Stress Into Strength

Resilience Routines for Warriors, Wimps, and Everyone in Between

Nick Arnett

• Publisher: HarperCollins Leadership
• Year: 2021
• ISBN:
  9781400224739
• Topic: Personal Development
• Subtopic: Mental Health & Wellbeing

Turn debilitating stress into remarkable strength through proven resilience routines taught by a critical incident instructor and first responder leader.

Discovering and practicing your ideal rhythm of stress and renewal – physical, social, and spiritual – will enhance your health, strength, and resilience. Stress reactions are automatic, but to transform stress into strength, you need to become intentional about routines that activate your natural renewal systems. The proven tips throughout Stress Into Strength will help you do exactly that.

Nick Arnett has had distinguished, high-stress careers, including as a paramedic and firefighter with experience in domestic and international disasters, as well as in the corporate world as a software founder and executive. For more than 15 years, he has led and taught people how to be resilient through crises large and small.

In Stress Into Strength, you will learn how to:

• Let go once and for all of the stress myths that the human brain's "negative" bias reinforces.
• Gain insight into your personality-based stress reactions and channel any negative, knee jerk reactions into positive, long-term responses to overcome your biggest obstacles.
• Learn how to choose physical, social, and spiritual stress and renewal responses that will help make your more flexible and resilient.
• Learn tips on when to seek help with trauma, staying undaunted through crisis in the workplace, and even raising resilient children.

Transform your personal and professional life with insights gained from some of the most stressful professions you can imagine.

CHAPTER 1

realistic optimism

Strong and resilient people are “realistic optimists.” Inspirational experts in psychology, coaching, spirituality, and other fields say it various ways, but the idea is the same: those who weather the storms remain hopeful even as they face up to whatever life throws at them, without giving in to despair or denial.

Hope? Optimism? Sounds like someone isn’t paying attention. Headlines and social media are filled with violence, war, crime, terrorism, poverty, disease, hate crimes, nasty politics, rudeness, natural disasters. Life across the globe seems to get worse with each passing year.

But if you look at the bigger picture, you’ll see that that’s wrong.

Even with the world-changing troubles of the COVID-19 pandemic, we are far better off in many ways than our parents, and so is most of the rest of the world. Since 1955, incomes, corrected for inflation, have tripled. Food is much less expensive, more varied, and the possibility of having strangers cook our meals has become affordable to far more people. Today, far fewer of us die in wars, accidents, or from illnesses than ever in history. Poverty has been cut in half since the 1950s. Just 120 years ago, life expectancy was thirty to forty; now it is more than eighty. Crime, violence, and deaths from war have been dropping steadily for decades.

We live far better than royalty of a few hundred years ago, given how little we need to work for essentials (food, fuel, clothing, and shelter) and given the choices we have about diet, entertainment, information, transportation, work, and much more.

If life is so much better today, why doesn’t it feel that way? Why is it such a struggle to be happy and optimistic?

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A pessimist is one who makes difficulties of his opportunities and an optimist is one who makes opportunities of his difficulties.

—HARRY S. TRUMAN

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Thinking optimistically isn’t the same as feeling optimistic. Progress and success often fail to make us feel good because our brains react more strongly to bad news than to neutral or positive information. This is the negative bias I mentioned earlier. We are wired to feel our struggles more than our satisfaction. Our brains think it is reasonable to dwell on one negative comment or mistake even when the rest of our day is filled with success. For example, losing often is more upsetting than the happiness we get from winning the equivalent.¹

Our negative bias interferes with our natural renewal systems. We easily become the opposite of realistic optimists, ignoring our successes and focusing on what is or could go wrong, being mired in excess fear, regrets, resentment, and anxieties. Bad is stronger than good; negative voices are louder, including those in our own heads. But that doesn’t mean they must be obeyed. We instinctively see critical people as smarter than positive people, but the squeaky wheel doesn’t always have to get the grease.

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Your brain is like Velcro for negative experiences and Teflon for positive ones.

—RICK HANSON

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We reinforce one another’s negative biases, being quicker to believe bad news (true or not), better at remembering it, and more eager, clever, and creative about sharing it. When we have something negative to say, we use more words, tell more people, and repeat ourselves more often than when we praise or compliment. If a lot of people have a lot to say about a topic, they are likely to be unhappy, angry, fearful, frustrated, discouraged, or otherwise negative.

At one of the social media intelligence companies I cofounded, we discovered that by counting words and their variety (trivial to compute), we could tell with surprising accuracy if a movie review was positive or negative—people have more to say, with richer vocabulary, when they are negative. We also saw that when more people began to talk about a company, a stock price change often followed, more often down than up. I sometimes regret that I didn’t invest based on this observation before it became widely known.

Negative bias helps us survive in a dangerous world, but it is an obstacle to showing up, being present, and enjoying life. To be more resilient, we need to be able to ignore or turn it off when it isn’t helpful. But that doesn’t come naturally. When one bad thing happens, we illogically feel as though more bad things are likely to happen. We lose our optimism and become more cautious, suspicious, and distrusting. Those are appropriate some of the time, but they wear us down if we get stuck there.

Here is the most important negative bias effect to keep in mind: most bad things feel worse than they really are. Negatives get exaggerated. Even the fatigue you feel when you work hard is an exaggeration. You feel like you are spent long before you reach your actual limits, because the feeling of fatigue isn’t from your muscles; it’s a protective emotion from your brain.² Mental fatigue is more obviously an emotion because when one kind of task wears you out mentally, you usually will still have plenty of energy for a different mental task—playing a challenging game as a break from work, for example.

You are wise to be skeptical of those who stand to profit from tickling your negative bias. No matter what the topic, it is safe to assume that news media, politicians, salespeople, and marketers often exaggerate risk. This doesn’t even have to be intentional—those who fail to take advantage of our negative bias are not as successful as those who do; competition tends to weed them out.

Realistic optimism is not just a hope or expectation that things will turn out well; it is fuel for action, a deep, experience-driven feeling that things can work for good, that real change for the better is possible, inside and outside of yourself. It is belief, which may or may not be religious, in reconnection, re-creation, and redemption.

stress activators

Your brain’s stress autopilot constantly monitors your environment for patterns that signal the possibility of an opportunity, challenge, or threat to comfort, companionship, or meaning. It doesn’t react just to those; it is also sensitive to affiliation, on the lookout for the same in the people and things you care about. The more you care, the more it will react. For example, parents are deeply wired to care about their children, so they may even react more strongly to possibilities or harm to a child than to themselves.

The first step toward making your stress reactions more flexible, rather than sticky, is to notice what is happening. In this section, my goal is to help you become better at noticing what activates your stress reactions. As you become more aware of stressors and the state of your body and mind, you gain greater power to acknowledge and let go of the reactions when they are not serving you well.

Unless you are unusual, your brain is more sensitive to threats than to opportunities. Even a hint of a significant threat, especially if it touches an unhealed physical or emotional injury, will likely activate your stress autopilot. Its sensitivity increases and you become more reactive if you don’t experience renewal after stress. Genetics has built into us some of these autopilot-activating patterns; others we acquire from our experiences.

• Comfort—Material needs: health and fitness, food, water, shelter, money, tools, and “muscle memory” skills. Stress activation in this area urges you to protect and care for yourself and others physically—giving you energy to work, to avoid or deal with physical danger, eat when you are hungry, drink when you are thirsty, rest when you are tired, and so forth. If you lack important skills, your stress autopilot will react to what’s missing: the feeling of control that comes from mastery.
• Companionship—Social needs: friends, mentors, pets, leaders, status, reputation, as well as language and information that others provide. Stress activation in this area makes you feel suspicious of strangers, critical, ignored, embarrassed, excluded, unloved, abandoned, disrespected, distrusted, or lonely. Social stress is also triggered by grief, isolation, and worrying about what others think of you.
• Meaning—Spiritual needs: faith, values, wisdom, morals, ethics—thoughts and feelings that are rooted less in logic and more in love, compassion, and right or wrong. This helps you to choose goals, priorities, and values, to decide what you say yes or no to. Stress activation in this area makes your life seem empty, lacking meaning or purpose. Spiritual stress can be especially difficult when something that is “not supposed to happen” happens anyway, or something that is “supposed to happen” doesn’t. When you violate a “supposed to,” feeling guilt or shame is normal. When others do so, you may feel manipulated, betrayed, passionless, trapped, or even bored.

Your stress autopilot is emotional and automatic, not logical or deliberate. You were born knowing some life-enhancing and lifesaving patterns (for example, staying away from the edge of a cliff); you have absorbed others from your experiences. Even when there isn’t any actual risk, your autopilot may react to situations that resemble past stressful ones. If you were frequently criticized as a child and had to earn your parents’ affections, for example, your autopilot might regard getting any kind of feedback as a pattern calling for an automatic, defensive stress reaction. On the other hand, you may also instinctively trust and be drawn to people who resemble those who loved and cared for you (even when the resemblance is something you dislike).

The power of patterns to activate emotions is why fiction—books, movies, theater, simulations, and so forth—can make you happy, amused, sad, angry, frightened, or anxious, even though they are not literally true.

Stress activators can sneak up on you because your autopilot is far better at controlling than communicating. Its “thought process” is available to us only through dreams, instinct, intuition, and other nonverbal information.

Sensory reminders also can activate your stress reactions—if you are a war veteran who smelled burning oil wells during combat, you might grow tense at the odor of an asphalt plant. It’s not logical, just a familiar pattern. You may not even realize what provoked the reaction. Smells are especially powerful, but sights, sounds, stories, and even the calendar can activate a stress reaction.

Identification is a stress activator that can be difficult to recognize—you are wired to react to opportunities, challenges, or threats to people who resemble you or those you care about. For example, if you have a ten-year-old child, you almost certainly will feel a stronger stress reaction to seeing or hearing about injury or threat to a ten-year-old than somebody who doesn’t have a child that age. The greater the similarities, the stronger your reaction is likely to be. This can sneak up on you, as when your autopilot identifies with someone who resembles you in a way you don’t want to admit about yourself.

Unpredictability is a stress activator because it conflicts with your brain’s emotional desire for control. Your autopilot may strongly urge you to avoid the possibility of a negative surprise. You may tolerate or even seek out familiar, yet bad, experiences, re-creating unhealthy relationships and repeating mistakes rather than take a chance on the new and unknown. As the following story shows, even when an unpredictable event is in your favor, you can feel distress.

My friend felt responsible for a zip-line accident. He was clipping people onto the line, but his youth organization hadn’t fully trained him. He used the wrong harness loop on a big adult and it broke. The man fell twenty-five feet and barely survived.

The victim sued. Lawyers assured my friend that, as a volunteer for a nonprofit, there was no chance he would be held personally responsible. The parties settled out of court and that was the end of it. Yet, a couple of years later, he told me that the most difficult part for him was that there were no real consequences, no penalty (even though being sued and deposed had been stressful).

My friend’s brain, longing for predictability, was saying, “If you hurt someone, punishment should follow.” Anything else is unpredictable and therefore deserves a stress reaction.

Your autopilot influences your thinking far more than your thoughts can influence your autopilot. This book is not about controlling or ignoring your stress autopilot. Trying to control it is exhausting. Trying to ignore it is paralyzing. Own it, because it is not just a fearful, primitive, wild animal trapped in your modern mind, messing up your plans and priorities. Your stress reactions drive excitement, passion, achievement, romance, strength, growth, and much more, because, again, fear is not the only thing that makes our hearts race!

“your brain will do that”

My crisis intervention instructors included Dr. George S. Everly Jr., of Johns Hopkins University, one of the founders of the International Critical Incident Stress Foundation. Everly’s oft-repeated phrase, “Your brain will do that,” lodged deep in my mind. I have found myself repeating it to people in crisis when they wonder if they are going crazy.

My hope for you, as you read this chapter, is that you’ll come to appreciate that, as annoying, frustrating, and even angering as our stress reactions can be sometimes, they are what human brains do—and there’s always a good reason for them.

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Courage is resistance to fear, mastery of fear—not abs...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title Page
• Copyright
• Contents
• Introduction: Stress, Essential to Life
• Chapter 1: Realistic Optimism
• Chapter 2: Obstacles to Renewal—Living Disconnected
• Chapter 3: Building Your Flexibility
• Chapter 4: Physical Resilience Routines: Connecting to Things
• Chapter 5: Social Resilience Routines: Connecting With Others
• Chapter 6: Spiritual Resilience Routines: Connecting With Beliefs
• Chapter 7: Resilience After Trauma
• Afterword
• Acknowledgments
• Notes
• Other Resources
• Index
• About the Author