STRESSILIENT EB

Dr Sam Akbar

• Publisher: Fourth Estate
• Year: 2022
• Print ISBN: 9780008448059
• eBook ISBN: 9780008448066
• Topic: Personal Development
• Subtopic: Applied Psychology

'…short, sharp guide to managing your mind.' THE SUNDAY TIMES STYLE

'If I could inject it, I would.' REFINERY29

'Brilliant' THE TELEGRAPH

Manage your mind. Handle your emotions. Concentrate on what matters in life.

So many of us feel stressed in our daily lives but lack the ability to respond to life's hurdles effectively and overcome these challenges. We can build resilience to stress by taking action to live our lives in a more meaningful way.

The answer is to become stressilient.

Dr Sam Akbar will show you how. As a clinical psychologist with over ten years of experience, Dr Sam draws from her own professional expertise to provide sensitive and realistic guidance to feel calmer, less stressed, and more resilient to life's challenges.

From understanding how your brain works, managing your emotions and challenging your thought-processes, to opening up your perspective and having more self-compassion, Stressilient offers an indispensable, easy and effective go-to guide to help you get from surviving to thriving.

Chapter 1

How To Manage Your Mind: Brain 101

‘I used to think the brain was the most important organ in the body, until I realised who was telling me that.’

EMO PHILIPS, COMEDIAN

One of the most effective things I do in therapy is to explain how the brain works. If you are going to get the best out of your brain, then you need to know a little bit more about that thing sitting between your ears. It’s the most powerful machine in the world, yet we really don’t understand how to manage it. Someone needs to hand out instruction manuals at birth. Read on for the lowdown on the brain.

The Beginning

Cast your mind back. Imagine you are a cavewoman sitting outside your cave, enjoying a beautiful sunset, with a gentle smile on your face.

Now imagine being torn to shreds by the bear hiding in the trees by your cave. Because that’s what happened to people who sat around chilling out. They got mauled by bears. Or lions. Or whatever roamed about looking for human snacks.

Our ancestors survived, and passed on their genes, by being super-duper hypervigilant and looking out for danger everywhere. They were a nervy bunch. But it made sense, if you think about the very real threats to physical survival back then. Better to be safe than sorry and all that.

No matter that a lot of the time you didn’t really see a snake in the corner of your cave, just your handbag strap (they had bags, right?), it still paid off to be very, very cautious and so your brain evolved into a highly alert ‘don’t get killed’ machine. That’s its job, and it’s why your ancestors survived and why you are here. So, thanks for that, ancestors.

Now it gets trickier. As humans began to live in groups for survival they fared better. They were safer and more likely to survive and pass on their genes.

So now, the other crucial concern our great, great, great etc. grandmothers had was not to get shunned by the group. We simply wouldn’t have survived in those conditions on our own – who would kill something for us to eat if we were alone and poorly? A bit like getting someone to nip out to Tesco for you when you’re self-isolating. Or hungover.

In Gear For Fear

Your brain is in gear for fear and the bit of the brain most responsible for that is your amygdala. The amygdala, an unassuming little thing the size of an almond, kickstarts you into action if it thinks there’s a clear and present threat. It shouts ‘This is not a drill!’ very loudly in your brain. It’s one of the bits of your brain which evolved first and its main interest is survival because that’s the only thing which mattered. Your amygdala will put your brain and your body into high alert by initiating the fight or flight response. Your amygdala is important, and has helped humans to survive and evolve, but it’s not the most sophisticated protagonist in your brain. It acts first and doesn’t really ask any questions later.

The fight or flight response is evolution’s way of keeping you alive. If you sense danger then you either need to leg it or put up a fight – all your physiological responses are geared to doing this. Your muscles tense, your heart beats faster, your breathing becomes shallow, your thoughts race …hang on … isn’t that anxiety? Yes. The symptoms of anxiety are the same because, well, they’re kind of the same thing. Your brain will respond in the same way to modern day threats or stress (fears about coronavirus, work, family, status, money, health, being rejected – you name it) in a similar way to being attacked by bears. Hence being very worried about public speaking in front of your boss or overthinking a relationship crisis can trigger a fight or flight response.

The Wise Woman In Your Brain

If only you had a pal in your brain to help calm your amygdala down and manage stress … Well, you do! Your prefrontal cortex is like the wise woman of your brain. I like to imagine mine as Michelle Obama but you could choose, say, Ruth Bader Ginsberg or Maya Angelou. It’s situated just behind your forehead. You can give it a little stroke if you like, to show your appreciation.

The PFC is what makes us uniquely human. It’s the ‘new’ part of the brain, the part that has evolved more recently as we have started to live in more complex groups. Unlike your amygdala, this is the sophisticated part of the brain. This newer part of the brain can solve problems, plan ahead and inhibit impulses. It’s the part that has helped scientists find a vaccine for Covid-19.

The PFC has access to information from your current situation and your past, so it can help you make good, effective choices in the face of stress. The problem is that it responds more slowly in the face of a threat than your amygdala which has activated your fight or flight system before you can even say prefrontal cortex. But don’t panic, I will be showing you how to keep your amygdala in check so you can use your PFC buddy to better effect.

So your PFC is just super but – of course there’s a but – its ability to think about what will happen in the future (which is what problem-solving is) and to have access to past experiences mean that it’s also the part of us that can agonise about the past, catastrophise about the future and compare ourselves unfavourably with others.

This Modern Life

So, we’ve got a problem. Our old brains are still geared for fear plus we have new brains which can worry about the future and agonise about the past. But there’s no sabre-toothed tigers or lions or snakes anymore. There’s something worse: the modern world.

To our minds, the modern world has as many threats as it has ever done. And we respond in similar ways which aren’t always that helpful. A cavewoman looks out for life-threatening danger and our modern minds do the same by asking ‘What if I fail? Is it worth the risk?’ A cavewoman doesn’t use up energy unless it’s crucial. Our modern minds tell us not to risk something unless we can be sure of the outcome.

A cavewoman thinks ‘I am not foraging in there, my friend. It went horribly wrong last time.’ Our modern minds say ‘Who do you think you are? Once a failure, always a failure.’ Add in a sprinkling of comparing yourself to others on social media (because you are built to fear rejection by the group), and your mind will go into threat overdrive.

So your mind isn’t trying to screw you and your life plan up, it’s trying to save you from pain, because that’s what it’s evolved to do, but it’s making a bit of a hash of it. Now that you know that your mind is well-meaning but anti-risk in any form, you can handle some of the stuff it comes out with more effectively so it doesn’t hold you back. You can absolutely learn to manage your amygdala and get the best out of your PFC to respond effectively to stress.

In the following chapters I am going to teach you the skills that are crucial to being stressilient in the modern world – how to manage your thoughts and feelings so they don’t hold you back, and how to live a better, more fulfilling life in the face of stress.

BOTTOM LINE

Brains are evolved to spot danger and to protect you from harm. This is great when chased by tigers, lions and bears, but less good when tackling modern day threats.

Old Brains (Don’t get killed/rejected) + New Brains (What if I get rejected like last time/What if I get killed) + Modern Life (I will fail, I am a loser, I can’t do this) = Tricky Minds which need managing properly with approaches based on science. Now that’s a bumper sticker I’d like.

Chapter 2

How To Think Better

‘Make not your thoughts your prisons.’

WILLIAM SHAKESPEARE, ANTHONY AND CLEOPATRA, ACT V, SCENE II

It all starts with your mind and the stuff that goes on in it – thoughts, memories, images. The biggest mistake I see people make is trying to change their lives without first learning how to manage their thoughts. If you don’t learn to think a little better, your mind will pull you off track every time. In this chapter I will explain why the things you usually do to deal with unwanted thoughts, memories and images don’t work, and what to do instead.

So, now you know that your brain is primed to look for danger and to warn you (a lot) about threats to your well-being in the modern world. You also know that your brain is very good at solving problems (even harder ones than fiendish sudoku) – it is, in fact, a problem-solving machine whose main aim is to not get killed. And that’s ok as problem-solving works very well in the external or physical world but less well in our inner worlds.

Problem-Solving Brains

Imagine a problem you have had recently – running late for a meeting, wanting to fix a leak in your roof, finding a hole in your shoe. Did your mind go to work on this problem and come up with solutions? Ring to say you will be late, call someone to fix the roof, take your shoe to the cobbler? All of them damn fine, tip-top solutions. So far, so good.

But here’s the problem. We then tend to ask our problem-solving minds to also deal with the maelstrom of stuff which goes on inside us, namely thoughts, memories, images, feelings, urges and physical sensations.

I am such a loser. I am a failure. I can’t do this. Had one of those lately? I am willing to bet you have. How do I know? Because nearly all of us do. Take a sneaky sideways glance at the person sitting next to you while you read this – maybe you are at work, or home or on the tube, or staring out of the window while we are in lockdown #86 – I can guarantee you that at one time or another they have had these thoughts too. Kerry in IT might seem like she’s got her life totally sorted with her ever-positive outlook and effortless capsule wardrobe, but her mind will be giving her a beating at times, just like your mind does.

And what do you try to do with the evaluations, comparisons, judgements and reasons your mind comes up with? You try to fix or change them. You try to talk yourself out of them or you berate yourself for having them in the first place. Your mind argues both sides until you are walking around the street waving your arms while muttering darkly to yourself as other people start to cross the road. Or so I’ve heard.

Cageing Thoughts

Attempting to change, avoid, get rid of or escape unwanted thoughts largely doesn’t work, but we do it anyway because a) we are hardwired to (see previous chapter), b) society tells us not to have negative thoughts and c) no one shows us an alternative. I can’t do much about a) and b), but I am going to step up on c). I am going to call this attempt to manage your thoughts C.A.G.E:

Change

Avoid

Get rid

Eliminate

It’s not a proper psychology self-help book if I don’t invent an acronym.

I want to show you why fighting with your unwanted thoughts doesn’t work. Try something out with me. Don’t think about a white furry bear. Just don’t think about that big white bear lumbering across the frozen north. Nope, just don’t think about it. Just think about something else, anything else but that white bear.

So? How did you get on? Thought so. White bears everywhere.

This phenomenon was investigated by Daniel Wegner, a professor of psychology at Harvard, after coming across this line in Dostoyevsky’s account of his travels in Europe:

‘Try to pose for yourself this task: not to think of a polar bear, and you will see that the cursed thing will come to mind every minute.’

Wegner decided to investigate this in his lab. He found that asking people to suppress the bear actually brought it to their minds more intensely and frequently. Not only that, but trying to suppress an image of the bear meant people had to then think about the bear in order to check that they were not thinking about it in the first place.

You can see where I am going with this. The more we push unwanted thoughts out of our mind, the more they rebound on us. The more you try to push away ‘I am a loser’, ‘I am ugly’, ‘I am fat’, ‘I am worthless’, ‘I am a failure’, the more they come back and hit you in the face. And when you try not to think about it, you have to check you aren’t thinking about it, which means you are, in fact, doing the actual thing you are trying very hard not to do.

Cognitive Fusion

Getting totally tangled up in your thoughts like this is called cognitive fusion. It’s like being stuck to your thoughts – think of a mouse caught on those sticky traps. The problem with being fused, or stuck, with your thoughts is that it stops you from taking action in your life, rather like the aforementioned mouse. Your thoughts, and what they say you can and cannot do, are calling the shots in your life. When you are in a state of fusion with your thoughts you aren’t present because you are too preoccupied with trying to CAGE them. And that means you aren’t present, you aren’t living in line with your values and you aren’t taking effective action to actually do something differently.

But It’s True!

Look, we are very concerned with what is true and what isn’t in the external world. And that’s a good thing. Seeing a red traffic light and thinking ‘I won’t speed through it’ is a good thing. Reminding yourself you need to do your tax returns is wise. You get my drift.

The key thing to remember is that it doesn’t matter whether your thoughts are true or not. I’ll just let that sink in for a minute because most people find this hard to begin with, pleading ‘But it is true!’.

Where we need to let go of whether thoughts are true or not is when they are evaluations, judgements, opinions, reasons and criticisms. Let’s say you think that you are anxious about public speaking. That may be true. Ideally, you would take concrete steps to improve your public speaking skills if that was something that mattered to you. But too often this will happen instead:

‘I’m not good at public speaking, I get too nervous. Now I have this presentation to do in front of my boss tomorrow. I know I’ll blow it, I can picture myself turning red and stumbling over my words, and all my colleagues will be sniggering, especially Kerry from IT. I’m such a loser and a failure. I definitely will not get a promotion after this. I can’t stand feeling like this. Maybe I’ll be made redundant after the next round of cuts, which is definitely coming. What if I can’t pay the mortgage? Is there enough in my savings to survive for a few months while I look for another job? I’d better research whether I can take a mortgage break. I’ll have a quick look on Google even though I should prepare for tomorrow. Maybe I need to think about moving in with my parents for a bit. God, what will everyone say if I mo...

Table of contents

• Title Page
• Copyright
• Dedication
• Contents
• Introduction
• How To Use This Book
• 1. How To Manage Your Mind: Brain 101
• 2. How To Think Better
• 3. How To Feel Better
• 4. How To Take Perspective
• 5. How To Be Right Here, Right Now
• 6. How To Live Better
• 7. How To Take Action
• 8. How To Be Self-Compassionate
• 9. How To Make Sense Of Yourself
• 10. How To Bring It All Together
• References
• Acknowledgements
• About the Author
• About the Publisher