I had my annual physical and mentioned to the doctor that my lower legs hurt when I lay down in bed.  He looked me over and instead of offering a new pill to take, he told me to read a meditation book, destressifying, by davidji.  I said, “Sounds like a good idea”, and promptly forgot it ten minutes after I left his office.  Then, two weeks later, while visiting a former co-worker in Scotland, she handed me the same book and said that it changed her life.  It felt like a divine intervention was occurring, so I read the book.  It’s fantastic and loaded with collaterals applicable to Applied Leadership.

The book is divided into two unequal halves.  The first 40 pages provides a clinical description of what causes stress and how the brain deals with it. The remainder and bulk of the book explains how each of us has the capacity to manage stress through various techniques.

In my seminar, I talk about how stress can cannibalize the capacity of an organization, and why it’s critical to set priorities for people, and help them with pacing of activities.  Davidji makes an important distinction between good stress (“eustress”) and bad stress (“distress”).  If something stresses us (a “stressor”) and we believe the situation is positive (like delivering a career-making presentation) and we believe it’s a worthy endeavor that will benefit us, then that stress is actually good for us.  Eustress grows our hippocampus – the part of the brain responsible for creating memories – and it leads to faster learning, better retention, and expanded awareness. If the stressor is for a short duration, we move into our optimal performance “zone” or “flow”.

However, if the stressor is extended for a long period of time, or we perceive it to be negative, regardless of duration, then we succumb to anxiety and our performance wanes. Left unabated, this stress drives a “fight-or-flight” response with excessive secretion of cortisol, adrenalin, and glucagon.  Long term, such stress impairs the prefrontal cortex, clouds memory, and leads to poor goal achievement, harsh attitudes, lack of clarity, an overwhelmed state, and illnesses such as diabetes.  Close to home, we have all seen good people at work get misaligned for one reason or another, and start to exhibit destructive behaviors where they become their own worst enemy, eventually committing career suicide.  We often wonder, “Why don’t they see what they’re doing to themselves?”, but that’s the manifestation of prolonged “distress”.

There are also echoes of davidji’s work in Applied Leadership’s Performance Management model.  We talk about the all-powerful need for goals and targets in an organization – ones that employees can visualize themselves achieving.  The objective is to keep employees in the “zone” of maximum performance – just enough challenge to focus their efforts on the task at hand, but not so much as to cause them to be overwhelmed.  That fine line is the difference between eustress and distress.  We now have a clinical explanation for why unreasonable targets create a culture laced with “fear of failure” that ultimately causes an organization to under-achieve on everything.

Distress can also occur in background conversations that cause us to “awfulize” or become “hijacked”.  Davidji explains why the amygdala becomes activated in such situations and shuts down the medial prefrontal cortex, leaving us with reactions based on unfiltered emotion.  Interestingly, he describes how the presence of estrogen can relax emotional triggers, while testosterone intensifies them.  It’s all about how these two hormones impact the neurological uptake of oxytocin, the “feel-good” neurotransmitter.  As he states, “loves conquers stress”.

Lastly, the correlation with Applied Leadership’s element on Boundaries is multi-faceted.  The connection is clear in the situation when management has not provided policies about what’s right or wrong in terms of employee behavior.  Leaving it up to each employee to interpret management’s expectations is a sure-fired way to drive all of the deleterious aspects of “distress” in employees. More subtle, however, is the impact of creating an inclusive environment in an organization.  Telling employees that they have a bad attitude does nothing but heighten “distress”, while enriching their jobs with new learning opportunities creates a state of “eustress” where they learn more and demonstrate the confidence, determination, and commitment to challenge themselves to achieve their fullest potential.

Honestly, davidji’s work is not the “Holy Grail” of leadership insights, but’s it’s not far from it.  At the very least, I recommend reading the first 40 pages as it provides knowledge, and knowledge is power because it enables access to choice.  Leaders choose to manage themselves to be the very best they can be.