What are you working on now?
It may sound a bit grandiose, but I’m searching for ways to help enhance global resilience and well-being. Nearer to home, here at the Mayo Clinic, I’m helping patients cope better with their illnesses; working to prevent illness in the first place, which is part of my motivation for teaching people about stress; and helping enhance the resilience of caregivers. Being involved in student life and wellness, I’m trying to improve student and teacher engagement and, yes, decrease the stressfulness of that engagement. And I’m working to prevent, and even reverse, professional burnout among healthcare professions. RELATED: The United States of Stress: You’ll Never Think About Stress the Same Way Again
From your own research or that of others, what have you learned about stress that you didn’t know or that surprised you?
Here’s what I didn’t know when I started on this path of research and study:
Even a little daily stress can have adverse metabolic consequences.After a particularly stressful episode, your risk of death and heart attack goes up several fold for a few hours.Not only does our response to stressors — real and perceived — start with the brain, but in the form of chronic, toxic stress, it ends up harming the brain. It’s a kind of perfect feedback loop.
We all need to be better informed about stress. In a sentence, what should we know to increase our stress IQ?
The kind of stress — the stressing out — that endangers our well-being comes from a demand-resource imbalance, a lack of control, and a lack of meaning in our lives.
What would you recommend to help people lower their daily stress levels and function better in the midst of a stressful situation, incident, or moment?
I actually have three recommendations that, I believe, will work in both situations:
Assume that everyone around you is struggling and special. Be kind.If it won’t matter in five years, it isn’t worth stressing out about today.Sometimes a step back can be a move forward. An adversity may be preventing a catastrophe.
Have you ever experienced a meltdown? If so, where and why?
I probably have, but I can’t recall the last time.
