The popularity of last week's post on 'how to stress less' is an indication of the level of interest around stress in the workplace. How many HR Professionals out there are aware of the neuroscience of stress versus success? Stress isn’t just a major contributor to illness and disease, stress hormones actually erode higher-brain networks. The result? Essentially the effects of chronic stress will inhibit you from succeeding fully at life. Prolonged periods of high levels of stress mean that your stress response system is on high alert, releasing toxic hormones into your system. These hormones effect your ability to perform, produce and ultimately, to enjoy your life.
The Effects of Stress in the Workplace
At work, stress has been directly linked to the following results:
- Negatively impacts performance levels.
- Impairs the ability of employees to effectively engage in teamwork.
- Results in poor and often limited decision making.
- Is one of the major contributing factors in employee turnover.
Mayo Clinic studies illustrate the difference between the brain function scans of an individual overwhelmed by high levels of stress, and one that shows the optimal brain capacity of an individual operating in the sweet spot.
The scan of optimal brain function looks like the lit up networks of light you see when flying over a large city like Sydney or Melbourne at night. Conversely, the stressed brain looks like the dim lights you see scattered here and there as you fly over the vast expanse of Australia’s outback.
The difference between these two brain scans is representative of the brainpower your business loses, (and could retrieve) if you are able to solve the problem of workplace stress.
According to multiple sources of research, clinical studies have proven that stress hormones have the following effects:
- The capacity to actually shrink higher brain networks.
- The tendency to switch our mood set point to negative.
- The ability to impair the immune system, ruin the cardiovascular system, and damage chromosomes producing cancer cells and prematurely aging you.
- Just like the effects of alcohol, the effects of stress also kill brain cells.
Add together all the life threatening stress-related illnesses and it’s not hard to see why stress is actually the silent, but most lethal killer in the United States. The bad news is, that other Western nations like Australia are catching up fast.
Stress is a massive opportunity cost that never hits the balance sheet, yet it definitely has the potential to be a line item with an enormous negative impact on your budget.
The most ironic aspect of workplace stress is that most organisations aren’t doing anything about it, and the result is that it’s cutting into their collective brain power. Consider this; when you hire an employee, you are actually hiring that person’s brain capacity and you're hoping it’s a smart brain that will grow even smarter. However, if you place that person in a high-pressure work environment without the tools to transcend the effects of stress, the likelihood is that he or she will lose brain capacity as a result.
Reset Stress to Success
The good news is that neuroscience has identified a solution to stress that goes far beyond conventional stress management. Not only does the neuroscientific approach repair the damage stress hormones can cause. This approach can also generate the neurological conditions that stimulate the growth of new connections within the higher brain that expand your brain capacity. The result is smarter, more innovative, and emotionally intelligent individuals.
The solution to resetting yourself from stress to success lies in the power of your mental state to rewire your brain. Your ability (and willingness) to change your mindset in specific ways enables you to literally change your brain structure to extinguish stress reactions and amplify higher brain function.
The technical term for this ability for change is neuroplasticity.
Here’s a small overview of the types of positive changes that neuroplasticity can produce in the brain:
- The usual networks that generate the brain’s executive functions grow to become more integrated with other neural networks. This means you increase your skill levels in relation to planning, decision making, error correction, and troubleshooting. You are also able to build strong cognitive abilities and can think more abstractly.
- Your gamma wave activity is far better organised and coordinated, signalling the type of higher mental activity and heightened awareness found in peak performers.
- The right brain and the prefrontal cortex work together to elevate intuition and creative insight into practical innovation.
- Activity in the left prefrontal cortex, the seat of positive emotion, swamps activity in the right prefrontal cortex, the seat of negative emotion.
- There is greater activity in the centre of the brain, especially the caudate and right insula, generating the social intelligence that sustains interpersonal resonance.
- Your entire physiology functions at its optimum, enabling you to live at optimal health and energy levels.
Rewire Yourself From the Inside Out
When your higher networks wire aand fire together, you are not only succeed, you are able to excel at every level of life. From career to family, from physical and emotional well-being to fully actualising your full range of talents and abilities, you whole experience of life can change.
The more you are able to function from this optimal mental zone, the less you stress, and the more your brain lights up with the mix of intelligence that predicts a successful and enjoyable life.
A brain that is operating at this optimal level, is a brain that is generating the fluid and creative intelligence to achieve goals, along with the emotional and social intelligence to instill:
- Joy in your work.
- Peace in your life.
- Harmony in your relationships.
It’s also a brain generating the homeostasis necessary to promotethe level of health and longevity we all seek. The key to all of these positive outcomes is building the mindset that transcends stress.
Who in leadership wouldn’t want an entire organisation of individuals operating at this level of optimised brain function? If an individual or company is not actualising the mindset that transcends stress to empower higher brain function, they are not maximising their full extent of fluid, creative, emotional, and social intelligence.
In 2015, there is no excuse for not implementing this type of imperative change. The benefits, on a personal / individual, as well as an organisational level, are truly exponential.
Fortunately, achieving the necessary shift in mindset is easier than you might imagine, and it adds little, if anything to your to-do list. Even better is the fact that change in brain structure happens quickly, according to research it can be transformed within four to eight weeks.
More and more frequently, CEOs and HR executives are working with experts on neuroplasticity to heighten the brainpower of employees. If word on the street is true, neuroplasticity and your ability to positively rewire your brain to access its optimal state will soon become the new competitive edge.
