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CHAPTER 9
CALM BOOSTERS

You have processed what happens in the brain when you’re stressed and how your mind reacts to stress. Through our tests and Ask Yourself questions you’ve been able to analyse what real calm means to you. In Chapter 6 we gave you six stress triggers to be aware of and avoid. We’re now ready with this chapter and the final one to give you specific guidelines.

The first dimension to real calm is self-awareness combined with self-compassion. With this understanding you can initiate calmness into your daily life so that it becomes your foundation. Like anything, you have to put your mind to it and invest in looking after yourself.

We’ve narrowed down six things that can boost your calmness. Just one of these alone might make a dramatic difference to your life, and as you read through you will sense what resonates most with you.

“We are like flowers in a garden, growing in different seasons, pollinated at different stages, flowering at different moments. So allow yourself time. Start now. Breathe.”

Jeremy Stockwell, performance consultant and TV coach

1. RELATING TO OTHER PEOPLE

Human beings are social beings. The more stress you experience, the more likely it is that you feel isolated even if you’re surrounded by people all the time. There’s a misconception that connecting with people means baring and sharing all your woes. With some you will – with others you won’t. Relating to others takes you out of the autopilot stressed mode that keeps you in your head. It tricks your brain into feeling way better.

Friends can be a major antidote to stress if you learn how to use friendships in a positive way. Rather than using friendships to moan or fill in time when you’re bored, you can turn to friendships to provide a vital base for support and wellbeing. If you surround yourself only with stressed friends who perpetuate the cycle of stressed habits, you’re not helping yourself. New York Times bestselling author and behaviour researcher Tom Rath¹ studied the Gallup Organization’s research on friendship, as well as conducting experiments with a team of researchers. His findings illustrated that good friendships have a massive impact on individuals – from feeling more satisfied at work if you have a best friend there, to eating more healthily if your best friend is a healthy eater. Rath’s philosophy on friendship is based on identifying the roles different friends play in our lives and not expecting one friend to be everything. Rath identifies eight vital roles friends can play: builder, champion, collaborator, companion, connector, energizer, mind opener and navigator. In terms of real calm, think about who in your friendship circle is a companion and energizer – who is always there for you, and who gives you a boost?

“Nourish a range of friendships at work and outside work. Don’t expect  one person to fulfil everything you need.”

Miriam Akhtar, positive psychologist

However difficult the environment you work in, rather than burying yourself behind a screen and your headphones, be open to finding supportive people so that you boost each other. This doesn’t mean people who only gossip and moan as negative talk drags you down. Who can support you by giving you practical advice? Who can make you laugh and see the funny side? Who can you share a healthy lunch with? Who is up for a fun activity? Jane Dutton,² Professor of Business Administration and Psychology at Michigan Ross School of Business, has researched high-quality connections and relationships at work. Positive relationships in the workplace don’t just help us survive, they help us thrive.

“All business comes down to good relationships. Can you cross the floor to speak to someone rather than emailing them?”

Miriam Akhtar, positive psychologist

Taking this principle one step further, you can start cultivating ways to gain support by joining a group that helps you train to deal with stress in a supportive environment, whether it’s a yoga class or a mindfulness course. There’s a huge sense of relief when you’re in a room full of people who are there to destress, and a reminder that this is the human condition.

“Opening up and connecting to others helps us find skillful ways to be in life.”

Ed Halliwell, mindfulness teacher and writer

JEREMY STOCKWELL ON THE VALUE OF LEARNING TO RECEIVE

‘The Japanese are culturally more receptive. When you meet somebody in New York the person takes off their hat and stands up. A Japanese person takes off their shoes and sits down. When you give your business card to an American, they put it in their pocket. A Japanese person takes it, holds it with care and inspects it. In Japan a measure of your generosity is how receptive you are. We can learn from this. When you go into a room, whether it’s a business meeting or a social event, focus on receiving.

To truly give the best of yourself in any situation you need to be present in your body, mind and voice – and to be focusing on others. Where you might be nervous because perhaps you have a presentation or a business pitch, if you focus on others your nerves will disappear because you are not doing this for you.

We need to remember we are all interconnected. If you connect to your environment and the people in this environment, you will have a true sense of others and you will be able to proceed with equanimity.

When your focus is on pouring your stuff out at people, this pushes people away. When you’re caught up in how nervous you are, the effect is to push people away too.

To receive authentically and appropriately we need to come away from judgement of ourselves and others. When you have to meet a group of people, breathe and receive them. Take a moment to breathe properly, with your entire lung capacity. Be aware of your feet – this grounds your body and opens your mind so that you’re not caught up in nerves and anxiety. In this condition, your meetings and interactions will be much more successful and the outcomes more fruitful.

To be sensible means to be sense-able, to come into our senses. Receive through your senses: whatever your situation is, what can you see, hear, smell, touch, taste? When our five senses are working, then our sixth sense, intuition, is activated.

We are not broadcasters, we are receivers. Thinking is you talking to yourself, whereas sense is real, it’s concrete. In this way, despite educational and media influences, you can learn to trust yourself a lot more. You will seem more responsible. Responsibility is the ability to respond: how will you respond in a given situation? When you focus on receiving your intuition, it will guide you and inspire you to respond. When you receive, you will be inspired.

That way everyone is calmer, others will trust you more and the outcomes – professional or personal – will be that much more successful.

2. MASTER CORRECT BREATHING

If there is just one skill that we absolutely recommend you learn, it’s breathing. Our experts are unanimous on this. Even if you insist that meditation and mindfulness are too challenging for you (though we’d urge you to give everything a go) breathing is something we do constantly. So we may as well learn how to breathe properly. Breathing is the one process we can call on at any given time to change the chemistry in our mind. Understand breath and train to breathe, and you have an instant tranquillizer. In Chapter 3 we gave you our health guru and Psychologies columnist Andrew Weil’s breathing technique and, if you’ve tried this out, hopefully you’ll be nodding and smiling at this point.

CHARLIE WALKER-WISE ON UNDERSTANDING HOW WE BREATHE

‘When we are stressed we have certain physiological responses which prevent us from breathing properly. But there is a lot of confusion about how to breathe. People tend to think of lungs being in the chest, but the bulk of the lungs are around the side of the ribcage and in our back. The impulse for the breath comes from the diaphragm, and when the diaphragm drops into the abdomen, it pulls the lungs down so that they increase in volume and air and squidge out of the way your intestines and stomach.

When you breathe like this, deep into the belly, you supply the body with the amount of oxygen it needs, particularly when you are doing something challenging, like a business presentation. You need to breathe this way when you most need to communicate, handle stress and deal with uncertain dynamics, in order to provide the brain with as much oxygen-rich blood as possible.

When people think about breathing they think about breathing IN, but when you are stressed you need to breathe OUT first – the breath in will follow without any effort.

Actors need to train to have a strong voice so they can resonate in a theatre, and they do this by building up strength to breathe out – because when you are speaking you breathe out, not in. To do that you need a musculature that’s a bit like an accordion, which powers air out. In acting we talk about supported breath, using abdominal and intercostal muscles to power the breath; we talk about people being ON voice, using the mechanics of the body to fill a room with power and conviction. There are similar situations in business. To engage these muscles you have to be calm, allowing a good amount of air before they can supply the voice with power. That’s where that nervous energy comes in: you can put it THERE to create power, you can use all your nervous energy for a good cause.’

3. DO MORE OF WHATEVER MAKES YOU  FEEL GOOD

One of the world’s leading authorities on positive emotions is award-winning Professor of Psychology at the University of Carolina, Barbara Fredrickson.³ Through rigorous research she developed the broaden and build theory of positive emotions: broadening the range of positive emotions we experience helps us build resourcefulness that then enables us to deal with challenging situations in life. When you’re going through a difficult time, however, this is mighty difficult. On holiday, away from it all, you can easily build on having a good time – you’ll even try lots of new things. But in the midst of a crisis? Or when stress has worn you out so much life feels relentless, how does that work?

“Needing to escape from stressful times is understandable. But it is necessary to find something life affirming and make healthier choices other than getting drunk or high.”

Sandra Elsdon Vigon, Jungian psychotherapist

It’s about finding moments of calmness through moments and times of escape and building on these. Doing more of what you love gives you pleasure. This means having hobbies that have nothing to do with achievement or making money, but are activities you enjoy. These activities clear your head, support you and nourish you. As Jungian psychotherapist Sandra  Elsdon Vigon puts it, they help you enter a zone that ‘provides  a safe and protective space where there is no one to answer to’.

“Fool around for no reason, without the need to prove something, with no desire  for exact mastery, just for the joy of letting go, like dancing at a party for the joy of dancing.”

Jeremy Stockwell, performance consultant and TV coach

4. BE PREPARED

Life is about changes and challenges and there’s no escaping that, so all we can do is prepare to handle what comes up as best as possible. Professor Robertson explains⁶ that when the brain reappraises negative events, this turns down the stress-linked activity in the brain’s main emotion centre, which helps us cope better in the future. When the brain is under full emergency drill it’s hard to do this. ‘But if we practise we can get better. We can learn to accept the reality of something that has happened without catastrophizing entirely.’

When we feel we’re in control and can handle life, stress doesn’t get the better of us. When we feel wobbly it’s like struggling to walk on a conveyor belt – you can’t keep up, your feet are out of control. Anything you can actively do to prepare for difficult situations coming up helps you develop a sense that you’re not out of control. Real calm is about developing competence so that you can confidently face what needs to be faced, whether that’s a difficult person, a work challenge or a personal issue.

PROFESSOR ROBERTSON ON TRAINING TO DEAL WITH STRESS

‘You need to train yourself to handle situations that trigger stress in the same way that the Special Forces train to go into battlefields. Just as they have to create simulated battle conditions, it’s simply not enough to practise what makes us feel good. There’s no point. We need to test the habits in situations where we need them. We can test in our minds, we can imagine, we can create mental states, we can imagine our boss shouting at us, or a text from an  ex-partner. And then we can rehearse.

When you anticipate a difficult conversation, take a few moments beforehand to relax. You can visualise and hear in your mind what might happen and prepare for your response in advance. If you rehearse good responses, you are more likely to handle the situation well.’

5. TRAIN TO TAME THE MIND

There’s ample scientific evidence that meditation benefits the brain. With so many different types of meditation, knowing where to start can be daunting. Mindfulness is the current buzzword, but you might also come across Zen, Buddhist and transcendental meditation.

There are broadly two types of meditation. One type is ‘concentrative’ or guided meditation where the focus is on specific thoughts and breathing, and the other is ‘non directive’ where the mind wanders. A team of researchers at the Norwegian University of Science and Technology (NTNU), the University of Oslo and the University of Sydney have been collaborating to find out exactly what happens in the brain during different types of meditation.⁷ They have discovered that nondirective meditation leaves more room to process memories and emotions because the brain is able to rest from everything else it has to do.

Whatever you decide to try out or choose according to what’s near you, is easily accessible and above all suits you, there’s ample evidence for the benefits of any form of meditation. One study⁸ even showed that meditation can boost unavoidable multitasking skills in information-intensive office environments because it improves concentration.

It’s well worth trying out meditation because for the short amount of time in your day that you invest, the benefits are huge. A recent study⁹ by Dawn Querstret and Professor Mark Cropley from Surrey University in partnership with the Mental Health Foundation found that just two hours of mindfulness training online over the course of a week can dramatically reduce fatigue and worry, leading to switching off and relaxing after work and sleeping better.

The challenge is to make any meditation practice a daily habit. As we pointed out in Chapter 7, learning to be calm is more about training and that requires patience. Don’t worry if it feels difficult to start with because that’s entirely normal.

ED HALLIWELL ON PRACTISING MINDFULNESS

‘Mindfulness is like the playing the piano – it’s difficult to teach yourself. It’s not impossible, but it isn’t easy and the best you can do is to train in easier circumstances. You can do that for five minutes at a time with an audio so you are guided through a meditation. (On my website there are guided meditations.) You train when you’re not in a difficult situation, and then over time you bring that into difficult scenarios.

Ideally it’s good to take a course too with a teacher you like. You wouldn’t start your first swimming lesson in a stormy sea. You would do so in a contained space with support, a pool with a teacher. You’re dealing with the mind which is complex and powerful. Often people give up because they try mindfulness during an acutely high-stress situation.

Most people come on courses because they are stressed. Stress signals to us something needs to happen and that something might be mindfulness. A one-day workshop is a good start to see how you get on and if you connect with the teacher.

Mindfulness is counter-intuitive, because we are invited to sit with the stress and deal with it. It’s being rather than doing. Non-doing is not what we are trained to do. All of our evolutionary history says do something. This is why you need to find a good teacher. Everyone is unique and a teacher can see you properly and help you during a course.

Formal practice and skilled guidance gives you a context to work with during a difficult situation – but it doesn’t guarantee immediate calm.

Mindfulness is about learning to be present, in the moment, rather than multitasking. There are other ways you can look to cultivating mindfulness. A yoga class can be a way of cultivating a connection between mind and body, for example. Some people find yoga more of a challenge than meditation.

My first mindfulness task was mindful tea drinking: to be fully aware of the sensation of the taste, touch, smell of a cup of tea and nothing else. There was an immediate calming effect from this. You can eat your lunch out of the storm of the office and really invite yourself to taste your food. When you’re cleaning your teeth, you can totally experience this rather than getting habitually lost and not noticing your thoughts. This is a start on the path to mindfulness.’

6. A CALM BODY STEERING THE MIND

It’s frustrating trying to change emotions that feel beyond your control. When you’re in that spiral of worry, of course you’d snap out of it if you could, which is why being told to stop worrying makes you feel even more agitated.

When your mind feels like it’s on a permanent spin dryer, it’s all too easy to focus on the contents in that spin dryer as the route to calming down. You forget your body entirely because that’s not the problem. And yet focusing on your body is the easiest route to handling the problem, namely your mind. This is the path actors routinely take so that we don’t see them as gibbering wrecks and so that they feel able to handle nerves.

Taking the body route is something absolutely everybody can do. RADA in Business trainer Charlie Walker-Wise describes the process as one that moves people away from their heads. To explain why, he refers to his joy of being a parent, watching his child laughing as a baby and encouraging him to laugh and play. The normal cycle of childhood is to play and be encouraged, until, as Walker-Wise describes, children are told to ‘act your age’ and instead of playing they are encouraged to cram information into their heads.

The problem underlining the absence of calm is this crammed head we grow up to carry. It’s not just information that we stuff our minds with, but thoughts that aren’t useful. As you know all too well, when you’re not calm you wish you could drill your head to let some of these thoughts escape. Instead of thinking your way out (or as is very common drinking to numb the thoughts), you can move your way through.

Several studies have shown that exercise improves the mood because of feel-good chemicals released in the brain. But more recent studies are showing that the benefits extend beyond an immediate positive change in mood. Exercise can help the brain deal with anxiety and stress.¹⁰

One recent study¹¹ by neuroscientists at the University of California showed why people who exercise have better mental fitness. Two important neurotransmitters, glutamate and gamma-aminobutyric acid or GABA, are released through intense exercise. Because vigorous exercise can be more demanding for the brain than something mentally challenging, the researchers explained that the brain makes more neurotransmitters. Studies like this are leading the way in establishing exercise as an alternative to anti-depressant medication.

“We end up with no relationship with our  body. It’s twisted and tense  and our mind is going: why  am I so stressed? To be calm we need to use our physicality.”

Charlie Walker-Wise, RADA in Business trainer

You might not like the sound of exercise, but that could be because you associate it with doomed January New Year resolutions to join a gym and lose weight. But so long as you consider that calm can come from using your body, how you do so is up to you. That could include turning your Strictly Come Dancing TV habit into ballroom dancing classes, or having regular shoulder massages to dispel the tension from sitting at a desk. You could let off steam with kick boxing or unwind with something mellow like Tai Chi. Even getting up from your desk regularly and stretching can make a huge difference to how your mind handles stress.

REMEMBER YOUR CALM BOOSTERS

We think you’ll agree that our six recommended ways to a calm you are not complicated. Connecting with people might sound overwhelming if you’ve been through a hard time, but this isn’t about dressing up and going to parties. You might make a concerted effort to see friends who are good listeners or join a new network with likeminded people. This can be the first step to feeling better and more able to tackle what’s causing stress. As soon as you take away the focus from you and turn your attention to who you are with, you’ll find you can escape from your stressed nervous head.

Learning to breathe is a valuable skill we recommend you master. It’s the one skill you can call on at any time to change the chemistry in your mind. And since you are already breathing, it’s a goal that’s 100% attainable. So is doing more of what you love, whatever that is. Our Real Ambition book outlined that the work-til-you-drop work ethic is now outdated and success means thinking about what you desire in every area of your life. You can indulge in that hobby, whatever it is, just for the fun of it, because it really is essential for managing stress.

Preparing for anything you know will be stressful requires effort and even discipline, but the pay-off is huge. Competence gives you confidence so your stress diminishes. The more prepared you are the more you’ll find you can approach different situations, enabling you to flourish – an essential part of real calm.

We encourage you to try meditation as this has ample proven benefits. Many people swear by it and others don’t take to it. The only way to know is to try it, ideally with a teacher you like. Finally there is exercise and ideally this will double up as something you want to do more of because it gives you joy. Whether you choose Zumba dance classes, a gym workout, running or walking, exercise not only benefits your body, it benefits your moods.

REAL PEOPLE

“Instead of getting drunk, I went on a mindfulness course”

– John

‘I’ve always been Jack the Lad, proud of my hedonistic lifestyle. But it was slowly niggling me that I felt suffocated in relationships and didn’t want to be tied to one woman – only when I was on my own I felt lonely and anxious. I couldn’t understand this anxiety. It was a horrible feeling so I just drank to get rid of it.

As my mates began to settle, there was no avoiding this. I didn’t have mates on tap to go out drinking, and with more and more work responsibility and pressures, hooking up with women for the night became impractical. I couldn’t go into work in yesterday’s shirt and I start work before shops open to buy a new shirt. There comes a point when certain behaviour isn’t cool and funny. When you’re leading a team you are setting an example. I could feel that as I got older I wasn’t so chilled as I liked to claim. I’d snap and get angry – and then feel guilty and make up for it by offering to buy drinks later.

I realized I was drinking more on my own in the evenings, and the mornings became about psyching myself up to going into work and putting on a front. Only I was always in a flap, easily irritable and increasingly stressed about work pressures. Every couple of months I’d have the euphoria of a new love affair, then I’d run away or be unfaithful and the cycle started again.

I guess I was in the right place to say yes to going on a mindfulness weekend course with a mate suffering from severe stress. His job was on the line and he was going through a messy divorce with two toddlers in between. I suggested a weekend in Prague getting drunk, but he said he needed to try out mindfulness. I thought: ‘well I could always skive off to the pub if it is rubbish’.

That was a couple of years ago and I have practised mindfulness since, going on several courses. I realized that first weekend that for all my Jack the Lad image that I projected, I’d always had a side to me connected to something else – the running in nature, the exercise with the guys in the gym, eating well, giving myself time every day to think clearly. It was like the pre-training to mindfulness and realizing this made me aware of the situations where I did feel calm. Calm to me means being able to handle anything coming at me. What I couldn’t handle was my own negative feelings. I had to learn not to stuff them with alcohol and release stress by shouting at people.

I am a work in progress. I’m back on top at work and supporting my team and fellow managers and talking openly about how we all feel stressed and sharing ways to ease this like playing silly games. I make time for my family – my parents, my brother and his wife and children. I haven’t cracked relationships yet but I’m learning about what I really need.’

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