Dinosaur brains and managing stress - excerpt from Dinosaur Brains: Dealing with All Those Impossible People at Work

Nation's Business, Nov, 1989 by Albert J. Bernstein, Sydney Craft Rozen

Dinosaur Brains And Managing Stress

Inside each human brain lurks the brain of a dinosaur--irrational, emotional, easily enraged--waiting to take control.

Individuals who tend to allow their Dinosaur Brains to control their lives are also most likely to succumb to stress-related disorders.

Some people automatically consider job stress dangerous and bad, but stress is what's happening out there in the world. It can be deadlines, phones ringing, too many job demands, too many meetings, or the ever-present difficulties of dealing with other people.

We can't really define stress in absolute terms. Instead, it has to be defined by its effects on people.

Some people see a threat and act on it; others react. It is their internal response that causes the problem. [The] inappropriate triggering of the "fight, flight, or fright" response creates potentially harmful changes, such as increased heart and breathing rates, overworked adrenal glands, tense muscles, and so forth.

This response often leaves people physiologically in the state of going uphill in high gear, which causes a great deal of stress on the body and the psyche.

The level of arousal can be measured, and this level determines how stressful a particular situation is to a person. It's important to measure these responses, because it's often possible for people to deny that stress has any effect on them. Your family doctor or mental-health practitioner can give you information about how to measure your level of arousal. A simple method is to be aware of an accelerated heartbeat and count your pulse rate. Muscle tension, especially in the neck and shoulders and around the jaws, is another sign of hyperarousal. High blood pressure can be another indication.

Over time, it's possible to learn to lower your response to stress. This process is known as coping. People use all sorts of coping strategies, some of which are healthy and make them stronger, but others undermine their ability to deal with stress.

Most of you have seen that stress test on which you assign points to life changes, and if you get too many points, you're supposed to have a nervous breakdown within a year.

Recently there was a study of executives who scored very high on the life-change scale but did not get sick. These managers were called stress-hardy. They seemed to flourish in situations that would severely damage other people. How did they do it? Their most effective coping strategy was a set of beliefs about life and the job. Central were beliefs about:

Control. These executives believed that what they did made a difference in the overall scheme of things and never considered that their problems were someone else's fault.

Commitment. The hardy managers felt that they were where they should be. They had not necessarily achieved all the success that they wanted, but they felt that they were in the right line of work and the right relationships and had the right hobbies. This feeling resulted less from believing they had made lucky choices than from their tendency to really get behind their decisions once they were made.

Challenge. The hardy executives regarded setbacks as problems to be solved rather than as catastrophes. They were likely to respond to a loss in one area of their lives by taking on a challenge in another area, such as coping with divorce by learning a foreign language. These people had the capacity to soothe themselves through self-improvement.

You can learn to be hardier by acting as if you see life in the way that these executives did. Acting as if you're in control is just as good as being in control.

The bad news is that studies also show that people who most need stress-hardiness tend to prevent themselves from making the changes that would help them. They read [an article] like this and respond by thinking, "I'll do it tomorrow," or "I already know all that, but it doesn't really apply in my case," or "I don't have time." All of these excuses come straight from the part of the Dinosaur Brain that tries to protect you from new ideas.

Some coping strategies are especially unhealthy because they tend to increase your arousal over the long run. Drugs and alcohol immediately come to mind. These strategies also include getting angry, looking at a problem to decide whose fault it is, organizing your job so that it's never finished (the workaholic syndrome), and avoiding the difficult parts of your job by forgetting or being too busy to deal with them.

How should you deal with stress?

All of the stress-hardy attitudes discussed here aren't necessarily the beliefs people were born with. You can learn them and practice them daily. Studies show that people who adopt these attitudes and work with them tend to be much more resistant to stresses of all kinds.

1. Maintain a positive attitude. How you see the situations of your life determines whether those events are stressful and how much negative arousal you're going to experience. It's what you tell yourself about the world--not the world itself--that causes problems.