High levels of stress affects our ability to think and perform at our best and can actually start to make some areas of our brain deteriorate. Fortunately, rest helps the brain ‘grow back’ to normal function. How much rest do we need? Coincidentally, it takes four weeks for some brain regions to grow back to normal size. If you haven’t taken four weeks holiday in a while, now could be a good time to start.

In a study of medical students who crammed for three weeks before final exams, it was shown that their cortex (the part of the brain that learns, controls behaviour and helps us to think critically) actually began to shrink. A smaller cortex means less ability to do all the things that make you valuable in work and life and help you achieve your goals.

The student’s brains eventually returned to normal size, but only after four weeks of rest. While some long weekends and a few short breaks here and there help us to recharge in the short term, our long term brain health and our ability to perform requires us to have some longer breaks as well.

Here are some tips for making this more effective:

1)     Get away

If possible, get away. Away from work and away from home. This makes sure that there is no feeling of ‘oh, I really should be doing x’ around the home or home office

2)     Turn off the office

Set up your auto-responder and divert your phone. You might still see your email on your smart phone, but if you’ve set up an auto-reply, then you set the expectation for people that you won’t be getting replying until you are back from holidays.

3)     Spend time slowing down

Don’t go flat out every day on your holiday. Trying to cram things into your holiday can sometimes be as stressful as cramming them into your work day. Make sure you take time every day to stop and slow down. Maybe a long walk on the beach, or an hour reading a book – anything that takes your mind of

If you have the right inputs, you can create the right chemicals. You can create calming chemicals like serotonin or damaging, stress chemicals like cortisol.

To fight stress, the fuel we take in is critical. Here’s what we need: antioxidants to fight the damage that stress causes; omega 3 fats to rebuild cells and B-group vitamins to help produce calming chemicals that work in opposition to the stress response.

Antioxidants:

When we are under stress, we produce enormous amounts of energy and our cells (both body and brain) work overtime. This is why stress is exhausting. Just like a car, when we run our cells at high levels, high levels of by-products are also produced and it is these by-products (called free radicals) that eat away at our brain cells (and others) and hurt performance.

Antioxidants neutralise these free radicals. Foods high in antioxidants are coloured fruits and vegetables and berries. Article – 5 Foods Rich in Antioxidants

Omega 3 Fats:

Omega 3 Fats nourish our brains. After we are working overtime with the stress response, we need to repair the cells. We also need to make sure we have enough of the fuel that helps us to build new cell connections (this is learning) and lay down new behaviuors and habits. Omega 3 is that fuel.

Omega 3 Fats are found in some nuts, and fish such as salmon. Article – Best Omega 3 Foods

B-Group Vitamins:

These vitamins provide the inputs from which our calming chemicals are made. Like anything, if you don’t have enough ingredients, you can’t make enough of what you need. B-Group Vitamins, especially B6 and B12 are the ingredients for serotonin and GABA – the calming brain chemicals that help us to switch off the stress response so we can get back to normal.

Milk and milk products are one source of vitamin B. Article – Foods that are high in Vitamin B

The worst thing you can do when you are experiencing high level negative emotions is to try to suppress them. High-level emotion prevents us from thinking clearly, but so does trying to stop them, as our ‘emotional handbrake’ competes directly for resources with our rational brain. Research shows that the most immediate way to neutralise negative emotion is to write down succinctly what you are feeling. Describe it in three words or less and then get on with your day.

High-level emotions stop us from doing our best work. Our emotional centre, when switched on, actually causes our rational brain (the prefrontal cortex) to switch off. For some reason, we are hardwired so that these two regions cannot function at the same time. And usually it is the emotional area that gets the attention in these situations.

But the opposite is also true. When we switch on the rational brain, the emotional area starts to dampen down and this is something that most people don’t take full advantage of. Finding a succinct label for the emotion and writing it down seems to switch on the prefrontal area in such a way that it helps to switch off the emotional region.

Students with high levels of performance anxiety performed thirty percent better on exams when they were asked to succinctly describe their emotions (in written form) just prior to sitting the test.

Coffee can be your best friend or worst enemy. If you follow these simple rules, coffee just might help you boost performance.

Let’s get one thing straight. Unless you have a particular intolerance or allergy, coffee is not bad for you. In fact, in recent years coffee has been linked to a decrease in various cancers an increase in longevity, and even weight loss. From a performance standpoint, coffee increases alertness, brain activation and decreases the rate of perceived exertion (that is, things seem easier when we have caffeine on board).

Like most things, coffee can also have detrimental effects – and sometimes it’s the habits associated with coffee that bring you down.

So here are the coffee rules. If you want your daily fix to boost your performance, not make you sick, then follow these.

1) Five is too many

The ‘safe’ amount of caffeine you should consume in one day is generally accepted to be about 300mg.  For argument’s sake, the average espresso has about 100mg (see this article). Two coffees are fine. Three should be fine. If they are only weak (different cafes can be as low as 50mg) then four would just scrape in. But five is definitely too many. This will create ‘caffeine rebound’ and physical dependency

2) Water + Coffee = Clever

Coffee will dehydrate you. Whenever you have a coffee, try to drink at least the same volume of water. This will keep you hydrated and this is a pre-requisite for cells that need to perform (including brain cells)

3) Ditch the sugar

The caffeine is doing the work. Coffee can actually be a great pick me up, especially around that 2-3pm slump. You don’t need a sugar kick as well. It only adds calories and while the coffee is good for you, the processed sugar generally is not. You can end up with a ‘sugar high’ which is inevitably followed by a ‘sugar low’, and by spiking your blood sugar levels like this regularly, you can damage the energy producing structures in your cells, leaving you with less energy in the long term

4) Pull back on milk

Go for skim milk if you can – this will decrease the fat intake and also calories in your day. If you really must, a full-cream coffee once a day isn’t going to kill you. If you drink a really milky coffee, like a latte, then try to roll back to a flat white, which has less milk. If you are trying to lose weight, then ditch the milk altogether – maybe a short macchiato or a long black (again, one milky coffee a day won’t kill you)

5) There’s no such thing as a ‘good’ muffin

Often what makes coffee so bad for you is the treat that you have with it. Ditch the muffin (usually heaped full of sugar and butter) in favour of a healthier snack. Maybe fruit or some avocado on toast. If you must have something kind of sweet, try some fruit toast with just a hint of margarine.

6) What’s your cut-off time?

If you have trouble getting to sleep at night, then you might need to re-think that last coffee of the day. Now, some people can have a cup of Java an hour before bed and be fine. Others will feel the effects of that 4pm cup when it’s time to hit the pillow. Know your cut-off time, and if you really need something, go for peppermint tea as a natural pick-me-up, without the caffeine.

Coffee can be a great booster, social excuse and/or sometimes an excuse to get out of the office for ten minutes. If you follow these rules, then coffee will remain your friend. And not become your enemy.

A study recently showed that people who were allowed to use Facebook at work were actually more productive than those who weren�t. As astonishing as this sounds there might be some underlying reasons for this that sit at the heart of productivity. So let’s take a look at why his might happen and then what we can learn from it.

There are a number of conditions under which people are more productive and seem to work better. When I say work, I mean the sort of work that characterizes the information age. That is, creative thinking, problem solving and working smarter, not harder.

Being able to access Facebook during work hours helps to satisfy two of these conditions – autonomy and belonging.

Autonomy � having control over our own resources

It has been shown countless times that when people feel a sense of control or autonomy, they are better able to control stress, problem solve and think critically. Control over resources is important. When budgets are micromanaged and heavily prescribed, there isn’t a team in the world that doesn’t say “Heck! Why don’t they just give us the money and let us spend it the way we need to? We know better than anyone how to use the budget to its best effect!”

This holds true for most resources, including time. When we allow people to use their time how they want – without micromanaging or telling them what they can do and when – we might actually see them make better use of their time.

Most employees feel that they are experts at what they do – they do it every day – so they know how to best use their time. But is Facebook-ing the best use of time? If they’re using it to disconnect and recharge for a moment before working at high intensity again, then it could well be.

Belonging � Facebook feeds social connectedness

Social support and feeling connected to people is a major contributor to productivity. When people have a feeling of social support and connectedness, they are better able to handle stress and a decrease in stress leads to an increase in productivity. Take for example people who are about to undergo surgery. When people are merely able to hold the hand of someone they care about, the stress reaction (characterized by heart rate, blood pressure and the level of stress hormones) decreases dramatically.

Connecting with people with whom we feel safe also has a positive effect on problem solving and creativity. Simply conversing with other people helps provide a different perspective on a problem and can often be the seed that creates a new solution. This happens even when we’re not talking about the specific problem in question – in fact sometimes that works even more effectively.

But won’t people abuse the privilege?

Sure some people will. But most people are pretty reasonable. In many situations where people are given control of a precious resource, they tend to treat it fairly responsibly. In one particular study, they compared patients with chronic pain and divided them into two groups. One group had to call a nurse to administer their painkillers, while the other group was able to self-administer their drugs. Contrary to expectations, the patients who were allowed to self-medicate used less of the drug. Amazingly, they also reported feeling less pain. Might this be another by-product of a feeling of autonomy?

So, what can we learn from this?

Well, the real lesson is that if we can create a feeling of autonomy and belonging then we get more productive people. Facebook might be just one example of this.

But the other lesson is this: we often make rules for the sake of those people who might offend. We make blanket rules because we think that one or two people might do the wrong thing if we give them a chance. Start making rules that satisfy the people who will do the right thing – and then manage the people that don’t.

People often ask me if we can build up a tolerance to stress. They reason that if we can subject ourselves to high levels of stress as much as possible, then we should be able to perform better under high stress situations because we become immune to it. The answer is no. But here are three things that can at least make it better.

If we are talking about extreme levels of stress – situations that are high intensity, long duration, and uncontrollable – then unfortunately we don’t become immune. In fact the opposite can actually happen and we become hyper-sensitive.

When we are repeatedly subject to a situation or stimulus, we find that generally there are two physiological options: the reaction either becomes desensitized to the stimulus or it becomes habituated.

If you go and live in a warm climate for a number of months, then usually what you find is that you desensitize to the temperature. What felt hot when you arrived three months ago doesn’t actually feel that bad now.

Habituation works the opposite way. If you took a job in a call centre, and every time the phone rang you had to push two buttons to take the call, after a year, we would find that this response hadn’t dulled, but in fact would have become more automatic. You might even find that if you are sitting at home and the phone rings you have this automatic response to to push the two buttons. The reaction has habituated.

In many cases the response to prolonged, high intensity, uncontrollable stress does exactly that – it habituates. The stress response becomes so ingrained and so well trained that it becomes triggered by even the smallest resemblance of a stressful situation. Just like the ringing of the phone puts the ‘push a button’ response into action, the slightest hint of stress can put the stress response into action.

The most famous example of this is Post Traumatic Stress Disorder (PTSD) in soldiers who have returned from duty. The unpredictable, high intensity, long duration of stress on the battlefield has so well trained their stress response that it only takes a car backfiring or a bad dream to put that stress reaction into full action.

The equivalent in the workplace is that people under intense stress for a long period of time cannot perform. Like the PTSD soldier, they make mistakes, they become incredibly risk-averse and they resort to ‘survival’ behaviours. We also put thru health at extreme risk if stress related illness, they lose focus and become de-motivated and possibly depressed.

If you are managing your people through a period of uncertainty and high stress (lets face it, who isnt?) Then here are some things to remember:

Controllable stress is not the same as controllable stress

Even though there are things that people have no control over at all, the main thing to realize is that it’s perception of control that really matters. Make sure that people have clear plans for how to succeed in the current environment – plans give us a great sense of control. Also give people autonomy where possible – even autonomy over small things makes a difference.

Social Support is critical

It may sound like whining, but people do need an outlier to talk about hoe frustrated they are and sometimes how hard it is. Create bonds within your team and allow the team to vent every now and then. Follow this up with some action planning to show people that there are things they can be doing to make it better.

Consistency combats insecurity

Try to find things that you can consistently do or focus on. In uncertain times, people look for consistency wherever they can get it. Keep your goals consistent and make some actions and behaviours consistent as well.