To tackle this in the workplace, Davidson teamed with the CEO of a high-pressure, 24/7, biotech startup and Jon Kabat-Zinn of the University of Massachusetts Medical School. Each of us has a characteristic level of left/right activity that predicts our daily mood range - if we’re tilted to the right, more upsets if to the left, quicker recovery from distress of all kinds. He’s also found that when we’re distressed, there’s heightened activity on the right side of the prefrontal area.
The circuitry that brings us back to full energy and focus after an amygdala hijack concentrates in the left side of our prefrontal area, finds Richard Davidson, a neuroscientist at the University of Wisconsin. The neural key to resilience lies in how quickly we recover from that hijacked state. Whenever we get so upset we say or do something we later regret (and who doesn’t now and then?), that’s a sure sign that our amygdala - the brain’s radar for danger, and the trigger for the fight-or-flight response - has hijacked the brain’s executive centers in the prefrontal cortex.
REST ON US UPGRADE
And with a little effort, you can upgrade its ability to snap back from life’s downers. The brain has a very different mechanism for bouncing back from the cumulative toll of daily hassles. What about bouncing back from the more frequent annoying screwups, minor setbacks and irritating upsets that are routine in any leader’s life? Resilience is, again, the answer - but with a different flavor. Challenge your downbeat thinking and replace it with a positive outlook.īut, fortunately, major failures come along rarely in life.
Give yourself a cognitive intervention and counter defeatist thinking with an optimistic attitude. If you’ve suffered a major failure, take the sage advice given by psychologist Martin Seligman in the HBR article “ Building Resilience.” Talk to yourself.
There are two ways to become more resilient: one by talking to yourself, the other by retraining your brain.
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