I would like to share with you these 2 amazing books The leading brain – Neuroscience hacks to Work Smarter, Better, Happier and The Seven-Day Stress Prescription to answer that question: How to use good stress to perform?

As I wrote in my previous post Et si on revalorisait le stress !, good stress is possible when we see differently our stress system: not only as a flight or fight response (Cannon) but as an optimal arousal and optimal performance (Yerkes & Dodson) or eustress (Selye) or challenge response (Lazarus & Folkman).

The Seven-Day Stress Prescription

I discovered Elissa Epel in the excellent podcast How stress improves health with Dr. Andrew Huberman (see at the end of my post Et si on revalorisait le stress !). Elissa Epel wrote the book named The Seven-Day Stress Prescription. Seven chapters for seven days.

She explains what the stress is, why there is a bad stress and why life without stress is impossible:

As tough as stress can be to cope with sometimes, we would be a lot worse off without it. Humans have a stress response for a reason: it prepares our mind and body for what we need to do in the moment and in the moments ahead. Evolutionarily, our body’s natural stress response saved our prehistoric lives time and again. It’s the reason we’re here today, and we still rely on it to motivate us.

She writes that our brain loves certainty. It’s what allows our nervous system to relax. When conditions are predictable and stable, we have more cognitive bandwidth to spend on thinking, problem-solving, creativity.

It’s necessary to find our sphere of influence: trying to exert our will over situations that are beyond our influence only makes stress constant and therefore toxic.

I like the chapter 3 named Be the Lion. She summarizes this chapter thus (see podcast):

I list a bunch of options in chapter three, which is called « Be the Lion instead of the Gazelle ». So the lion and gazelle are both, you know, high blood pressure, high stress. But the gazelle’s having this total threat vasoconstriction responses because she might die. The lion might get dinner. So it’s needing to mount the stress response because it’s so excited to get the tasty dinner for, you know, the next few days. And so the lion is having that challenge response. And so we can remind ourselves be the lion.

By reframing we can feel more challenged rather than threatened by keeping a healthy perspective:

Threat stress belief: This is so stressful. I hate this feeling.
Reframe: This is exciting! I can appreciate this feeling!

I’m not going to tell you more because this book must be read for a truly personal experience. You can find exercises to define your stress baseline and lot of explanations to change your deep mindset to perform with good stress.

This book is strongly recommended by Jon Kabat-Zinn (founder of MBSR and author of The Healing Power of Mindfulness and Mindfulness for All): “The perfect prescription for this moment in time and outside of time.”

Elissa Epel’s first book, written with Nobel laureate Elizabeth Blackburn, is The Telomere Effect: A Revolutionary Approach to Living Younger, Healthier, Longer. You can read their research publication (2004): Accelerated telomere shortening in response to life stress.

You can follow Elissa Peel here (website) and here (blog).

The leading brain – Neuroscience hacks to Work Smarter, Better, Happier

I saw Friederike Fabritius in the great French / German Arte’s TV report Le stress nous fait-il du bien ? in which I learned what is distress / eustress (Selye) and challenge response (Lazarus et Folkman). She wrote the book named The leading brain – Neuroscience hacks to Work Smarter, Better, Happier with Hans W. Hagemann.

Like Elissa Peel’s book, Friederike Fabritius explains the story of our stress system and why it’s necessary. The authors explain the arousal system defined by Yerkes et Dodson at the beginning of the twentieth century.

The two psychologists [Yerkes & Dodson] were able to illustrate the relationship between arousal and performance on a remarkably simple graph that has come to be known as the Inverted U.

For the authors, there’s no universal standard for optimum arousal. Why ?

The short answer is that we can’t really say. The longer answer is that it can vary dramatically from person to person and from one task or situation to another. There’s no universal standard for optimum arousal. In that respect, arousal has a lot in common with spicy food.

I like lot of key points from « Find your sweet spot ». One of them is about task switching as I wrote on my post Le multitâche, cette lubie qui nous grille le cerveau.

Zero in on what’s important. Peak performance never comes when you’re doing more than one thing at a time. Only when you are in a state of focused attention, working single-mindedly without constant interruptions, is it possible to perform optimally.

It’s an other reason to use the Kanban of Lean Management / TPS. One piece after one piece system, known as one-piece-flow in Lean Management.

I like the second chapter « Regulate your emotions ». Not because the authors used Zinedine Yazid Zidane in an exemple, but because there is lot of explanations to understand our brain and stress system.

Its primary business is to keep you alive. So you’ll have to forgive it for being a little oversensitive whenever it gets even an inkling of something that might put you in jeopardy. Like a bodyguard with an itchy trigger finger, it shoots first and asks questions later.

Our stress is like the software in the Voyager I space probe (1977):

Many of the threats that primitive humans faced are no longer a factor, but the software that was designed to respond to them is still up and running.

A dinosaur in our brain. How to stop it?

The challenge is to develop a way for the brain’s more sensible system to step in before your primitive brain gets you in trouble. By the way, trouble typically comes in two basic forms: 1) the emotional outburst that everyone notices and 2) the more subtle inhibitory response when the cerebral cortex intercedes and attempts to hold down the brain’s angry dinosaur before it does permanent damage.

As the first chapter, I like some key points:

Try Cognitive Jujitsu. The best way to cope with stress is to treat it the way experienced martial artists handle their opponents. Instead of fighting it directly, deflect it, by using its strength to your advantage through labeling or reframing.

The next key point is a truth. But with our way of life, do this it’s a real difficulty. Yet it’s our life…

Emotional resilience. To build up your resistance to the potential ravages of stress, you need to eat well, exercise, and get sufficient sleep.

I’m really happy to see Kaizen in this book because my hobby today is to explain the benefits of true Lean Management with neurosciences.

Changing almost any routine, whether it involves how you do your work, the way you structure your day, or even what you eat at mealtime, requires additional conscious effort and, with it, additional energy. Aroused from its comfortable complacency, your brain sounds the alarm by awakening the watchdog of your limbic system, the amygdala, which triggers your threat response.
The secret of kaizen is that it operates below the radar of your brain’s threat response.

Yes, yes and yes! Thank you Friederike Fabritius for that! Wow, it’s a great book. I let you discover last chapters.

You can follow Friederike Fabritius here (website), here (keynotes) and here (blog).

I strongly recommend these 2 books to answer the question: How to use good stress to perform?

Note: Sorry for my English… It’s my first post with this language. I work on it 😉