Keep Breathing, It Just Might Save Your Life

Henry Lescault knew he should have listened to his intuition and passed on this last undercover assignment. But it was too late now. A drug dealer had just threatened to kill him and his family. Henry knew his best response was to keep breathing and keep talking.

Around four years into his law enforcement career, Henry had already put in his papers to leave his local Massachusetts police department to join the Naval Criminal Investigative Service (NCIS). Henry's specialty was undercover work, and he had a standing rule: Never do undercover work in the town he grew up in. The chances of his cover being blown were just too great. After he had given his notice to leave for the NCIS, though, his bosses pleaded with him to run one last case in his hometown. A drug-dealing ring was breaking into local pharmacies and selling the narcotics they stole to schoolkids. The higher-ups begged Henry to take the case. With the danger to the kids in mind, he reluctantly agreed.

The moment of truth came when Henry, who was not wearing a wire, was supposed to make a buy from a suspect in a park late one night. Henry knew he might be in trouble when he showed up at the appointed time and four guys were waiting for him instead of one. As he was negotiating the purchase, one of the dealers suddenly asked, “Is your name Henry?” Drawing on everything he had learned since studying martial arts as a teenager, Henry silently took a breath, held it briefly, and quietly exhaled. With his life on the line, he calmly replied, “No, it's Dave.”

The dealer replied with menace: “Well, you look like a guy named Henry who went to high school with my brother, and that guy is a cop.”

Henry's breathing and training took over at that point. “Look,” he answered back, “I don't know who you think I am. I don't know your brother. I don't want to know your brother. I am just here to do business.”

“You better be,” the dealer snarled, “because if you are that guy, I will find your family. I will kill them all, and then I'll come and kill you.”

Steady as a rock, Henry said, “You know what, pal, I am a business man. I just want to buy these drugs; here is your money. If you want to cancel the deal, we can cancel it and walk away right now.”

Once the money appeared, the deal was done. Henry walked back to the car to radio in the location of the dealers so the bust could be made. (Mobile phones were rare back then.) His radio wasn't working, so he went to a nearby gas station to call in the details using a pay phone. The dealers were arrested, convicted, and put in jail. Henry and his family were safe, and a couple of decades later he told me the story you just read.

What kept Henry alive that night was near perfect synchronicity between his mind and body under conditions of extreme stress. The good news is the same skills, not even nearly as perfectly applied, can help you access the mindfulness alternative to being overworked and overwhelmed. Like they did for Henry, they'll help you live a longer, healthier, and happier life.

What Was Going on Inside Henry and What Goes on Inside You

Our bodies are capable of some pretty amazing things. Many of those things don't even require active intervention on our part. Actually, it's a good thing that they don't. Can you imagine the outcome if you had to actively direct your heart to beat or your lungs to breathe? It wouldn't be pretty, that's for sure.

With some systems in our body, however, it pays for us to mindfully intervene. One of those is the autonomic nervous system (ANS). What Henry did that night in Massachusetts was expertly manage his internal response to a highly threatening external stimulus. What enabled him to do that was his ANS. The ANS along with the central and peripheral nervous systems enables us to do everything we do as human beings. The ANS is subdivided into three complementary systems: the sympathetic nervous system (SNS), the parasympathetic nervous system (PNS), and the enteric nervous system. When you just have “a feeling in your gut,” you know the enteric nervous system is at play, because it's the division of the ANS that controls your gastrointestinal function. And although it communicates with the sympathetic and parasympathetic systems, it can operate independently of either of them.

In the context of this book, we're most concerned with the SNS and the PNS. Let's take a look at each of them in terms of how they worked together and separately in relation to how Henry responded when the drug dealer threatened to go after him and his family. Hopefully you'll never face the extreme nature of the threat that Henry faced that night, but you likely will deal with hundreds of low-grade, often silent, threats every day that can leave you feeling overworked and overwhelmed. We can learn a lot about how to deal with those threats by taking a deeper look at Henry's story.

Fight or Flight

The SNS is where the fight or flight response resides. When the drug dealer threatened Henry, his fight or flight response was activated. When Henry saw and heard the threat, a part of his brain called the thalamus sorted out the details and activated two other parts of his brain. As you can see in Figure 3.1, one was a relatively small part very close to the brainstem called the amygdala. The amygdala activated another part of the brain called the hypothalamus, which signaled Henry's adrenal glands to release the adrenaline that immediately prepared his body for emergency action. If the danger persisted, his SNS was on alert to activate other stress-reacting hormones such as cortisol to keep him revved up after the initial surge of adrenaline diminished. The other part of the brain that the thalamus connected with when Henry was threatened was the upper region called the cortex. The cortex, especially the area called the prefrontal cortex (located right behind your forehead), is where critical and more sophisticated thinking happens. This is where situations are sorted out and options are developed.

Rest and Digest

As Henry quietly took that deep breath when the dealer asked him his name, he began to activate his PNS. The PNS is often called the rest and digest function and, although Henry wasn't doing any resting or digesting at that particular moment, activating his PNS counterbalanced the fight or flight response of his SNS that gave him the space to think through how he wanted to handle a very stressful and dangerous situation. It also helped mitigate the natural SNS responses of sweaty palms, tight vocal cords, and even crapping in his pants if his digestive system suddenly shut down.

Under your own less dramatic but still stressful circumstances, you want to have the same kind of synchronicity between your SNS and PNS that Henry had in the park that night. It's what scientists and doctors call managing your allostatic load. The goal is to keep your SNS and PNS in a state of balance or homeostasis. Researcher and author Rick Hanson offers a really useful metaphor: The fight or flight (SNS) response is the accelerator, and the rest and digest (PNS) response is the brakes.¹ As Figure 3.2 reminds us, these responses need to work in concert with each other for you to effectively manage your allostatic load.

Stuck in Chronic Fight or Flight

The challenge for many leaders and high-capacity professionals is that the kinds of stress-inducing factors outlined in Chapter 1 can leave them in a low- to high-grade state of chronic fight or flight. In his 30-year law enforcement career, Henry faced his share of life-threatening situations that could trigger an acute fight or flight response. The irony for him, as he told me in our interview, is that his office hours were often more stressful than his time in the field. “The thing about the office stress,” he said, “is that it kind of just eats away at you day after day. It's just kind of chinking away at the armor to the point where it will crack.” What Henry is describing is the chronic, low-grade state of fight or flight that long-term stress can trigger.

If you've ever paid attention to what you feel like after a 13- or 14-hour day of back-to-back meetings, a hundred or so e-mails, an interminable conference call, dozens of decisions, a contentious conversation or two, and a tough commute, you know what Henry is talking about. Now, add in factors that may or may not be at play in your life, such as business travel, your kids' school and sports commitments, the challenges that come with aging parents or sick loved ones, and financial pressures or worries. If you're also a smartphone-enabled executive, manager, or professional, the likelihood is you never get a true break from any of this on any day of the week. In a study of 1,600 managers and professionals, Harvard Business School professor Leslie Perlow found that:

• 70% check their smartphone within an hour of getting up.
• 56% check their phone within an hour of going to sleep.
• 48% check over the weekend, including Friday and Saturday nights.
• 51% check their phone constantly during vacation.²

It's easy to see how all of that stimuli and input can leave you with a fight or flight response that is chronically stuck in the on position.

The impacts of that on your brain and your body are clear.

What Chronic Fight or Flight Does to Your Brain and Body

Let's take the brain first. Perhaps you've noticed that your decision-making capacity isn't at its best when you're feeling chronically stressed. Researchers have demonstrated this in studies. In one study, participants who were placed in conditions that induced chronic stress fell back on habitual strategies (relatively more mindless) even though coming up with new strategies (relatively more mindful) that were directed toward their goals would have been a better way to go. Functional magnetic resonance imaging (MRI) results from the same study showed that chronic stress leads to atrophy of the prefrontal cortex (the part of the brain where higher-order thinking and decision making reside) and in the brain circuitry that controls goal-directed decision making.³

So, that's what a chronic state of fight or flight does to your brain. What does it do to your body? Remember that from an evolutionary standpoint, the fight or flight response was what protected our prehistoric ancestors from saber-toothed tigers and other wild beasts that would have been happy to have them for lunch. The threats today—packed calendars, tough decisions, jammed in-boxes, family pressures—are subtler but more persistent. If you end up in a chronic state of fight or flight because of them, the toll on your body can be severe. Because it was designed to address the saber-toothed tiger kind of threat, the fight or flight response amps up systems in your body that you need to respond to danger and amps down bodily systems that aren't required to either fight or flee from the tiger. When those systems get stuck because you're in a state of chronic fight or flight, the effects, which are summarized in Figure 3.3, can be severe and life-threatening.

We're All Psychosomatic

No doubt you've heard the term psychosomatic illness. Sometimes it's used in a dismissive way, as in, “Oh, his problems are just psychosomatic.” In other words, “It's all in his head.” When you understand the roots of the word—pyscho referring to the mind and somatic to the body—and consider the impact of an ANS that is chronically out of balance, you can see that psychosomatic illness is real and widespread. In fact, as noted earlier, research conducted by the Benson-Henry Institute for Mind-Body Medicine at Massachusetts General Hospital has found that between 60 and 90 percent of all visits to doctors are prompted by stress-induced illnesses.⁴ In a 2011 study it conducted of its employees, the health insurer Aetna found that the 20 percent of people who reported the highest amount of stress in their lives had annual medical expenses that were $2,000 higher than average.⁵ In the five years that followed the 2008 worldwide financial crisis, a major Greek hospital found that heart attacks among the population of the region it serves leapt 44 percent over the rate from the previous five years.⁶

Statistics like these confirm what Power Yoga creator Bryan Kest said to me in our interview: “The largest factor in our well-being is the place where our mind dwells.” Kest's point brings us back to the Tim Gallwey equation about performance that was introduced in Chapter 2: your performance equals your potential minus the interference. Performance refers to both your mind and your body. There will always be extrinsic interference over which you have little or no control. Your well-being and your capacity to overcome overwork and overwhelm depends on the mindfulness of your intrinsic response to the extrinsic stress-inducing interference.

The Promise of Rest and Digest

The entry point to mindfully responding to feeling overworked and overwhelmed is awareness and intention. It's about being aware of the factors that can make you feel overworked and overwhelmed and intentionally activating your rest and digest system to counterbalance your fight or flight system. It's what Dr. Herbert Benson of the Harvard Medical School and a pioneer in mind-body medicine in the West called the relaxation response.

The good news is you can learn to activate your rest and digest system to overcome that overworked and overwhelmed feeling, making it more likely that you show up at your best and generate the kinds of outcomes you hope for at home, at work, and in the community. That's what the mindfulness alternative is all about and what we'll focus on in the rest of this book. We'll work on getting clear on what your unique version of best state performance looks like and identify the simple, practical, easy to apply routines that can help you operate from that best state scenario more often than not.

The additional good news is that by mindfully using your rest and digest system, you can reverse a lot of the damage you may have already done to your brain and body. For instance, one of the routines we'll take an in-depth look at is being aware of and intentional about your breathing. As you may know, taking even a few minutes to intentionally slow down and notice your breathing is one of the foundations of meditation. With the advent of functional MRI machines, all kinds of compelling research is now available that shows the positive impact of mindful breathing and other meditative practices on the structure of the brain.

Research conducted by Eileen Luders and her colleagues at the UCLA Center for Neuroimaging shows that regular meditation increases and thickens (in a good way) the gray matter in the cerebral cortex, which, in turn, improves the brain's capacity for information processing, memory, emotional regulation, and decision making. Perhaps more importantly if you're concerned with minimizing chronic fight or flight, is that regular meditative breathing actually shrinks the size of the amygdala (remember, that's the part of the brain that triggers the fight or flight response).⁷

Meditation is not just good for the brain, it's good for the rest of your body as well. New research suggests that a regular routine of mindful meditative breathing that activates your rest and digest system also make your cells healthier. Your chromosomes have protective caps at their ends called telomeres. Telomeres shorten with age and deteriorate more quickly under conditions of chronic stress.⁸ Your body also produces an enzyme called telomerase, which helps extend the useful life of your telomeres. Recent research by a number of scientists, including Nobel Prize winner Elizabeth Blackburn, shows that just 12 minutes a day of meditative breathing can increase telomerase activity by 43 percent. This suggests an improvement in the premature aging caused by being in a chronic fight or flight state.⁹

When I first heard about the positive impact that even a little bit of mindful meditative breathing can have on my mind and body (especially as someone who is serious about managing his multiple sclerosis), I thought, “Why wouldn't I take time every day to mindfully breathe and meditate?” That was a little over a year before I wrote this chapter. My own bit of anecdotal experience since then is the consistency of taking time daily to sit and breathe for anywhere from 5 to 30 minutes—whatever time I have available—has made a big difference in my energy, stamina, and outlook. If you're looking for a more scientific validation that even a little bit of daily activation of the rest and digest system that can help, consider a recent study from the University of Wisconsin. Stressed-out primary care physicians were given some brief training in mindfulness meditation techniques and encouraged to spend 10 to 20 minutes a day using them.¹⁰ The burned-out doctors reported almost immediate improvements in their stress levels and compassion shown to their patients. By sticking with their simple daily routine, they were holding on to those gains when they reported back a year later.¹¹

Easy to Do and Likely to Make a Difference

The findings from studies like these demonstrate that the mindfulness alternative doesn't require you to solve for 100 percent to overcome overwork and overwhelm. As a matter of fact, you shouldn't even try to solve for 100 percent; it's too stressful. Instead, aim for small improvements consistently applied. The kind of small improvements you're looking for are the simple steps that sit in the sweet spot between things that are easy to do and likely to make a difference.

If, through pursuing just a few of the routines that we'll unpack later in this book, you are able to reduce the severity of chronic fight or flight by even 5 percent in a week, that would be a big win. Again, 5 percent may not sound like much, but if you have that 5 percent gain consistently each week, in a month your chronic fight or flight state will be reduced by 20 percent. Keep it up and in three months, you'll have a 60 percent reduction. Now we're talking real impact. As the late UCLA basketball coach John Wooden once said, “When you improve a little each day, eventually big things occur. . . . Seek the small improvement one day at a time. That's the only way it happens and when it happens, it lasts.”

Let's now move on to the applied science part of this book. It begins in Part Two with an introduction to your Life GPS®.