How to Promote Calm: Science-Backed Breathing

1: Stress gets a bad name.

Like many things in life, the Goldilocks rule applies here.

Too much stress.  Not good.  In fact, it will kill us.

But too little stress is not good either.

To perform at our best, we want to harness stress and use it to our advantage.

Or as Goldilocks says, “Not too hot. Not too cold. Just right.”

“Stress … continue reading

1: The default mode for peak performers is not recovery, rest, and relaxation. 

“If momentum matters most, sitting still feels like laziness,” Steven Kotler writes in The Art of Impossible: A Peak Performance Primer.  “And the more aligned with passion and purpose we become, the more ‘wasteful’ time off starts to feel.”

Yet, we need to prioritize recovery to avoid burnout.

“Burnout is identified by three symptoms: exhaustion, depression, … continue reading

1: Gallup researchers have calculated a national stress index based on a survey of more than 125,000 people from 121 countries. The analysts ask participants whether they had experienced a significant amount of stress the previous day, Dr. Daniel Friedland writes in his brilliant book Leading Well from Within.

The results? The higher the nation’s stress index, the higher the nation’s well-being.

“Further, individuals who were stressed but not … continue reading

1: VUCA stands for Volatility, Uncertainty, Complexity, and Ambiguity.  

That’s our world. There are two ways we can show up.  

Option one? A reactive mindset. “We feel threatened with fear, stress, self-doubt, ego, and conflict; where an unconscious and reflexive series of protective responses can dominate our psyche and ripple through our actions, activating similar experiences in others that can instantly drain energy and fragment teams as well as families,” … continue reading

Dr. Daniel Friedland arrived at the board meeting feeling raw and out-of-sorts after an argument with his teenage son.  

Danny* was the board chair of the Academy of Integrative Health and Medicine. It was the morning of the second day of a combined board meeting with another leading organization in integrative health. The goal of the meeting was to formalize the upcoming collaboration of the two groups.

The leader … continue reading

1: We’ve got it all wrong.

We’ve been taught that stress is bad for us.

This belief is harmful, Kelly McGonigal argues in The Upside of Stress: Why Stress Is Good for You, and How to Get Good at It: “The best way to manage stress isn’t to reduce or avoid it, but rather to rethink and even embrace it.”

The fight-or-flight survival instinct is part of our stress … continue reading