Preventing a DIY Lobotomy
Stress isn’t the problem most leaders think it is.
It’s entirely possible to be brilliant in the face of incredible pressure.
What determines your ability to perform, in the heat of the moment, is your physiological state.
When stress spikes, most executives stay cognitively busy while their nervous system descends into chaos.
It’s a 200,000-year-old survival mechanism.
When we wandered across the prairie two millennia ago, and suddenly saw a bear, we didn’t need smart thinking.
If we stood gaping at the bear trying to be clever, the bear would eat us.
So we developed a way of shutting down our brain to create binary thinking – fight/flight or play dead.
And it saved our life.
Anything more sophisticated and we’d be lunch.
Under such stressful moments our heart sends our brain a chaotic HRV signal, and it causes a DIY lobotomy.
But at work we don’t meet bears we meet our boss.
Even if they’re a nice person, the same physiological chaos kicks in and the DIY lobotomy occurs again.
We are all operating with 200,000-year-old software and we’ve never had an upgrade.
Worst still once we’ve lobotomised ourselves, we don’t realise we have. Why. Because we have no frontal lobe functioning. We lose perceptual awareness.
Often this is not an all or nothing phenomenon. We can induce a partial lobotomy.
Look at the people around you. How well are their frontal lobes functioning? How perceptive are they. How quickly can they understand what you’re saying. How often do you have to repeat your message.
Do you get the impression that they’re they operating with a 100-watt light bulb in their head or have they inadvertently dimmed their own lights and triggered their own lobotomy.
This is why people go blank in an exam. It underpins stage fright. Under stress we can become the lobotomised “rabbit in the head light”. On game shows like the “Weakest Link” or “Family Fortunes” we laugh when we see smart people say stupid things.
It happens to us all. It’s biological. It’s a survival mechanism. I demonstrated this exact thing, live, in my first TEDx Talk.
Brain shut down under pressure underpins “human factor” safety protocols. It’s why we do fire drills. When the fire alarm goes people lobotomise and stop thinking. This is why we have to practice a drill, again and again, because we have to teach people to escape the burning building without thinking.
It’s also why we can never think of the smart think we wished we’d said in the middle of an argument. Or worst still we say something, that in the light of day when our brain function returns, we regret saying.
When your employee starts saying things that don’t make sense, it may not be because they lack capability. It may just be that they’ve triggered their own lobotomy.
The good news is that it’s possible to train yourself to “think clearly under pressure” or what’s called T-CUP”.
You can reset your brain.
The main challenge is that it never occurs to you reset your brain in the heat of the moment, when stress spikes, because your brain has closed for business.
You have to practice resetting when you’re not under pressure.
And it’s very easy to do.
Just change the way you breathe.
Don’t take a few deep breaths – that won’t help you.
Train yourself to breathe rhythmically. Rhythmic breaths. Not deep. Not large. Not fast. Rhythmic. This means a fixed ratio of the in-breath to the out breath.
What ratio you chose is less important than you picking a ratio and sticking to it.
They don’t teach you this at Havard. Even Navy Seals training doesn’t teach this. What is often taught in special forces training is to habituate to the stress. They will put recruits under pressure repeatedly until the danger is so familiar it becomes boring. This is called inurement training.
This is not the same as teaching people to be perceptive in the face of a threat.
Why this works
When you breathe rhythmically and evenly the chaotic signal from your heart to your brain changes. It becomes coherent. The HRV trace changes from something that looks like an earthquake seismograph to a pure sine wave.
I demonstrated this with a member of the audience in my 2nd TEDx talk.
When your heart sends you brain a coherent signal it turns the lights back on.
Your frontal lobe function is restored. Your perceptual awareness increases. You can suddenly start thinking again, and the answers, that are already in your mind, become available to you.
It’s important to practice being coherent when there’s no pressure on you until rhythmic breathing becomes your default pattern.
Once you can generate coherence, through rhythmic breathing in the peace of your own home, you can start training yourself to maintain rhythmic breathing under increasingly difficult situations until you can do it in the heat of a stressful moment.
Imagine how empowering it will be to know, with 100% certainty, that you can perform under any kind of pressure, without losing your mind.
Why. Because once you’ve got control of your breathing and physiology you also control your own brain function. You control it. Not other people, not your boss, not your shareholders, not your colleagues, not your partner, not your kids. You.
Stressful situations will no longer intimidated you.
The beauty of rhythmic breathing is that it works whether you believe it will or not.
You just need to try it.
Before that important phone call, or that important presentation, or even in the middle of a key meeting just try changing how you breath.
No-one even knows you are doing this.
It can be your quiet super-power.
While the light around you dim, while others are struggling to think clearly, you quietly install your competitive advantage.
You rest your brain by breathing rhythmically and evenly.
Try that and see the difference it makes.