Highest Potential: How to Stop Overreacting

Our brains are powerful. We have the potential to shift into a positive mindset, but it's not as simple as it sounds. To access a positive mindset and mental toughness under pressure and during setbacks, we need self-awareness, emotional intelligence, and critical thinking skills. So if you're curious about science-backed tools to strengthen your mental resilience, you're in the right place. Welcome to the Mind Body Space Podcast. Where I aim to share actionable tools you can use to reach your highest potential. I'm Dr. Juna Bobby MD. I'm a mom of 2 kids who love challenges, for the most part, and I'm also a physician, and my specialty is teaching the science of resilience. In this episode, my awesome friend Fiona Murden joins me to share her expertise on human performance. Fiona is an award-winning author and Chartered UK Organizational Psychologist who works with top-level executives and leaders. Today we're discussing one of my favorite topics, the reactionary brain, or how not to overreact. This is one of my favorite topics because I tend to overreact sometimes. So we all have times when we overreact, and most of the time it's not in our best interest. So we're going to talk about evidence-based exercises that we can do to train ourselves to decrease overreacting to things that are not actually a threat and probably not the wisest thing to do in the moment and things that don't really help us with our overall goal and where we wanna go in life. Of course, sometimes we need to overreact in order to catch things that may be a danger to us. So our brains would much rather look at a garden hose and think it's a poisonous snake than the other way around. Because otherwise, if we didn't have this sort of reaction to dangers, we might miss something. And that wouldn't serve us in the long run evolutionarily in our survival. This is what psychologists call negativity bias. In other words, our brains would rather be safe than sorry. Hello, Fi, how are you?

Hi, Juna, I am good, thanks. How are you?

I'm good. So lovely to see you as usual, and hopefully in the future sometime soon, um, I might be videoing these. Oh, if you're okay with that.

Okay, I can make sure I've got my mascara on.

You look gorgeous as usual. All right, so today we're going to talk about the reactionary brain and how not to jump to conclusions or get into our overreaction, uh, brain, because obviously we all know it's hard to do that sometimes because psychologists call it negativity bias, right, where we kind of jump to negative thoughts. Naturally.

Yes.

So when you're working with C-level executives, which is what you do, how do you assess how reactive people are? And what are your recommendations when, you know, leaders become more overreactive in situations and it can throw them off their focus?

So there isn't a specific test, but you see a collection of behaviors that would lead to someone being more reactionary. Um, and I think the first, the first place we would look would be decision-making styles. So if someone is very action-oriented, for example, rather than reflective, uh, they're more likely to be reactionary. But, but there's different forms of it because there's what we would say is you can be action-oriented. I don't know if you have this expression in the States, shoot from the hip. Oh yes, yeah, so that's—

in fact, I thought that was an American thing, but I guess it's a British thing.

No, as I said it, I thought it probably is actually an American thing, isn't it? It's cowboys shooting from the hip. Um, but, but it's— that's when it gets into the more negative space, because you can have someone who's very action-oriented and they get things done. But you can have someone that lets their reactive brain or emotional brain lead their decision-making or their behavior, and that's when it becomes problematic.

And how, how can you tell about yourself? How do you become self-aware of how reactionary you are on a scale?

I think we— I think, I think we know because I think It's that feeling of, oh, I wish I hadn't said that, or I could have handled that differently, um, which we, we all get to an extent. But I think if you're getting it to— I mean, like everything with behavior and mindset, it's all on that sort of a spectrum. And if you're getting it to an extent that it's really problematic, or if other people are feeding back to you that it's problematic, that's when you need to look at it. Because we're all going to say things we wish we hadn't sometimes, or do things we think, oh, I wish I hadn't done that. It's making it less frequent is the key.

Do you use any kind of scales to measure that? Would you use like a scale of 1 to 10, or?

Not specifically. I mean, what you do is if you've got a leader who is being really emotional and not really thinking through the way they're responding, I mean, we'd call it being childish, actually, because there's another thing. Well, there's something called the transactional analysis, which is parent adult-child. And if you've got someone in parent or child, they're not behaving in a rational way. They're either telling and sort of directing from parent, or if they're in child, they're just very emotional. And you do see with a lot of leaders, they are emotional because that emotion has helped drive them to where they're at. But with some, it becomes exaggerated in leadership because no one's giving them feedback.

Yes.

Or not giving them the right feedback that they need, which means it becomes reinforced. Or they actually learn to moderate it, and that's the route you want them to take. But it's often the founders, so people that have set up their own companies— and this is a really massive generalization— but it tends to be the founders that are more reactionary and more emotional than it is the people who work for corporates.

Because founders generally are probably more emotional because they need that emotion to drive, uh, founding something which is usually very difficult and challenging.

And, and also they get less feedback because they don't have the structure to work within that you do in a corporate, where someone will say to you, look, you know, you want to go up to the next level, but if you behave like this, you're going to just annoy everyone and that's not going to help. Whereas if you're a founder, it's your company, you're leading it. If someone says something you don't like, you don't do business with them or you ignore them.

That's true.

And you just plow on doing it your way. And so it can get really, it can get quite problematic.

Interesting. Interesting. And now when you say childish, you know, I work with a lot of teenagers and, um, tweens. And so how would you go back to that age group and set some standards or mental exercises that they can do to strengthen this? Basically, we're talking about executive brain functioning, right? Because it's emotional regulation.

Yeah.

Would there be anything that you do as a parent and seeing executive-level professionals that you would recommend?

I mean, I think mindfulness is just brilliant for this. It's finding the route to use mindfulness that works for you. That's the key thing. Particularly teenagers, you know, they'll try mindfulness. Having said that, same with chief execs I work with, and they'll be like, no, no, no, no, it doesn't work for me. I can't sit still for that long.

Okay. You know what? Mindfulness has gotten such a bad rap because there's a lot of people who are just so turned off by that word now because it became such a buzzword. I think it has had a backlash.

And people misunderstand what it actually means.

Exactly.

If you do use it effectively, like through the sessions that you run, for example, Juna Bobby MD, if it's used effectively and if you find the one that works for you and if you stick with it, because it's like a skill, it's not something that you just give a few goes and suddenly it works. It's something you have to— because in effect you're exercising your brain. And if you want to strengthen that connection between the executive function of your brain, which is the bit that makes the nice rational decisions and the bit you don't sort of think, oh goodness, I wish I hadn't said that, because it's already decided what the best outcome would be and made— helped you think it through. It strengthens that connection with the limbic system or the emotional centres of the brain, which makes it easier to manage your emotions.

Mm-hmm. So kind of slowing down and doing that as a practice.

Yeah.

And going back to people having a reaction to it, so just last weekend when I started my classes, I always have one person who's like, I can't stand mindfulness, no, I can't do that, and then one person who absolutely loves it. So I tend to, um, stay with the science a bit so that it could appeal to both of those people. How do you present it to executives? That it's just a mental skill?

When I'm working with them, I tell them they have to do it.

So you send them off into the meditation room?

I send them off with something like Headspace, and then I pester them every day saying, "Are you doing it? Are you doing it yet?" I do explain the science as well. Yes, I do find that's a really effective way of helping people understand the point of doing it. But I also think it's finding the way that works for you. So it might be that Headspace works, it might be that it doesn't. It might be that doing some breathing work helps, or it might be like, no thank you. It might be that yoga works, or it might be, again, it might be, mm, not really me. But it might be even something like going for a run and using that consciously as the space to separate yourself from your emotions. But the quick— the quicker tips to doing this are to name your emotions. So I think we've talked about this before, Juna, so you know, and so I'm not telling you, I'm just sort of sharing with your audience.

Of course. No, but I always get something out of our conversations as well.

Oh, thank you. So do I. If you name an emotion, so for example, your little brother or sister comes in, you want to yell at them. You think, if I yell at them, I'm going to get privileges taken away from me by my parents. So I really shouldn't yell at them. You think, what are you— how do you feel? I can think of a few swear words, but we're not going to use those. So how do you feel? You say, I am really— I feel really angry, I feel frustrated, I feel annoyed because they always come in and whinge when I'm trying to do something. They're always trying to get attention. But you label those emotions, so You can even write them down or something. Frustrated, angry, irritated, annoyed. By doing that, firstly, you've slowed yourself down. You've stopped yourself reacting. Secondly, from a neurological, psychological perspective, you've stepped away from the emotion, which gives you enough of a space to then think through how you're going to respond.

Yes, absolutely. Just to add to that, you're literally moving your brain processing— we call that bottom-up processing— your limbic system, your emotional center, and moving it into your language processing centers, which are called Wernicke's and Brodmann's areas. But those are, you know, technical terms. But it's nice to know this anatomy even as a child, to know these words, because it does help to know that there's different parts of your brains that you can activate, you know. And I sound like Spock when I'm talking like this, but no, you don't. It's, it's a type of distraction almost, uh, where you distract yourself out of your bottom-up overreaction brain. As you were talking about, it's so important to label your emotions. And there's another trick that I learned from Search Inside Yourself, the Google mindfulness group. It's basically saying, I am feeling this emotion in my body. So you say, I feel angry in my stomach. I feel anger in my head, you know? And because neuroscientists have shown that emotions occur at the same time in your body as in your mind, in your brain, at the same exact time it's occurring. So that's another way to step away from that emotion. Of course, it's hard to do when you're in the moment.

It is hard to do, and it's particularly hard when you're a teenager because we know that that connection between those two areas, if we're taking it in broadest terms, the executive function and limbic system are not fully developed yet.

Yes.

So it makes it harder for a teenager than it does for someone who's in their late 20s.

I don't know, it's hard for me too, so maybe I'm stuck back there.

Yeah, me too.

So I usually say, I mean, it's so cliché, but taking that deep breath really works. Take those breaths and step away from the situation if you can. Thank you for that tip. And again, with the executives, I mean, you can't force them to be mindful because it's such a mental process. You can't really check in on them. Is there any way to measure it, or do you have them subjectively measure themselves before and after a mindfulness practice, maybe to convince them?

There is the subjective measure, and then there's also feedback. So the type of leader that will want a coach working with them who isn't a coach that just tells them what they want to hear— and you can guess I am not one of those—

What use is that kind of coach anyway, right?

It just makes things worse, I think, reinforces behaviors. But is to get feedback from colleagues, and that feedback can be all sorts of things. But I mean, fundamentally, it might just be on a scale of 1 to 10, how reactive do you think I am? And then you go away, you do some mindfulness, or you do some work on it, and then you come back and you say, on a scale of 1 to 10, how reactive do you think I am now? Or it could be that you use the, you know, an official 360 leadership, send it out to colleagues and you gather that information. But you should see a change occurring if someone is consciously working on that.

And what is the time frame? Like, when do you get that baseline? And do you say, I give you 2 months or 3 months? Do you have a time frame before you test them again?

Okay, with the 360, it would usually be 6 months. But you can— but we do the mini 360s, so the mini check-ins, sometimes they're called pulse surveys. Those are sort of really short, sharp. So if, for example, you've done, I don't know, say a set of 90 questions, the ones in between would just focus on the area you're working on. So you might have a set of 10 questions that just go out to those people again, and those could be all around how do I react in meetings, how do I respond when something makes me stressed, you know, some things that are very emotionally big.

And how— what is the time frame for those?

Yeah, that can be every 4 weeks, every 6 weeks.

Uh-huh. But I like that, that the longer version is 6 months. You give them time to really change and work on things. I love it. I want to try that in my household, right, with our kids. Get 360 with, um, at family dinners.

Yeah.

Or maybe that's not good to eat and talk about the stuff at At the same time, it probably causes indigestion, irritable bowel syndrome, and all of the above.

Yes.

Okay, thank you. That was so helpful. It's wonderful.

Thank you.

I love our conversations. So do I. I'll see you next time.

See you next time.

Thank you so much for listening. I hope you got as much out of it as I did. To support the creation of this content, subscribe and share this podcast with anyone curious about achieving their highest potential. Go check out Fi's website, fionamurden.com, to find out more about her podcast and award-winning books. And then go on over to mindbodyspace.com to sign up for my newsletter. You'll get tips from my unique neuroscience-based planner and courses developed from over 10 years of experience teaching high-performing students of all ages at Juilliard, NYU, Columbia, Achievement First, and many other organizations. Thanks again for spending this time with me. Until next time, this is Dr. Juna Bobby MD wishing you and your family wellness.