I am busy executive with a challenging job. How is brain fitness relevant to me?

Here is ques­tion 21 from Brain Fit­ness 101: Answers to Your Top 25 Ques­tions.

Question:

I am busy exec­u­tive with a chal­leng­ing job. How is brain fit­ness rel­e­vant to me?

Key Points:

• Reduce your stress to improve con­cen­tra­tion and learn­ing readi­ness and reduce distractions.
• Increase your men­tal stim­u­la­tion to help main­tain a healthy, flex­i­ble brain.

Answer:

Exec­u­tives, or any­one involved in com­plex and rapid­ly evolv­ing envi­ron­ments, need to make pres­sured deci­sions based on sound log­ic, instead of emo­tion­al impuls­es. It is not easy to deal with the frus­tra­tion, for exam­ple, when the mar­ket does­n’t go the way we antic­i­pate. Stress can also lim­it our men­tal flex­i­bil­i­ty and abil­i­ty to see alter­na­tive solu­tions, there­by pre­vent­ing us from adapt­ing to, and suc­ceed­ing in, new circumstances.

Stress is an unavoid­able con­se­quence of life. But when work stress becomes too much, it can lead to burnout, a com­bi­na­tion of:

• Emo­tion­al exhaustion,
• Phys­i­cal exhaus­tion, and
• Cog­ni­tive weari­ness (slow thinking).

Exces­sive stress also leads to var­i­ous car­diac, immune, and oth­er health prob­lems as well.

There is such thing as the “pos­i­tive”  stress you feel pre-game or pre-per­for­mance that helps you deliv­er the per­for­mance of your life. You may feel that same good stress at work if you are primed for an activ­i­ty that you can accom­plish right then and there. Short term, acute stress, known as the fight-or-flight response, can help you focus and per­form, if it is in the right amount. This kind of stress is short lived. You feel the jit­ters or adren­a­line for a peri­od of time, then you use it up accom­plish­ing your goal, and then you get to rest and recov­er while bask­ing in the glow of your accomplishment.

There are tools we can use to bet­ter man­age stress, such as the ones described in Best prac­tice for top trad­ing per­for­mance: biofeed­back (Freeze-Framer).

The Gen­er­al Adap­ta­tion Syn­drome (GAS) describes the long-term, nasty kind of stress that just does­nt go away. The kind of stress that par­a­lyzes you into inac­tion — where you just stare at the prob­lem and wor­ry about it with­out being able to do any­thing about it. This is the kind of stress that kills your neu­rons, destroys your immune and car­dio­vas­cu­lar sys­tems, and makes you anx­ious, irri­ta­ble, and unable to sleep. This is the kind that can be helped through a biofeed­back-based Peak Performance/Stress Man­age­ment pro­gram which pro­vides real-time visu­al feed­back on your “inter­nal per­for­mance” and helps you iden­ti­fy and learn how to man­age the emo­tion­al arousal that can dis­rupt exec­u­tive func­tions: judg­ment, plan­ning, ana­lyz­ing, and reasoning.

As with most things, there are lev­els of stress. While an opti­mal amount can help you, too much or too lit­tle can hurt. Find ways to help con­trol and low­er your long-term stress, such as biofeed­back based pro­grams (Freeze­Framer, emWave) or Mind­ful­ness-Based Stress Reduc­tion (MBSR) ones.

Further Reading

• Beg­ley, Sharon. Train Your Mind, Change Your Brain: How a New Sci­ence Reveals Our Extra­or­di­nary Poten­tial to Trans­form Our­selves. (Bal­lan­tine; 2007). ISBN 978–1400063901.
• Gold­berg, Elkhonon. The Wis­dom Para­dox: How Your Mind Can Grow Stronger As Your Brain Grows Old­er. (Gotham; 2006). ISBN 978–1592401871.
• McCraty R, Bar­rios-Choplin B, Roz­man D, Atkin­son M, Watkins A. The impact of a new emo­tion­al self-man­age­ment pro­gram on stress, emo­tions, heart rate vari­abil­i­ty, DHEA and cor­ti­sol. Inte­gra­tive Phys­i­o­log­i­cal and Behav­ioral Sci­ence. 1998;33:1515–70.
• Sapol­sky, Robert. Why Zebras Don’t Get Ulcers. (Owl Books; 2004). ISBN 978–0805073690.
• Brain Fit­ness: Shift Happens
• Brain Teas­er for Stress
• Stress Man­age­ment Work­shop for Inter­na­tion­al Wom­en’s Day