Chronic stress floods your body with cortisol and damages mental health, but resilience is learnable. The SAS uses 4-box breathing: inhale 4 seconds, hold 4, exhale 4, hold 4. Exercise releases endorphins that lift mood. Find what calms you.
How many times have you heard people saying, "I'm really stressed"? How many times do you hear yourself saying it? A certain level of stress increases performance, but when it gets out of control, that's when we start to get problems. Your genes moderate your susceptibility to stress. Chronic exposure to cortisol, the stress hormone, can result in anxiety, depression, and other mental health issues for you and for your team members. Resilience can be learned and developed through good relationships with others, having autonomy and sense of purpose at work, and the ability to identify and express difficult emotions. Now, there is no magic hack that works for everyone. Sorry. So if people tell you otherwise, ain't true. Finding your way to calm is the best way to reduce stress. The most common neurobiological hacks for stress include 4-box breathing. So breathing in for 4 through your nose, holding for 4, then exhaling for 4 through your mouth, then holding for 4, then inhaling again through your nose and repeating. So that's what the SAS use. The second most popular neurobiological hack for stress relief is exercise, which releases lots of feel-good endorphins as well. Anyway, I'm off to the
