Currently, a quarter of all employees view their jobs as the number one stressor in their lives. The world health organisation describes stress as the “global health epidemic of the 21st Century”. Many of us now work in constantly connected, always-on, highly demanding work cultures where stress and the risk of burnout are widespread. Since the pace and intensity of contemporary work culture are not likely to change, its more important than ever to build resilience skills to effectively navigate your work life. Repeatedly in my career I have seen that the most resilient individuals and teams aren’t the ones that don’t fail, but rather the ones that fail, learn, and thrive because of it. Being challenged-sometimes severely-is part of what activates resilience as a skill set. More than five decades of research point to the fact that resilience is built by attitudes, behaviours and social supports that can be adopted and cultivated by anyone. Factors that lead to resilience include optimism; the ability to stay balanced and manage strong or difficult emotions; a sense of safety and a strong social support system. The good news is that because there is a concrete set of behaviours and skills associated with resilience, you can learn to be more resilient if you’re lacking in this critical component and end up having a long and happy work life.
So how can we develop resilience and stay motivated in the face of chronic negative stress and constantly increasing demands, complexity, and change? Here are some tips based on some of the latest neuroscience, behavioural and organisational research.
Exercise Mindfulness
People in the business world are increasingly turning their attention to mental training practises associated with mindfulness-and for good reason. Social psychologist Laura Kiken, for example, has found that mindfulness predicts judgement accuracy and insight-related problem solving. Peter Malinowski, who is a cognitive neuroscientist, found that mindfulness enhances cognitive flexibility, facilitating job performance accounting for all three dimensions of workplace engagement vigor, dedication, and absorption.
So how do you go about bringing some mindfulness into the rhythms and routines of your daily work? Research suggests a combination of mobile learning, on-site training, webinars, and peer to peer learning networks promotes the greatest chance for mindfulness to become a core competency within a person and or organisation.
Participants report statistically significant improvements in resilience and say that mindfulness tools and content delivered in these ways are highly useful for managing stress, improving collaboration, and enhancing well-being.
Finally, a number of books and apps also offer structured approaches to mindfulness, including the books Fully Present: The Art, Science and Practice of Mindfulness and Mindfulness: An Eight Week Plan for Finding Peace in a Frantic World. Useful apps include (but are not limited to): Headspace, Spire, Mental Workout, Calm, Whil and Simple Habit.
Compartmentalise your cognitive load
We receive 11 million bits of information every second, but the executive, thinking centres of our brain can effectively process only 40 bits of information, according to Shawn Achor, co-founder of the Institute for Applied Positive Research and author of The Happiness Advantage. One practical way to think about this is that though we can’t decrease the amount of information we receive (in our inboxes, for example), we can compartmentalise our cognitive tasks to optimise the way we process that information. Be deliberate about compartmentalising different types of work activities such as emailing, strategy or brainstorming sessions, and business-as-usual meetings. Compartmentalising work is useful when you consider that switching from one type of task to another makes it difficult to tune out distractions and reduces productivity by as much as 40%, according to recent research published by the American Psychological Association. Translation: to the extent that it is possible, avoid context switching much the way you might create a dedicated time for physical exercise in your day. This approach may be overly regimented for some, but it creates the optimal set of conditions for us to effectively process information and make quality decisions while decreasing cognitive load and strain.
Take detachment breaks
Throughout the workday, it’s important to pay attention to the peaks and valleys of energy and productivity that we all experience, what health psychologists call our ultradian (hourly) as opposed to our circadian (daily) rhythms. Mental focus, clarity and energy cycles are typically 90-120 minutes long, so it is useful to step away from our work for even a few minutes to reset energy and attention. Research suggests that balancing work activity with even a brief time for detaching from those activities can promote greater energy, mental clarity, creativity, and focus, ultimately growing our capacity for resilience throughout the course of the workday. The long-term payoff is that we preserve energy and prevent burnout over the course of days, weeks, and months.
Develop mental agility
It is possible — without too much effort — to literally switch the neural networks with which we process the experience of stress to respond to rather than react to any difficult situation or person. This quality of mental agility hinges on the ability to mentally “decentre” stressors to effectively manage them. “De-centering” stress is not denying or suppressing the fact that we feel stressed — rather, it is the process of being able to pause, to observe the experience from a neutral standpoint, and then to try to solve the problem. When we can cognitively take a step back from our experience and label our thoughts and emotions, we are effectively pivoting attention from the narrative network in our brains to the more observational parts of our brains. Being mentally agile, and decentring stress when it occurs, enables the core resilience skill of “response flexibility,” which renowned psychologist Linda Graham describes as “the ability to pause, step back, reflect, shift perspectives, create options and choose wisely.” We often tell our children who are upset to “use your words,” for example, and it turns out that stopping and labelling emotions has the effect of activating the thinking centre of our brains, rather than the emotional centre — a valuable skill in demanding, high-performance workplaces everywhere.
Cultivate compassion
One of the most overlooked aspects of the resilience skill set is the ability to cultivate compassion — both self-compassion and compassion for others. Compassion increases positive emotions, creates positive work relationships, and increases cooperation and collaboration, happiness and well-being and decreases stress. Compassion and business effectiveness are not mutually exclusive. Rather, individual, team and organizational success rely on a compassionate work culture.
The ability to build resilience is a skill that will serve you well in an increasingly stressful work world that does not appear to be decreasing in intensity anytime soon.