stress management & resilience
Week 1
Stress, resilience & cognitive performance
Researcher’s collective understanding of stress, resilience, and cognitive performance is quickly evolving and uncovering new truths each day.
In this 4-week program, you will learn the science around each, and you will be introduced to practices that will objectively assess and improve your stress tolerance, cognitive performance, and resilience. It is my goal, by the end of the next 4-weeks, to challenge your mindset around “Stress Avoidance” and “Stress Performance” - Choose wisely!
1
STRESS: GOOD or Bad?
The binary thinking around stress as simply being negative or “bad” is not only an oversimplification, but it is a useless label that fails to provide both a deeper understanding of stress and a solution to society’s challenges surrounding stress, mental health, and burnout.
First, watch the videos, then answer the question below…
2
Resilience & recovery
RESILIENCE can be defined as your ability to “bounce back” from adversity, trauma, tragedy, threats or significant sources of stress (Garmezy and Masten, 1991, p. 459).
In other words, resilience is a measure of how quickly you’re able to recover from stress.
Researchers are discovering that resilience is not simply a trait that people either have or do not have, but rather it is a skill that can be learned and developed. (McDonald et al., 2012)
In the section below, you’ll complete a form which you’ll use weekly and/or daily as a self-check-in to strengthen your awareness around your current recovery in a given moment. This will help your coach better understand how your recovery is changing, and resilience, week over week.
find your recovery SCORE
Please click the button below and follow the instructions. Rate each category as they apply to you over the last 1-3 days. As guidance, a score of ‘7’ is positive/ more “good”, ‘1’ is negative/ more “bad”, and ‘5’ is average. You will receive an email with your Recovery Score. Your coach will track your progress and use this to guide your weekly coaching calls.
Keep this window/tab open. Return here and scroll below to begin your first practice — Meditation!
3
your 5+ senses & Safety!
We are all familiar with our 5 senses - Sight, Hearing, Touch, Smell, and Taste. However, these five forms of body sensing are only the tip of the iceberg. Together, these fives senses make up what scientists call exteroception - the part of our nervous system that processes sensory information from the outside or “external” world.
Less familiar (and less understood) are the senses that provide sensory information from our “internal” world or interoception. This information, also processed by our nervous system, includes both unconscious and conscious awareness of our body’s internal state from body sensations, to temperature, heart rate, blood sugar levels, hunger, and fatigue.
Why is this important? Our relationship with our body’s internal world and how we interpret these sensations directly influences our mood, emotions, and behaviors. When total stress load is high our minds and bodies perceive our “external world” (aka environment/exteroception) as unsafe or unpredictable, which can lead to disconnection with our “internal world” (aka physiology and psychology/interoception) leading to anxiety and feelings of unease.
“A deeper understanding of interoception could inform the development of novel therapeutic interventions for a range of conditions, from stress-related disorders to metabolic and digestive diseases.”
Takuya Sasaki. Nature. How the brain senses the body: Researchers are uncovering how interoception, the body’s unconscious perception of internal states, can impact both brain and body.
HEART SENSING
Please follow the video below and record your results!