Numbing out from stress
And nine other surprising things I’ve learnt about resilience
Resilience has become a buzzword in recent years but it’s a topic that’s long fascinated me.
My interest began when I was training for an Ironman more than ten years ago. Preparing to swim 2.4 miles, cycle 112 miles and run 26.2 miles is not the sort of distance where you turn up and “wing it”. So I explored my food, mindset and how to best recover between work-outs.
Over the last ten years I’ve continued to explore physical resilience doing events like 5K races, marathons and long distance cycling trips. More recently, I began training as a psychotherapist which is helping me to better understand mental health and emotional resilience.
This passion has now become my job. I work with CEOs, directors and founders of start up companies to explore their resilience and what it means for them to thrive in their work. I also work with teams and support company wide resilience programmes.
As part of my approach I use heartbeat analytics to assess people’s resilience. The wearable technology provides amazing insights into each person’s unique areas of stress and sources of recovery.
Each day I’m going to share one of the ten most surprising things I’ve learnt about resilience after doing more than 200 of these assessments. The observations are based on personal accounts rather than objective data or quantitative research.
I would welcome your feedback if you have any comments that support or disprove anything I’ve written in these insights.
Insight #8 — numbing out from stress
A handful of my clients have chronic levels of stress.
This means they have almost zero recovery each day, including in their sleep. Their resilience reports show consistent levels of stress throughout the seven day measurement.
What is most striking is these clients do not get stressed by day-to-day situations that would stress most people. For example, missing a train home or having an argument with a partner.
In other words, they are not reacting to what’s happening around them. Which suggests that they’ve numbed out to the world.
In these situations their source of stress is more complicated.
For example, I worked with a highly talented and driven client who was leading an under resourced team. She was working extra hard to compensate for the lack of manpower, but her efforts were being unrecognised in an unsupportive work culture.
Her response was to try even harder because redoubling her efforts was a strategy that had served her well in the past. It was an ingrained pattern of behaviour and this time it was dramatically undermining her resilience. As a result she was stuck in a rut, numbed out and unable to change her situation.
Other people can numb out and think they are being resilient.
This means they tell themselves they’re handling the pressure when in fact they have become desensitised to the world. This is different to being resilient which requires us to be agile and respond to our changing circumstances.
Click here to read insight #1 — one person’s stress is another person’s recovery.
Click here to read insight #2 — life is more stressful than work.
Click here to read insight #3 — introverts should be more introverted.
Click here to read insight #4 — culture eats recovery for breakfast.
Click here to read insight #5 — exercise isn’t always good for you.
Click here to read insight #6 — senior leaders are not more stressed.
Click here to read insight #7 — the power of purpose.
Tomorrow I will share insight #9 — work can be addictive.
