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Developing resilience to stress

Posted on | June 26, 2012 | No Comments

Extensive research has been carried out on the subjects of stress and fatigue and the best ways to combat them. One such research on mental toughness and its correspondence to psychological profile had some interesting findings that we excerpt below.

A tough person sees an opportunity as a gain and novelty as a challenge. On the contrary, an untoughened person sees opportunities as potential harm or dreadful threats.

The most interesting aspect of this research into toughness is related to the different physiological state – whether the person sees novelty as a threat or challenge.

Some scientists believe that we can train toughness. In fact, they have researched extensively on the subject and found out that resilience to stress can be built over time by experiencing stress.

For instance, sport scientists are aware that an athlete’s capacity can be enhanced by a regular training process that pressurizes the muscles and the cardiovascular system to an extent of mild damage to tissues, followed by a period of rest and recovery. In short, the completion of the stress and recovery process  expands the productive capacity of an athlete.

Likewise, the scientists researching on toughening have concluded that a similar process of challenge and stress followed by periods of recovery can fine-tune a human brain and nervous system such that a person will start seeing stress agents with resilience.

How to beat anxiety, fatigue, and stress?

Most of us, when stressed, try to take a break or go on a vacation to rejuvenate our energy resources. Exhaustion is an inevitable part of life. However, you partying all-night and being exhausted is not the cause of mental fatigue. According to scientists, if we merely change the activities we can beat mental fatigue. This would not be the case if our energy reserves were exhausted.

According to a recently developed model in Neuroscience, fatigue is body or brain’s mechanism to convey that we are not performing as per our expected return. For instance, if you are engaged in an activity of search and are unable to come up with the results, your brain via the sign of fatigue will convey you that you are wasting time and probe you to see elsewhere.

How to cure fatigue? Take on new tasks!

The cure for such a mental fatigue is no vacation or rest, but a fresh task.  Backing this is data that shows that gradually work related illness such as hypertension are not work inflicted but occurs because we lose our control over the allocation of attention. If the management grants the flexibility to workers to choose what to work on and when to work on, worker fatigue can reduce. The management will also be happy, as workers will approach each task with renewed enthusiasm. In short, keeping a track of our bodily signal can prepare us on how to deal with fatigue. In such instances, the novelty would be rejuvenating.

However, what if a person is suffering from chronic stress. If you give such a person a novelty task, he would be uncertain of what to do and expect. A separate study highlights that under chronic stress, the body needs familiarity and not novelty. However, most often, when chronic stress crops up at work, we plan a vacation to some unknown place. The idea is to change the scenario for rejuvenation, which just holds true when in normal situations. However, when a person is highly stressed, the novelty will only add further to the mental load. Therefore, it is good to spend your time in familiar zones with family and friends and not to some far-off locations.

The real task is to understand our bodily signals, fatigue, or stress, and train our mind to be resilient.

Adapted from an article, Retraining Your Response to Stress and Mental Fatigue, on Fast Company

Category: Career Tips

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