In this third and last part on the series on stress resilience for leaders, you’ll learn 8 best practices to beat stress—or at least deal with it more productively. Previous posts have introduced the concept of stress resilience and the three components of stress resilience.
Dr. Henry Thompson, author of The Stress Effect, calls the first seven of these best practices your ARSENAL™ against stress. Along with meditation, the eight best practice, each in its own way has been proven to increase stress management capacity, developing cognitive resilience, and building stress resilient emotional intelligence.
Now, here’s the important thing to remember as a leader: there are going to be times where the stress you are experiencing is out of your control. It could be externally driven or it could be something internally driven. It during these times where you need to draw on your stress resilience habits to get your through. That’s exactly why you need to start now to build your stress resilience. So let’s go ahead and examine the 8 best practices in further detail.
The 8 Best Practices for Increasing Your Stress Resilience
1. Awareness. Awareness is your ability to monitor and collect feedback on how stress is affecting you at any given time. It is the foundational practice that enables all others. In order to increase your awareness you need to:
– Take time throughout the day to take account of your feelings, thoughts, and actions
– Monitor your cognitive and emotional functioning dashboards
– Use an “awareness scale” to assess your capacity to deal with stress
– Understand and identify what’s going on with yourself stress-wise and why it’s happening
2. Rest. Getting sufficient rest is absolutely critical to your ability to cope with stress. We need rest to allow the brain and the body to regenerate and repair itself. Do your utmost to avoid losing sleep. Sleep loss is cumulative and your cognitive abilities in particular will suffer the longer you deprive yourself of sleep.
If you’re like most Americans, you probably hop yourself on caffeine to keep yourself going. Although studies have shown that caffeine with help boost performance if you’ve lost sleep, keep in mind that this only works if you aren’t taking in a lot of it in the first place!
Rest is essentially any way to disengage from the day-to-day grind and give yourself time to push away from the stress-inducing aspects of your job.
Getting proper rest includes:
– Taking breaks and getting enough sleep (sleeping at least eight hours a night)
– Taking time for yourself throughout the day to get away from the grind for short periods of time
– Taking vacations, trips, and getaways
– Say no when you have to so that you resist overloading yourself unnecessarily
– Identify other ways you can get rest or that are restful such as walking, listening to music, a quick scan of the web, or a short non-work conversation with a colleague
3. Support. All of us need psychological, emotional, and physical help from others. This is your support network of family, friends, colleagues, bosses, and mentors. These are people we can turn to when times are tough and talk about challenging issues and even vent frustrations.
The keys to getting the support you need support include:
– Listing out the people in your support network and how to contact them
– Supporting those in your network: what comes around goes around
– Hanging around people who lift your spirits
– Engaging in activities that cater to the greater good such as religious activities and charities
– Most importantly, use your network!
4. Exercise. The health benefits of exercise are well documented, but the benefits of exercise on your ability to deal with stress is less well known. Exercise increases blood flow to the brain and elevates your ability to combat the cognitive and emotional effects of stress. As an Airman, I was required to stay fit, and I’m glad I was because it greatly enhanced my ability to deal with the day-to-day stresses of being on active duty including deployments and command.
Here’s what you need to do for:
– Get a physical, preferably yearly
– Stop making excuses, get off your backside, and step out!
– Track your baseline measurements such as heart rate, blood pressure, and VO2 max
– Find out what form of exercise motivates you most: individual or group, indoor or outdoor, etc.
– Make a schedule and stick to it
– Set reasonable goals. It’s going to take time to progress. Enjoy the journey!
5. Nutrition. Eating right is fundamental to being stress resilient. Your body depends on a strong, healthy flow of energy to deal with and ward off stress. But, this is easier said than done, especially in the United States. What tastes good and is readily available is not necessarily the best for you. So good nutrition takes an investment of discipline and time.
Here are nine things you need to do to get the nutrition you need:
– Make healthy food choices
– Keep a food journal. It might surprise you as to what you put into your body. A journal is also a good way to stay focused on your eating plan
– Weigh yourself each day and record your weight
– To change your eating habits, make small changes each day
– No fad diets
– No junk food
– Drink enough water every day
– Cut back on or eliminate soft drinks
– Control and reduce your portion sizes
6. Attitude. Your attitude helps determine your orientation toward stress. Do you have a positive approach to dealing with stress or is your attitude more negative? Studies have shown that having a positive attitude correlates with good health, memory, emotional attunement. Your attitude also affects those around you and is contagious. It’s critical for establishing motivation and commitment for dealing with stress.
The following list of tips will help you maintain and sustain a good attitude:
– Participate in activities that build your self-confidence
– Smile a lot. It’s an “attitude multiplier”
– Make a habit of seeing the glass as half full
– Solicit feedback from others on how they perceive your attitude. Adjust accordingly
– Be an enthusiastic team player
– Use self-talk to keep your attitude in check and upbeat
7. Learning. Just like our bodies, our brains need to workout too. You have to challenge your cognitive and mental functioning so that you are able to stay sharp. If you engage in lifelong or continuous learning, you will enhance your ability to adapt to novel and stressful situations.
Taking the following actions will get you well on your way to becoming a lifelong learner:
– Set learning goals. Learn a new language, read a book, or take an online class
– Hang around interesting and smart people
– Deliberately stretch yourself. If you’ve been wanting to take that advanced sculpture class, do it!
8. Meditation. Meditation can improve our creative thinking, our energy, and stress resilience. It is an incredibly effective way to deal with stress. Studies show that meditation is associated with improvement in a variety of psychological areas, including stress, anxiety, addiction, depression, eating disorders and cognitive function, among others. In addition, research shows that meditation can reduce blood pressure, pain response, stress hormone levels and even cellular health.
How’s that for a stress resilience best practice?
Here’s what you need to do to incorporate meditation into your routine:
– Set aside time every day to do it. Start with ten minutes a day, then build up to a half hour
– Sit or lie in a comfortable place
– Make sure it’s quiet
– Relax everything and clear your mind
– Focus on your breath
– Choose a method. Many people meditate while praying, doing yoga, or repeating a mantra. Find what works best for you
Pulling It All Together: Being a Stress Resilient Leader
The great thing about these 8 best practices is that they are based on common sense and backed by solid research. In short: they work.
That said, I think we all know what’s good for us, but the tougher part for some might be actually putting the 8 practices in play on a consistent basis in your life.
Toward that end, the ARSENAL™ assessment is a great tool for helping you understand how well you are doing on the best practices for stress resilience, and a great way to get started on your way to increased stress resilience.
Shoot me an email to see about taking the assessment and learning what you’re doing well and where you might need some improvement. My email is: joe@theleadershipforge.com
By Joe Scherrer | The Leadership Crucible