Resilience-the Power to Reclaim our Sanity, Health, and Civility
Have you noticed that people seem to have shorter fuses these days? Are you seeing more outbursts by colleagues, clients, and family members, in public, or online? What the heck is going on?
Maybe you’re noticing it’s you who has become quicker to react with anger, fear, or anxiety. Perhaps you’re wondering, am I the only one feeling this way? That answer: Definitely not, you are far from alone.
It’s easy to make negative judgments about ourselves or others. But when we do, we miss a critical opportunity to gain a deeper understanding and a doorway to sustainable solutions for better mental, physical, and social health.
If you’re willing to take a little ride with me here, I believe you’ll find it worthwhile.
Has Everyone Gone Mad?
Given the current state of hostility and division among people, it does appear the world has gone crazy.
Thankfully, the clear lens of neurology provides physiological answers and a crucial vantage point to reclaim our sanity, health, and civility.
Very simply put: This is what four years of chronic stress and burnout look like in human beings with overtaxed nervous systems that have become highly dysregulated.
Think of chronic stress as a pair of self-darkening sunglasses that negatively tint our perceptions of how we think, feel, and act, with the physical body bearing the toll at a functional level. The tint gradually gets darker and darker, incrementally increasing our negative perceptions, behaviors, and health.
The twist is that we don’t realize it’s the glasses creating the distortion. It looks and feels like someone or something outside of us is causing the problem, so we think people and things outside of ourselves have to change for us to feel better.
The irony of chronic stress and burnout is that we can’t see it in ourselves but quickly spot (and often judge) it in others. Perhaps you’ve been in a meeting or at home and watched someone have a seemingly “out of nowhere” emotional outburst, blame someone or something else, and storm out of the room leaving everyone else raising their eyebrows at each other. If so, you’ve seen some of the effects of chronic stress.
Chronic stress creates predictable negative bias patterns across every aspect of our health -how we think, how we feel, how we act, and how it shows up physically. These aspects of our health are so intrinsically tied, that I use the term “body/mind” to encompass them.
Historically, the allopathic medicine system has compartmentalized health treating mental, emotional, behavioral health, and physical health as separate entities.
The reality is that physiologically, there is no separating mental health from emotional health from behavioral health from physical health. It’s all ONE health. A sample of pandemic fallout in the upsurge of prescriptions for depression and anxiety, stress-related emergency room visits, high blood pressure, gut issues, violence, and suicide bears this out.
Connecting the Dots
A March 2024 burnout survey by MyPerfectResume provides data that demonstrates a vivid connect-the-dots illustration. Note the italics which highlight the thoughts/emotions/behavior/physical connections.
- 1 in 5 think about quitting their jobs every day
- 1 in 4 have experienced depression about their jobs
- 9 out of 10 respondents feel burned out
- 24% have taken a leave of absence due to stress
- 20% have called in sick because they couldn’t face going to work
- 20% felt angry at their co-workers
- 10 out of 12 have had outbursts at work (53% reported multiple outbursts) in the last 6 months
Reported Health-Related Issues:
- Increased anxiety/stress
- Frequent headaches
- Chronic muscle pain
- Disturbed sleep
- Lower immunity, higher risk of colds, flu, and other infections
- Stomach, digestion issues
- Difficulty concentrating
- Irritability
Through the dark lens of chronic stress and the underlying neurological bias of perceived threat, here’s an example of what we experience in our psyches, our bodies, our work, and our relationships:
It shows up as a stressed-out leader or manager barking at direct reports about another deadline that must be met. The reports neurologically react in fight, flight, or freeze. One gets angry and resistant. Another shuts down, already planning to call out tomorrow. A third person who has hit their breaking point avoids saying anything but gets online and fills out job applications. A series of reactive emails ensue to pass the buck or blame.
The Outcomes:
The product is not delivered as promised and the client is unsatisfied and unhappy. Everyone goes home in a bad mood and vents about how toxic the culture is, how no one else takes responsibility, or how certain people are intentionally out to get them. Conversely, they say nothing, reach for something to “take the edge off” and zone out binge-watching TV. Meanwhile, their mood is so thick family members feel it and they get triggered into their go-to emergency fight/flight/freeze response to cope with the situation.
In this scenario, everyone negatively impacted goes to bed in one of the three emergency states. They’re now unable to access the deeply needed restoration side of the nervous system that holds the healing power of sleep, cellular repair, and full immune system function. Instead, they wake up feeling worse, dreading the day, wondering how they’ll get through it.
This is how the fire of individual chronic stress spreads into a blazing forest fire across organizations and human society.
So How Do We Flip the Switch?
The blessing in things getting so bad is that it demands attention. When asked what would help reduce their stress, respondents of the cited survey offered the following:
- Earning more money
- Having more role clarity
- More flexibility/autonomy with my schedule
- Getting a promotion
- Having fewer responsibilities
- The ability to work from home more
- Being more intellectually challenged
- Having more autonomy over my work
- Having a different manager
- The ability to go into the office more
- Fewer meetings
- A shorter commute
Thankfully, more leaders are starting to realize the impact magnitude of chronic stress and taking steps to listen and improve the work environment, which will greatly benefit their people, culture, and bottom line.
Eliminating stress triggers and implementing meaningful changes is the smart place to start and the first step of an effective resilience strategy. However, it falls short of being a viable sustainable solution.
What’s Good for the Tree Sustains the Forest
Trying to stamp out chronic stress and its ripple effects by focusing on external triggers is like pruning the branches of a diseased tree. It might make it look healthier temporarily. But so long as the root cause is left untreated, the disease will continue to spread through individual trees and the forest of humanity showing up as physical, mental, emotional, organizational, and societal disease and disturbance.
It’s time to address chronic stress at its roots by shifting the individual, organizational, and societal priority to regain agency over our body/minds and rebuild resilience and health from the inside out.
Resetting ourselves not only helps us. It also positively co-regulates others, restoring our sense of safety in engaging together. Making individual well-being a priority is the cornerstone of creating and sustaining community, organizational, and societal well-being.
This approach allows us to shift from the insidious threat, distrust, and division that has darkened our perspective, health, and behavior toward ourselves and each other.
A Sustainable Solution
The ever-renewable, resilience-building prescription entails teaching people how to re-regulate the nervous system when triggered supporting the body/mind to increase its resilience and capacity to get along with each other while addressing life’s challenges.
This holistic, root-cause solution addresses the problem internally reactivating calm, critical thinking, emotional balance, trust, kinder, more considerate behavior, and allows the body/mind to shift to restore itself. This is where we’re designed to live – the neurological home of our mental, emotional, physical, and social health and well-being.
The more proficient we get in re-regulating ourselves through resilience training and other smart health and social practices, the more natural co-regulation happens between us. Through it, we restore our sanity, our health, and our civility.
From that restoration, our cooler heads, kinder hearts, and greater health can fuel our creativity, empathy, and capacity to collectively resolve the challenges that face us all.
CCNG would like to thank our contact center colleagues for sharing these insights.
