Ever wonder where the day went? It’s not uncommon to reach the late afternoon and marvel at why you didn’t gain more traction on your to-do list. That’s because the workstyle most of us use is reactive.Many of us are feeling overwhelmed, and remote working arrangements aren’t necessarily helping, because they increase the amount and forms of communication you must track. The challenge is our brain’s instinctual reaction to overwhelm.

Reactive Work Style

We have a hangover from our ancestors that doesn’t really work in the modern world. Anytime your ‘ancient’ brain perceives that something is more than you can handle, it sees it as a threat and triggers the stress response. Stress today is social stress, but it still sets off the automatic response of fight or flight.It’s possible to manage our thoughts so we’re not just reacting in panic mode all day long. Setting these boundaries will help you work in a more sustainable way.

More Work Is Stressful, Biologically

Part of your brain is always asking, “What’s wrong?” “How am I going to make it? “What’s next?” Self-inflicted stress is the frenzy and frazzles to get to the next item on the list.To get anything done during the workday with focused attention, you need to tap into your working memory. The human brain is limited to three or four thought chunks for only a few seconds.

Attention Management

Unfortunately, interruptions blow up working memory. We have the rise of what’s called ‘attention deficit trait. It’s not ADHD, but it mimics the same symptoms. Your attention span shrinks, you have a hard time staying on task, you flit from one thing to the next, and you have more time urgency because you’re falling behind.To regain your attention, calm your mind. Count backward from 100 to zero in your brain. Since we don’t do this every day, we have to pay attention to it. If your thoughts stray, just come back to the next number down the line. The exercise is relaxing and calming.

The Working Memory Is Always Stressed

Exercise is a good stress reducer because it brings your brain back to the centre. Or focus on your breath. It massively increases your attention. Deliberative breathing shuts down the acceleration of the stress response. It’s strongest in the immediate few minutes after the button gets pushed.We think because something’s in our head, we got to pay attention to it. We don’t. We can try to be thought-free, as hard as it sounds.

Focus On Your Breath

In order to have more attention, it’s important to set the terms of engagement with your devices. Disruptions erode your impulse control, and interruptions make anything you do seem more difficult and aggravating than it is. Humans are allowed to set the rules on the devices.The impulse control mechanism is located in a part of the executive attention function of the brain called effortful control. Interruptions shred it and make us self-distract and lose the ability to regulate impulsivity and stay on task. Managing interruptions, then, is key.

Interruption Management

Another boundary your brain needs is the ability to let things go in order to return to work. This is called “barking” management.Does your dog bark hours, days, months, or years after another dog walks past your yard? He drops the event as soon as it’s over like it never happened. But that’s not what humans do. We keep barking. We hang on to the event, and that’s what causes our stress—but we don’t have to.Hanging onto stress is rumination. We can play a big role in shutting down this ancient reflex by managing the thoughts in your brain.

Barking Management

We’re very verbal creatures, and a lot of words are flowing through our brains. They attach themselves in a random way. They fuse with thoughts, feelings, emotions, and moods in our brain and come out in the form of a thought.For example, if you have a confrontation with someone at work and your thoughts drive you to a conclusion that you can’t take it anymore, you’ll be worse off than you were because you’ve self-defined yourself as being in a bad state. Labelling your thoughts as thoughts separates you from knee-jerk, emotion-word fusings that hold you hostage to false beliefs.

Thought Labelling

We are not hard drives with hair.After two hours of time on task, the brain has to get off task to relieve strain and reboot.The brain needs daily, weekend, and vacation resets. Robinson says productivity goes up after 10-minute breaks, 20-minute breaks, and dramatically after a vacation. Recreation and relaxation also allow you to put away whatever you’ve been thinking about over and over and recover. If you don’t, you’ll come back to work the next day with the stress still there.

Refueling Management

So many of us feel overwhelmed. Setting boundaries allows you work in a more sustainable—and less reactive—way.

Stashed ideas

These are the 4 boundaries your brain needs to feel less overwhelmed

If our minds are messy, we mess up our lifestyles, and when our lifestyles are messed up, our mental and physical health suffer. The 5 Steps are a way to harness our thinking power—any task that requires thinking can use a neurocycle, which means everything can use a neurocycle because we are always thinking! So, are you ready to begin cleaning up your mental mess?The brain is not hard-wired or stuck; it’s soft-wired, which essentially means it responds to what we think, feel, and choose—and what we eat, what we put into and onto our body, and how we move our body.

Neurocycling is a lifestyle

When our thinking is toxic, it can mess up the stress response, which then starts working against us instead of for us. This, in turn, can make us more vulnerable to disease, which is why many researchers now believe that toxic stress is responsible for up to approximately 90 percent of illness, including heart disease, cancer, and diabetes. Only 5–10 percent of disease is said to come from genetic factors alone.

About Toxic Thinking 

First, you prep that amazing brain of yours, and this is where mindfulness, meditation, breathwork, tapping, and so on are essential. You can do some breathwork (my favorite, because of its scientific base and effectiveness, is the <a href="https://www.wimhofmethod.com/breathing-exercises">Wim Hof method</a>)3 or something similar. This is a simple, mind-driven action that prepares your mind and optimizes your brain and body, allowing you to calm down enough to react in the most favorable way. Next, you go beyond the mindfulness your preparation has created into directed neuroplasticity through the 5 Steps:

Preparation For Neuro cycling 

“The goal of the Gather step is straightforward: to understand what you’re hearing, reading, and experiencing, and to get the information into the brain properly. As you go through this step, it’s important to remember we are thinking beings; we think all day long.”

Gather

The aim of this focused thinking step is to learn how to think deeply and intentionally, which will develop your phenomenal capacity to build effective, long-term memory into your dendrites. The Golden Rule of the 5 Steps is to think to understand the information you’re trying to remember, which involves three steps: asking, answering, and discussing.

Reflect

“This step involves writing down the information you selected in the analytical thinking step above. I recommend you use the “brain-friendly” way of writing I have created, called the Metacog (see appendix B). It’s really important to write concepts down as you do the ask/answer/discuss process, because this reinforces healthy dendrite growth and really forces you to think about your thinking. Remember, the brain operates like a quantum computer.”

Write

“helps build useful long-term memory into the dendrites. It’s a very simple yet extremely powerful process. All you have to do is deliberately and intentionally go through what you’ve written, either in your journal or on your Metacog, to see if it makes sense, and if it has all the necessary information on it. It goes without saying that you can’t learn from something that doesn’t make sense to you, and the Recheck step helps with this. It involves a cross-evaluation of the content of your written work.”

Recheck 

“In this step, you play “teacher” and sequentially reteach all the information that’s on your Metacog. Teach it to your dog, your cat, or whoever will listen to you! You can even reteach yourself in the mirror. Explain what you’re learning out loud. Using all of your senses will make your brain work harder and build the memory more effectively. Test yourself in some way; perhaps create some questions you think may be asked by your boss or teacher. Ask yourself questions that will help you apply the information to your life in a real and tangible way.”

Active Reach

Check for <a href="https://apps.apple.com/us/app/neurocycle/id1460119837">iOS app</a>Check for <a href="https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=com.switch_android&hl=en_US&gl=US">Android app</a>

Neuro cycling Mobile Apps

I completed reading this awesome book about “Cleaning up your Mental Mess” last night by Dr. Caroline Leaf. This book is really good and very informative to train your brain and mind. I tried to give some summary here. 

Toxic thoughts, depression, anxiety--our mental mess is frequently aggravated by a chaotic world and sustained by an inability to manage our runaway thoughts. But we shouldn't settle into this mental mess as if it's just our new normal. There's hope and help available to us--and the road to healthier thoughts and peak happiness may actually be shorter than you think. Backed by clinical research and illustrated with compelling case studies, Dr. Caroline Leaf provides a scientifically proven five-step plan to find and eliminate the root of anxiety, depression, and intrusive thoughts in your life so you can experience dramatically improved mental and physical health. In just 21 days, you can start to clean up your mental mess and be on the road to wholeness, peace, and happiness.

Cleaning Up Your Mental Mess

Workplace stress is increasingly becoming a larger part of the conversation since the pandemic.Reports indicate that the number of people seeking help with stress or anxiety has increased by 55%, according to a study by a mental health services provider in the United Kingdom.In 2021, 822,000 workers in the U.K. suffered from work-related stress, depression, or anxiety.

Workplace Stress

Stress is our body's response to pressureOften a sign you've pushed yourself too far without making time to consider whether what you're doing is sustainableAs ambitious high achievers, we ultimately want to go the distance, but going the distance is impossible when struck with migraines, low moods, anxiety, and irritability

The Root Cause Of Stress

<ul><li>Stress is unique to each person. For some, stress is incapacitating, while others actually need a bit of stress to keep them motivated.</li><li>It's easy to slip into the idea that if you take your foot off the pedal, even for one second, everything will come crashing down.</li><li>The issue with this thinking is that you are denying yourself an opportunity to refuel, despite being on a marathon of the mind for years on end.</li></ul>

Take A Break: Things Will Work Without You

<ul><li>Dealing with strain becomes significantly easier when we are fulfilled as people.</li><li>Managing stress becomes a possibility when we've invested the time to become bigger versions of who we are.</li><li>Life as a high achiever comes with challenges, greet those challenges as someone who has been given every possible opportunity to cope with it.</li></ul>

A Bigger Version Of Ourselves

<ul><li>Leaders need to address the responsibility of leaders in the fight against work-related stress</li><li>Creating an environment that prioritizes flexibility, mental and physical well-being, personal growth, and open channels of communication are steps toward combating stress for high achievers.</li></ul>

What Leaders Can Do

For high-achieving professionals working in competitive fields, it’s important to find the best way to preserve your mental resilience.

How to deal with stress while working in a demanding industry

Many of us are facing challenges that can be stressful, overwhelming, and cause strong emotions in adults and children. Public health actions, such as physical distancing, can make us feel isolated and lonely and can increase stress and anxiety. eople may have strong and lingering reactions. Learning healthy ways to cope and getting the right care and support can help reduce stressful feelings and symptoms.

How To Handle Stress ?

The symptoms may be physical or emotional. Common reactions to a stressful event can include : 1. Disbelief2. Feelings of fear, shock, anger, sadness, worry, numbness, or frustration3. Changes in appetite, energy, desires, and interests4. Difficulty sleeping or nightmares, concentrating, and making decisions5. Physical reactions, such as headaches, body pains, stomach problems, and skin rashes6. Worsening of chronic health problems7. Worsening of mental health conditions It's natural to feel stress, anxiety, grief, and worry during traumatic events .

So Basically What Are The Symptoms Of this Well Known Stress ? 

1. Take breaks from watching, reading, or listening to news stories, including those on social media. It’s good to be informed but hearing about the traumatic event constantly can be upsetting. Consider limiting news to just a couple of times a day and disconnecting from phone, tv, and computer screens for a while.2. Take care of yourself. Eat healthy, exercise, get plenty of sleep, and give yourself a break if you feel stressed out.3.Make time to unwind. Try to do some other activities you enjoy.4.Connect with your community- or faith-based organizations .

Healthy Ways to Cope with Stress 

1. Talk to others. Talk with peopleexternal icon you trust about your concerns and how you are feeling. Share your problems and how you are feeling and coping with a parent, friend, counselor, doctor .2. Avoid drugs and alcohol. These may seem to help, but they can create additional problems and increase the stress you are already feeling. So in this way you can cope up with your stress feelings .

Two Most Important Tips For Getting Out Of Stress .

Nowadays managing stress is important so by following this you may have control on this feeling called stress

Everyday tension takes a heavy toll on your health. Learn how to identify common, ongoing stressors and how to deal with stress effectively.

10 Simple Ways to Cope with Stress

<ul><li>Americans are emerging from the pandemic more stressed out and reactive than ever.</li><li>Emotional flooding is an automatic physical and mental response to an unexpected negative reaction by another, usually a close person, an encounter we can perceive as a threat.</li><li>Beyond hurting personal relationships at home and creating all kinds of difficulties out in the world, emotional flooding significantly impairs decision making.	 </li></ul>

Emotional Flooding

Imposing a 30-second response delay on everyone reduced aggression significantly, but only when there were negative consequences (having to perform a task) to being aggressive.Counting to 30 only works when you have the self-awareness to understand your reality, and it can be challenging during emotional flooding.

The Challenge Of Staying Aware: Counting To 30

Sit quietly and think about the feelings you are experiencing.Then, say to yourself, "I am not this anger. It will not manage me or make my decisions for me." This metacognition will leave you calm and empowered.

Observe Your Feelings

Managing your emotions is like home improvement: You can teach yourself to do a lot of it well, but it's best to get some professional assistance when the job is particularly tricky.Journaling is one of the best ways to achieve metacognition, which in turn creates emotional knowledge and regulation, which provide a sense of control.

Write It Down

If you can prevent your emotions from taking over in the face of stress, you can avoid a lot of regret and set a good example for others.

These are the 4 boundaries your brain needs to feel less overwhelmed

Cleaning Up Your Mental Mess

How to deal with stress while working in a demanding industry

10 Simple Ways to Cope with Stress

How to Stop Freaking Out

It's time to

READ

LIKE

A PRO!