The Challenge of Change Resilience Programme

Transcription

1 The Challenge of Change Resilience Programme Dr. Derek Roger The Work Skills Centre PO Box 24 Little River Banks Peninsula 7546 New Zealand

2 Why Conventional Stress Management Doesn t Work The conventional approach to managing stress is based on a number of principles, three of which are listed below. There is little or no evidence for the effectiveness of conventional stress management; in contrast, the Challenge of Change (CoC) Resilience programme is based on a long-term programme of internationally recognized research which has shown that the training impacts signi cantly on wellbeing and performance. The principle of the CoC training is that resilient people don t get stressed because they don t turn pressure into stress. 1. Signs and symptoms of stress The problem with identifying stress, either in ourselves or in others, is that there is no single symptom or group of symptoms which would add up to an unambiguous diagnosis. This is only true in posttraumatic stress, where symptoms such as ashbacks can unambiguously be linked to a particular trauma. It is also important to remember that what we see may simply be a habit and not a response to stress. A better approach is to be aware of changes in behavior, which might in some cases be attributable to stress for example, changes in sleep patterns, short-temperedness and irritability, absent-mindedness and daydreaming, and increased susceptibility to illness. 2. Life-events The idea that so-called life-events moving house, changing jobs, etc. are the cause of stress has been so assiduously promoted that if anyone moves house we unthinkingly assume they must be stressed. If it were true that events are inherently stressful there would be no stress management how many of the events that occur in your life can you avoid? People equally unthinkingly assume that a bit of stress is good for you, yet if you ask how they feel when they re stressed, the answer is usually miserable and upset. Not content with good and bad stress, psychologists have generated important-sounding psychobabble to describe them as eustress and distress. The CoC Resilience programme is explicitly anti-psychobabble, and uses the simple English terminology of pressure and stress. 3. Relaxation Relaxation is useful, but only if it includes relaxing the mind: bodies are in essence lumps of meat that do what minds tell them to do. The CoC Resilience programme includes mindfulness exercises provided on an audio CD to relax both body and mind. 2

3 The Continuum of Sleep and Controlling Attention Wide Awake Waking Sleep Sleepwalking Dreaming Sleep Deep Sleep Waking Sleep: Attention Controlled: 3

4 The Challenge of Change Pro le/ Guidelines for Interpreting Scores Scores range from 0 to 10, with high scores in the range 8-10 and low scores in the range 0-2. For some scales a high or a low score is de nitely preferable; these are the one-edged scales. The scales measure habitual responses that can be changed by implementing the Four Steps in the training programme. 1. Rumination (R) measures the tendency to ruminate about emotionally upsetting events that have occurred in the past or might occur in the future. Ruminating compromises performance and maintains physiological arousal inappropriately; this is a one-edged scale where the lower the score the better. Since rumination is the de nition of stress used in the CoC Resilience programme, this is the most important scale. Waking sleep is attention snatched away, but rumination ensues when negative emotion is added and the dream becomes a nightmare of what-ifs and if-onlys. To counter waking sleep or rumination, wake up and to stay awake for as long as possible, which reinforces the habit of waking up rather than just going back to sleep. 2. Emotional Inhibition (E-I) measures inhibiting or bottling up emotion. Low scores are better, although expressing emotion needs to be in an appropriate context. The appropriate expression of emotion facilitates resolution, but endlessly complaining about issues is simply verbal rumination. A useful rst step is to involve someone you can trust and to take opportunities to express to them how you felt about the work you did that day (as opposed to just what you did that day). 3. Toxic Achieving (TA) is characterized by wanting everything done yesterday and operating with impatience, hostility and demand. This leads to cardiovascular strain, and TA is one-edged with the lower the score the better. If you have a high score, why are you always angry, and why do you justify the anger to yourself and others? The reason is that the world isn t the way you want it to be. And why should everything be delivered yesterday, at whatever cost? Toxic achieving is the cornerstone of blaming cultures. 4. Avoidance Coping (AV) is trying to ignore the problem and hoping it will just go away, illustrated by piling up the furniture against the door in the house analogy in the training programme. Low scores are preferable. Check your in-tray, if you have one: how many of the jobs at the bottom have been there for weeks? Are you realistically ever going to do them? Procrastination is indeed the thief of time, so evaluate them with detachment and either do them or bin them. 5. Perfect Control (PC) measures the desire for perfectionism and control. High scores indicate a perfectionist, controlling tendency, and low scores are preferable. PC is driven by anxiety over not delivering the perfect outcome, but everything can be improved upon. Perfectionists fail to see the threshold of added value, beyond which no further effort will add anything, and they also 4

5 tend to be control freaks. Start by checking with your manager or team leader what is actually required, and working to a more realistic time-frame. This isn t about compromising quality, but rather about recognizing the limits to time and effort. 6. Detached Coping (DET) describes disengaging and being able to see things in perspective: high scorers don t turn molehills into mountains. This is one-edged and is the third step in the training programme. Practising detachment maintains a balanced perspective from which the negative preoccupations of rumination can be seen for what they are. Being detached doesn t mean not doing anything, but rather freeing the mind from the distracting thoughts so that you can function more ef ciently. 7. Sensitivity (SENS) is sensitivity to others emotional feelings. High scores are preferable, but a high score needs to be accompanied by a high score on detached coping if not, the emotion can t be kept in perspective. The programme emphasizes the importance of having high scores on both detached coping and sensitivity, which is called detached compassion and is equivalent to empathy. 8. Flexibility (F) measures how rigidly or exibly we behave. Being rigid and in exible may mean clinging to redundant aims and missing opportunities that change may bring, and the higher the score the better. Being in love with change for its own sake isn t helpful either, so before steaming ahead, rst decide, in as detached a frame of mind as possible, whether the changes really are needed. 5

6 Becoming Detached and Letting Go Detachment and letting go are illustrated in the CoC Resilience programme by using a house as model for the mind. The rst two houses show what happens when there is either avoidance or rumination; the third diagram, shown below, represents a detached perspective from which to let go of negative emotion. The Four Steps to Resilience 1. Waking Up and Staying Awake 2. Controlling Attention 3. Becoming Detached 4. Letting Go Relaxing Body and Mind 1. Relaxing the body: Deep Opening the rst gate (Neck and Shoulders) Opening the second gate (Pelvis) Freeing circulation Letting go with out-breaths 2. Relaxing the body: Rapid Stopping Relaxing (Checking/Loosening) 3. Relaxing the Mind Stopping Freeing Outward Attention Changing Time Perspective (Presence of Mind) 6

7 Summary 1. The course distinguishes between post-traumatic stress and day-to-day stress. The emphasis is on the latter, and the programme aims at increasing resilience by distinguishing between pressure and stress. Resilient people don t turn pressure into stress. 2. Symptoms are just effects, not causes, and spending time examining them is pointless. Life-event scales suggest that stress is a property of the event. In fact, stress is how we respond to the event, not the event itself. 3. Events provide information (input), the mind processes the information, and gives attention (output). In practice, however, instead of remaining in the present, attention is often captured and drawn back into the mind where it circles round on the current re-play. These thoughts and preoccupations are imagined they are dreams, and while involved in them we are in waking sleep. We spend a lot of our working lives in waking sleep, which is not necessarily damaging, but nothing gets done you can t work and sleep. 4. An illustration of really waking up is the ght or ight response, which is facilitated by a surge in adrenaline and cortisol from the activation of the pituitary-adrenal axis. This is not stress, but the damaging effect of prolonged elevations in adrenaline and cortisol on the cardiovascular and immune systems is what links stress and illness. Fight or ight is prolonged by ruminating about what ifs and if onlys ; all you re ghting or eeing from are thoughts in your head, the worst things in your life that never happen (monkeys giving up their lives for peanuts). 5. By contrast, intentionally going into past or future is called re ection, which can only be done from a detached perspective. There are three ways to deal with upset. Denial or simply becoming lost in the dream are maladaptive; the third way is to use detachment, so that the thoughts can be seen for what they are and allowed to pass - the analogy here is of the house with two doors. 6. These principles can be summarized in 4 steps to freedom which emphasise waking up, controlling attention, becoming detached, and letting go. 7