Working Smarter

Happy 2014, everyone! I hope it’s a great one for you. One way to help make it that way is to use that precious window of openness we have at the beginning of the year when we are receptive for a nanosecond to new things  and resolve to do something different this year: not take stress but turn off the danger signals that drive it.

Hiding in plain sight, this toxic saboteur can ruin your work and health with a trip to the ER and a sinkhole of medical bills. You may think you're handling it, but that's usually an illusion, supplied by the adrenaline released by the stress response, which masks the damage to your body by giving you a sense you're powering through it.

Brian Curin, 39, thought he was managing risk well as president of footwear retailer Flip Flop Shops, which has more than 90 locations. Yes, he had pressure, but he exercised and ate well. He could handle it. He did feel a little off, though, and had a faint ache of something resembling heartburn.

Curin decided to pay his doctor a visit. Blood work, a resting EKG and a respiration test were negative, but a stress test and an angiogram turned up a big problem: four blocked arteries, one of them at 100 percent—not what Curin expected at his age. Without open-heart surgery, he could have been dead within weeks.

"I was extremely lucky," says Curin, whose wake-up call prompted him to start a campaign, The Heart to Sole: Creating a Stress-Free America, to lobby for stress-testing at all companies and to support the American Heart Association's My Heart, My Life program. "If something doesn't feel right, it's probably not. Get it checked out."

Because the human brain's fear central, the amygdala was built for life-and-death scenarios 100,000 years ago, it doesn't know how to process the social stressors of the modern world. As a result, we react to stressful events as life-and-death before we think and become easy prey for chronic stress, which compromises the immune system, increases the bad cholesterol and decreases the good kind. Bravado and busyness can keep us in denial mode until the paramedics arrive.

You're not much good to your work and family from six feet under. This year, let’s make a vow to keep the sirens at bay with these essential stress-reduction strategies.

1. Pay attention to your body. Insomnia, heart palpitations, anxiety, bowel issues--they're trying to tell you something. See your doctor.

2. Make stress-testing as routine as dental checkups.

3. Cut stress by reducing time urgency. Every minute is not life or death.

4. Identify the story behind the stress and reframe it from catastrophic to a new story: "Yes, I've got 300 e-mails, but I can handle it."

5. Build stress-relief techniques into your schedule—meditation, progressive relaxation, exercise, a hobby.

6. Set boundaries. Sixteen hours of work a day is not sustainable. Find the "just enough" point in a given day or project.

7. Check email at designated times. Four times a day is the most productive email checking schedule.

8. Delegate or get help. Doing it yourself can cost well more than the price of a helping hand.

9. Step back. Brains have to reset every 90 minutes. Breaks increase mental functioning and interrupt stress.

10. Get a life. The best stress buffer is a life beyond work. Remember that?

If you would like to get yourself and/or your organization off to a great start for 2014, a stress management program can be one of the best investments you make all year. Our stress reduction tools pay off many times over in dramatically less medical costs and higher productivity and engagement. Click below for more information and prices.

When the person next to you yawns, chances are very good that you are going to be breaking into a yawn, too, even if you are not sleepy in the slightest. When someone laughs for a long time, it's very hard to resist a grin or chuckle.

And when your stressed-out colleague is demanding a meeting right now, the alarmed face quickly incites yours to mimic it. Now you’re stressed too, as a result of what is known as second-hand stress. Like second-hand smoking, it can be very harmful to your health.

We all have a copycat streak in us, thanks to social circuitry that makes us yawn and panic when others do. As a social animal, we are built to relate to others, so much so that we physically reflect back their expressions and movements.

The urge to echo is triggered by what are known as mirror neurons, brain cells that mimic the actions or emotions of others. While they help us learn, understand, and bond, they can also be our undoing when the channeled behavior is the emotional contagion of stress.

THE MYSTERY OF THE STEREO YAWN

Mirror neurons were first identified in the 1990s by Italian scientists studying how the brain controls mouth and hand movements in macaques. Researchers found that a distinct batch of cells lit up when the monkees performed or even observed specific movements. 

Mirror neurons are thought to operate similarly in humans. Located near motor neurons responsible for movement, speech, and intention to act, they simulate the actions and emotions of others and give us the impulse to do so—thus, one of life’s great mysteries, the contagious yawn. You’re not remotely sleepy, but you cut loose with a jaw-popper after the person next to you has done the same.

A study in Switzerland using fMRI scans found a connection between the mirror neuron system and higher cognitive empathic functions. When subjects in the study were shown photos of people yawning, a region in the mirror neuron system was activated.

Even if we’re not physically imitating what we see, mirror neurons still fire off a simulated version of the activity in your head as if you actually did it. It’s all designed to help us learn, understand, empathize, and connect with what others are doing and feeling. Too often, though, what’s mirrored is the stress of coworkers, managers, and significant others, and that is bad for teams and organizations, as triggers get passed down the line. 

PASS-ALONG STRAIN

Researchers have long known about the infectious nature of stress. Pass-along strain runs rampant in relationships and work settings. Studies have shown that there is "crossover" stress from one spouse to the other, between coworkers, and "spillover" from the work domain to home. The stress contagion effect, as it’s known, spreads anxiety like a virus. Our mirror neurons help suck us into the emotional eruptions of others.

Emotions are highly contagious, and that can be highly dangerous when the emotional storms of others reflexively trigger the stress response in us. Stress is a factor in five out of the six leading causes of death, according to the CDC.

Stress suppresses the immune system, lowers the good cholesterol, increases the bad, and leaves decision-making up to a hysterical corner of your ancient brain that can’t compute the social stressors of the modern world. It can lead to any number of illnesses and conditions, from insomnia, to cardiovascular disease, to heart attacks, and undermines decision-making, judgment, and thinking. 

I work with fire and rescue crews who see very tough things in their work every day. If they absorbed all the pain and grief they witnessed, they could not do their jobs. The same is true for all of us. Yes, we want to be empathetic and understanding, but we don't want to take on the stress and anger of others.

You don’t have to mirror anyone else’s stress—or listen to the alarms of your own stress equipment, which are equally false (unless you are in a true life-or-death moment). The key to resisting the emotional contagion of stress is overriding the double-team autopilot of the reflex stress response and your mirror neurons, being able to catch yourself.

OPT OUT OF EMOTIONAL CONTAGION

You can reduce the frenzy of someone else’s deadline or frenzy by stepping back and identifying the real story—it’s not an emergency, it’s not your stress, it’s not a crisis. It's what is in someone else's head. Separate what is the other person's mind from yours. 

By using proven stress management processes, you can turn off the false danger signal. Instead of mirror neurons directing you to feel stress, you can use them as a tool to better understand why a person is going off, and, as a result, why you don’t have to.

We can let others know that we would prefer to be dealt with in a way that doesn’t treat every event as Apocalypse Now or threaten our health. Others don’t know they are as much of a conduit for stress as a fiber optic cable is for data. Let them know.

Reduce interactions with the stress conductors in your life. And put a selection of photos on your computer or smartphone of people in the act of yawning to catch yourself when the false alarms of others set you off. Yawn, and move on.

If you would like to learn about how to control stress in your team or organization, click the button below for details on our stress management programs.

To the outside world, Catherine Thompson England seemed to be handling the pressure of her job as a caseworker for abuse victims well. Though she had told her boss that stress was mounting, it didn't appear to be a problem, since she was getting the job done. But the Pennsylvania social worker was staying late and working at home to do it, a growing trend in a world of tight budgets and understaffing.

Things weren't going well at all. One day the pressure exploded and Thompson England had a breakdown. She was hospitalized for 10 days.

"People don't want to hear about stress, because everybody has it," says Thompson England, who has a five-year-old son. "You will deal with a lot of stress before you reach out, because it's not taken seriously."

Stress has become such a normal part of the day-to-day that it has become a kind of adrenalized wallpaper. Bringing up the subject is to point out the obvious—or that you are a wimp, unable to take it in a bravado world that feigns invincibility. Fear of being wimpy, though, leads to real weakness—physically, since stress plays a role in five out of the six leading causes of death, and financially, since stress costs the nation a boggling $1 trillion a year.

Chronic stress triggers conditions that kill more people every year than cancer and nicotine combined, but it's treated as if it's no more serious than excess gas or bloating. Take a pill and deal with it. Americans certainly do, consuming $16 billion worth of antipsychotics each year and $11 billion in anti-depressants.

There's a disconnect between stress and the conditions it sets off—hypertension, stroke, coronary artery disease, diabetes, insomnia. Many of us watch our cholesterol, get exercise, keep sugar under control, and yet don't do anything to manage the switch linked with the diseases we're otherwise trying to prevent: stress. That's because we've never been taught to take stress seriously—until a heart attack or burnout.

I come across this every day in my work as a stress management educator. There was the manager at a government security agency who had a stroke in his 40s. The real estate agent with panic attacks. The CEO leveled by a heart attack. 

Unlike more exotic bugs and conditions, there is a cure for stress: knowledge. Science knows how to prevent and manage it. The stress response is activated when a perceived threat overloads ability to cope with the danger. It's an early warning system that worked well in hunter-gatherer days when threats to life and limb were frequent, but it doesn't know how to compute the social stressors of the modern world. A number of proven stress management processes can turn off the false alarm of stress. Once the danger signal has been shut off, the stress stops in four minutes.

Job stress is serious business for business leaders who want to cut medical costs and absenteeism, increase performance, and maybe save lives, including their own. Brian Curin, president of Flip Flop Shops, which sells sandals and a casual lifestyle at 80 stores around the country, discovered that he took too casual of an approach to his own health. Though he exercised and ate well, years of stressful business-building had taken a hidden toll. Curin failed a treadmill stress test, and a follow-up angiogram revealed that his heart was starving for oxygen. He had four major blockages, one of them 100 percent—at the age of 38.

"It was years of running as fast as I could go at the speed of business," said Curin. "It really shows the effect that stress can have on you. They said if I had had a heart attack, they wouldn't have been able to help me."

He had to have a quadruple bypass to repair the damage. Curin was so shaken by the experience he decided to do something about it. His company started an initiative with the American Heart Association, My Heart, My Life, to advocate for stress tests at companies and educate customers on stress prevention.

Stress testing, whether by exercise test, ECG, blood pressure testing at work (one out of five people have elevated readings at work but not at home) or other modalities, has to become as routine as dental or cholesterol checks to identify people like Curin, who are unaware of the problem, or England Thompson, who fear reaching out might mark them as a wimp or burden to others.

England Thompson learned she has to speak up more, set boundaries, and share the load with others. "We need to normalize the fact that stress is a very real thing and you don't have to deal with it on your own," she said.

Stress testing, coverable mental health counseling, and social pressure to change macho attitudes can make it acceptable to get help and overcome the shame, bravado, and willful ignorance that feed the chronic disease mill of stress.

The person sitting next to you on the plane is a total stranger, yet after an hour of conversation, you feel like know him/her better than someone you’ve worked with for years. You wind up discussing some family issue or long-ago setback even your friends don’t know. What’s going on here?

Psychologists call it the “Stranger on the Train Effect,” a suspension of the normal rules of revelation, because what you say to a stranger can’t come back to haunt you. It’s a kind of Vulcan mind-meld minus the lobster-like pincer move to the shoulder. We get to the nub quickly when we’re traveling, since there’s limited time and no need to fear blowback from what we say. If you’ve ever experienced this phenomenon, you know it’s possible to get below the surface with folks very quickly, something we all have a need to do.

One of our core needs is “relatedness,” say researchers. We need to have close connections with others. When we do, that’s gratifying. We feel energized. Listened to. Valued by someone. A part of something.

That’s true not just outside the job, but also at work, where strangers can be less so when there are more opportunities to communicate beyond the usual game face and grunts. Granted, the revelation parameters are a lot different at work, where comments do have an afterlife, but the same need to connect exists at the office—and managers who understand this can get a big payoff in the form of engaged staff.

Engaged employees are 28% more productive than their colleagues. Employee engagement means someone is self-generating extra effort and vitality. It doesn’t come from being told to get fired up. Engagement is a two-way street, and requires communication and trust flowing in both directions.

This is a delicate topic at most organizations. People tend to be at their most guarded in a realm that controls their paycheck and promotions. Yet the trust that fuels engagement can only come when people feel they have an opportunity to be heard. Survey scores at most organizations are low when it comes to staff believing they have a voice. That’s another way of saying involvement is low, which means so is engagement.

Without a voice, there’s a sense of exclusion, which doesn’t make people feel valued, the critical factor in engagement. Exclusion promotes the opposite of the proaction necessary for engagement. What does spark self-initiative is inclusion. The research shows that when employees feel a part of the mix, free to contribute and even offer countering views, engagement soars. When more voices are heard, money is saved too. Ernst & Young saved $15 million in one initiative that sought out everyone’s suggestions on better ways to work.

How can more employees find the voice of engagement? It starts with more conversations between leaders and staff; not more meetings, but personal conversations that recognize people for what they’re doing well, asking them to set high goals, and relying on them to self-assess progress. Allow people to express how they feel about a certain task. Even if there’s nothing that can be done to change it, the mere fact of discussion helps build trust.

Being able to talk about what’s working or not keeps resentments from building up and creates a spirit of inclusion. That increases the sense that an employee is valued, and it can help surface better ways of doing things that build employee competence, another core need.

Trust is a reciprocal affair. You don’t get it unless you give it. I see that on my local basketball team, the Los Angeles Lakers. The leader of the team, all-star Kobe Bryant, is inclined to do it all himself, but the stats show that when he doesn’t score as much and shares the ball with teammates, the team has a much better record.

When we give up the ball more, the evidence shows more self-responsibility is taken, more communicating takes place. Research by Harvard’s Leslie Perlow has shown that dialogue within teams can increase productivity and effectiveness, but also something more: commitment. Talent wants to hang around when their voices and issues are heard and occasionally acted upon.

You don’t have to be a Vulcan to be on a better page with colleagues, but getting beneath the usual small talk to promote more relatedness isn’t that hard. Be more interested in others. Ask about their lives, their cycling club, or dance lessons. When we know more about the individual needs and lives of our colleagues, the sharing builds better teams, provides more support when we need it, and promotes better work-life balance for all.

Engaged employees are a part of the solution. If you'd like to find out how an employee engagement program can build involvement in your organization, click the button below.

Some companies won’t even use the word “stress,” hoping that avoiding the term will make a very toxic problem go away. Meanwhile, many imploding professionals are equally in denial about their stress. “It’s part of the territory.” “Got to suck it up.” Meanwhile, their purses or desk drawers look like pharmacies.

It’s no wonder that unmanaged stress costs American business $344 billion a year in medical bills, absenteeism, and recruiting and retention bills, according to a study at Middle Tennessee State. And no surprise, either, that more than three-quarters of all doctor visits are stress-related. Ostrich-mode is making us sick and unproductive.

Why do so many companies, big and small, ignore the time bomb of stress, the crisis mentality, frenzy, dysfunctional teams, anger, resentment, and panicked thinking that comes with it?  Habit. That habit is to look the other way, because stress is 1) the employee’s problem, a personal issue; 2) not that big of a deal; 3) something that only happens in tyrannical companies; 4) an admission that something’s not working; and last and most importantly, 5) lack of information on what stress is and how it spreads through a company to make everything more difficult and costly.

The reality is that in a time of hyper speed-up and lean staffing, stress—triggered by a perception of not being able to cope with demands—is at epidemic levels, and it’s a threat to every organization. If stress was an infectious disease, it would be the Center for Disease Control’s public enemy number one.

Yet too many believe stress isn’t all that serious, or something only wimps succumb to. Talk to Tom Row, a hard-charging scientist with a 70-hour a week schedule, who one day found himself leaving his office on a stretcher after a massive heart attack. He didn’t even know he was stressed, because the adrenaline flowing through his body made him feel transcendent.

Or hear it from an entrepreneur I spoke to recently who had a heart attack in her twenties. Or from the host of folks whose marriages have disintegrated because of the hair-trigger emotions, fear, and exhaustion set off by stress and burnout. Stress can turn you into someone you’d normally run from.

Contrary to the denial reflex, chronic stress has real health and business consequences. Ignore it, and it won’t go away. It will only get worse. When the stress response is activated, the immune system is suppressed, digestion processes are upended, blood pressure rises. The longer that goes on, the more physical problems erupt. Ignoring stress is like working with one hand behind your back, and one foot at the doctor’s doorstep. The longer we buy the false emergency, the more our thoughts come to believe the distortion of events is real.

If companies knew how damaging stress is to anything the organization is trying to accomplish, they wouldn’t put up with it for a nanosecond, because that would be like burning money. They would make stress management and work-life balance programs as much of a priority as the next quarter’s earnings, because those earnings depend on healthy, engaged minds and bodies.

Stress guts the chief productivity tool, attention, which is hijacked by an ancient part of the brain that can’t see beyond false crises—not good for planning, conversation, innovation, anything that requires concentration and openness. Stress is plenty good, though, for mistakes, rash emails, and disengagement.

The failure to nip stress in the bud means that this toxic cell spreads through the organization. Stress is highly contagious and is transmitted easily through pass-along strain and the mirror neurons that make our bodies echo the emotions of those around us.

Unlike a lot of diseases for which there is no solution, there is a cure for stress. The stress response is set off by a false story that can be shut off, and when it is, the stress stops in four minutes. How valuable would that be, to be able turn off the source fueling anxiety, conflict, and disengagement? More than 40% of employee turnover is due to stress. The cost to recruit and train top talent can range upwards of $100,000.

How much better could work and life be without the vise-grip of fear and anxiety caused by stress? Without the churning stomach, headaches, high blood pressure, and insomnia?

I can tell you, "a lot," because I see it regularly after our work-life or stress management trainings or in my coaching work. Teams go from wits end and overwhelm to a workday they can manage. Individuals move from fear and frenzy to a calm firmness amid chaos. It's day and night when you have the tools to keep stress at bay.

There’s nothing to deny or feel embarrassed about with stress. It’s part of the funky brain architecture we’re stuck with. It’s part of organizations, even the best ones. It’s part of a volatile world. But when it persists, it’s also a very clear signal that something is wrong with the picture.

If your organization or you would like to change that picture, click below for a free consultation and learn how fast you can transform your team and life.

It’s hard enough trying to manage the noise of one mind, but we're all stuck with a two-headed monster. We are of two minds, and that is especially true in situations that feel threatening or stressful. No wonder we get headaches.

In one corner, there’s the ancient brain, the emotional hub known as the limbic system, with the fear center of the amygdala at its core. It doesn’t have the talent of the brain in the other corner, the 21st-century model, but it is lightning fast, quicker on the draw than conscious thought.

It can pick up a sign of fear on someone’s face in two-hundredths of a millisecond, reports Daniel Goleman in Social Intelligence. As a result, the amygdala is in charge a lot of the time, as is the job stress, and life stress too, that comes with it—unless we find a way for the smart brain to get the upper hand with a little stress management.

The amygdala is used to being the boss. It ran the cerebral show before the higher organs of the brain, such as the prefrontal cortex, evolved to weigh pro and con. Prior to that, decisions were based on whatever raw emotion dictated, as they still are today when the amygdala takes over. It hijacks your brain whenever a perceived threat is detected.

With its keen detection of danger, the so-called “lizard” brain can keep you out of harm’s way, or it can get you into trouble in a world it was never built for with its knee-jerk responses to negative comments, work deadlines, or projections that turn out to be nothing but wild anxiety.

The ancient brain wants to deck the person who took your parking spot. The modern brain intercedes, sometimes. The ancient brain wants the chocolate cake now. The modern brain tries to keep you healthy. The ancient brain freaks out over a new assignment or an overloaded in-box. The modern brain does the analysis and decides that, yes, there’s work here, but certainly no emergency.

In a work life balance webinar I conducted for a client this week, one of the participants talked about how she was starting to get a handle on the pesky ancient brain. She began stopping herself every time something felt stressful or overwhelming. When a sudden project came in that would normally push her button, she paused, and asked, “Why? Why is this making me stressed? Is there a real emergency that should require the stress response?

The mere act of asking questions brings the modern brain back into the picture for reflection and analysis, shoving the reflex fear of the ancient brain out of the way. The higher brain computed in every case that there was no emergency, no threat to this woman's life or limb. She “reframed” the ancient brain’s stress signals from fantasy to reality, shutting off the stress cycle.

How many times a day does your amygdala set off stress alarms? Reframing these false alarms on the spot can save a lot of needless angst.

To reframe, though, you have to stop, actually shut down output for a moment of input and insight. Stress feeds off fantasy anxiety that is switched on and left to spiral unchallenged. Stepping back from the situation to reflect cuts off the stress cycle, which gets more entrenched the longer it spins its fiction uncontested.

Stop, and you can go again, informed by your modern brain, not the pre-humanoid model.

Most of the research on job stress has looked at men, but a new study of women finds the stress process very democratic in its toll on the old ticker and its supporting systems. The study, from Brigham and Women’s Hospital in Boston, found that women who report high job demands and stress levels are 67% more likely to have a heart attack and 38% more likely to have a heart problem—stroke, high blood pressure, coronary artery disease—than women with low stress.

It’s another sign that work stress is not a trifling case of nerves, but a health hazard, one that requires stress management skills few of us are taught. The belief is that we can live with stress, that it’s just part of the professional territory—and that we can’t discuss it or try to resolve it or we'll be a wimp.

We do live with a lot of stress. Life is chock full of it, but not all of it is a threat. When demands are low, or high but you have some measure of control over them, events can be perceived as challenging or exciting. But when demands are high and you don’t have control over them, it’s another story—which is why more than two dozen studies show the connection between work stress and heart problems. That’s the kind of stress that is risky to live with.

Chronic high strain triggers the stress response. It creates a sense of not being able to cope, which is misinterpreted by the ancient hub of our emotions, the amygdala, to be a life-and-death threat. Off goes the stress response and a flood of hormones that suppress the immune system, increase blood pressure, and can lead to cardiovascular problems and a host of medical issues, from insomnia to irritable bowel disease.

The study followed 22,000 women in the healthcare field for 10 years and found the high-strain group (including managers, who were high risk) with an elevated risk for heart problems. Lifestyle issues—smoking, weight, etc.—accounted for only one-quarter of the increased risk. The research supports data found in a Finnish study of 48,000 women, which found that job stress can double the risk of cardiovascular disease.

If you or your organization fall into the chronic, elevated strain category, stress management strategies are crucial to prevent the toll on health, decision-making, productivity, and pocketbooks. Since the stress beast runs on knee-jerk reactions and “explanatory style”—what we tell ourselves about stressful events—changing the response to stress can change everything and lead to vastly improved work-life balance.

The stress process is so ingrained it takes a concerted effort to retrain the brain to react differently than autopilot fight-or-flight. Our stress management programs reframe stress so it can be cut off before it spins out of control into chronic activation that takes bodies and businesses down with it.

A two-pronged approach is needed, tools that we can use to put out the fires as stress pops up—both mental and physical techniques—and then stress management strategies outside the job to counter amygdala activation and release the tension. It's part of the body's natural work-life balance system, the parasympathetic system of recovery restoring the body to rest and maintenance.

Study co-author Michelle Albert singled out the importance of having ways to unwind after work. Regular recreational and exercise outlets are essential to relieve work stress, or it continues to fuel anxiety, muscle tension, and cortisol release. That requires planning, a different skill-set than the work mindset, and the right motivational strategy—all of which are part of our training program.

One of the hallmarks of stress is obsessive thinking about the perceived crisis of the moment. Pastimes and aerobic exercise buffer stress as well as increase positive mood and confidence, which helps switch off the false emergency signals in the brain and create the vitality to perform better on the job.

It's all about coping with demands. If they push us beyond our ability to cope and nothing is done to increase coping resources, non-android bodies and performance pay the price. The good news is that coping strategies can become the best parts of the day, from relaxation techniques to recreation after work—if we can override the "I'm too busy" mental block fueled by stress to take care of ourselves, that is.  

We burn up a lot of time and nerves worrying about what’s going to happen next. The fears almost always turn out to be just that, wild projections. You’re going to get fired because the boss is in a bad mood. You’ll never make the deadline. You'll never have another good idea.

You would think we would know the routine by now, but, no. Our brains love to stew, since they are tuned to a survival instinct that sees things through the prism of imminent disaster whenever possible.

That’s particularly true when stress is at the helm. The stress response turns on the ultimate alarmist, the amygdala, the brain’s primitive emotional hub and fear central, which floods the mind with one overriding theme: catastrophe.

A brain built to keep us alive in 100,000 B. C. hasn’t made the transition to the modern world. We may be carrying 21st century technological devices and wearing duds from Macy’s, but inside our heads, there’s a caveman/woman waiting to freak out at the slightest threat.

Keeping down the panic reflex is the challenge of our lives, and, increasingly our work too. Job stress can do what sabre-toothed tigers never could, keep us in a state of chronic stress, which can have a major impact on health, performance, and bottom lines. More than two dozen studies show the connection between job stress and heart disease.

When work stress activates the amygdala, the trigger sets off a pattern many of us are too familiar with, known as awfulizing. Since the amygdala believes your life to be in imminent danger, it blows things well out of proportion. The unreturned phone call, the meeting you weren’t invited to, the disapproving tone of someone’s voice, signals impending doom.

Awfulizing is the byproduct of irrational self-talk set off by an activated amygdala. It turns everything into a worse-case scenario, which fuels the stress response and more calamitous thoughts. A few minutes of overreacting can trigger fight-or-flight. The awfulizing default exaggerates mistakes, slights, flaws, and behaviors into apocalyptic scenarios.

It’s pure fantasy, and unless we challenge them, they become the reality, not a pleasant one for any department or company where awfulizers are running wild. It leads to a perpetual state of crisis mentality in any organization.

One of the triggers of awfulizing is the tendency to take things personally. The reality is that things happen in the world, and we can choose to see them in a neutral way or take them personally. That’s not an easy choice, I admit, given the fact we have this thing called an ego, which always wants to have its way and believes it is at the center of the universe. Once the ego is into it, off goes more raw emotion that feeds more irrational thoughts. Irrational self-beliefs also enable catastrophic thoughts, as events seem to validate pet fears—I must never make a mistake; my worth depends on how much I achieve or produce, etc.

We have better things to do than run a fantasy factory all day. The best stress management programs and work-life balance trainings (see ours here) build skills to control the self-talk and the exaggerations that come with it. People learn how to recognize the patterns and shift to realistic self-talk that keeps the horrors confined to the Sci-Fi channel.

The next time your brain starts spinning out catastrophic scenarios, catch the awfulizing and remember the caveman inside your head, a character long past the expiration date.