influence of cognitive biases and corporate psychopathy across different organisations. Recently, she has investigated the impact of chronic, work-induced stress on brain function, and has just published a book called Why We Do What We Do. Helena has spent the last 25 years working closely with businesses to define and design new initiatives, particularly in the areas of organisational behaviour, leadership and team development, intercultural communication, and organisational change. Helena has held senior talent management and organisation development positions within international companies and now works predominantly in the telecommunications, pharmaceutical, and finance industries. Helena has delivered and coordinated tailored development in different countries in line with the requisite capabilities and business requirements and created a reliable process for building a talent pipeline. Helena believes in creating an energised and participative learning environment whilst at the same time treating people with sensitivity and respect. Helena has lived and worked in Switzerland and the US and now works extensively across the Middle East, Europe, US, Africa, and Asia. She works at all levels within organisations and also coaches senior executives. With a deep commitment to ongoing research in current organisational and psychological trends, Helena possesses keen insight into the best practices in learning, communication, and leadership. A member of the British Psychological Society, she brings a scientific edge to the work she delivers and continues to apply the latest developments in the fields of psychology, neuroscience, and behaviour to the organisational context

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