Ep48 Neuroscience of Resilience

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Hello everybody and welcome to this episode of the Chief Psychology Officer with Dr Amanda Potter, Chartered Psychologist and CEO of Zircon and I'm Christian Lees-Bell, Senior Consultant at Zircon.

Hi Christian.

And this is such a great opportunity to share our research today looking at the neuroscience of resilience. I know this particular topic is a real interest of yours Amanda, is that right?

It is but I think you say that most times actually. Most of our podcasts or in fact all of our podcasts are of interest to me, that's why we're doing them.

all right i didn't know that

and they were the modules i loved i've had a real interest in neuroscience and the brain and chemicals for many many years so it's really great that the work we're doing now with our clients is really bringing neuroscience to the fore.

There's definitely a growing interest of mine as well partly through some of the work that we do in the research and I know maybe not everybody's cup of tea in terms of getting into all the details and the science I know that when we do a lot of our workshops on resilience and psychological safety I think a good portion of attendees really find the neuroscience angle really fascinating.

They do don't they and it may be because Our energy and excitement goes up a level, Christian, when we're talking about it.

I think it has to, doesn't it?

I do think that people seem to get it. Yeah, true.

But before we dive into the ins and outs of that, can you share with our listeners, first of all, what resilience actually is, Amanda?

So resilience comes from three places. It comes from our attitude or our traits and preference. It comes from how we control our physiology and how we control the autonomic nervous system. And also from the social interaction that we have with friends, colleagues, family.

That's really interesting. So in that respect, if our resilience is dependent on things like traits, physiology, social support, then it must be different for everybody, right?

Completely. So each of us have very different personality traits. We know that from all of the research over many years or strengths. And as a result, we have a differing propensity to experience positive and negative emotions, which can really impact our emotional intelligence, our social intelligence, but as we're talking about today, our resilience.

is something which is a lot less stable by it sounds like compared to personality or traits could be quite changeable daily or weekly.

That's such a good point you brought up there, Christian, because what we're talking about is state or trait. And we know from the research that emotional intelligence, social intelligence, resilience are states. In other words, our experience of our situation impacts how we feel, whereas our personality is much more stable. stable and enduring over time, our resilience, emotional and social intelligence can vary depending on the experience of life and what's happening in our world.

Yeah, and that makes a lot of sense to me as I think that I'm less resilient on a bad day or when I feel more stressed than usual. So is it the case that before we try to understand resilience, we need to understand stress?

Yep, totally. Particularly in the field of psychology and health, stress is a extremely complex and multifaceted issue that arises when an an individual is met with a number of challenging situations, either prolonged or acute, intrinsic or extrinsic, real or perceived. So many things could actually make us feel stressed. And it's the extent to which we are able to cope with that stress or it's perceived to be outside of our coping ability or strategy.

So it's that notion of balance, I guess, right? Demands and resources. Is the concept of stress, do you think, a modern thing or have we always talked about it?

I think it's a term that we've particularly started using in the 70s so in our careers Christian as we were I mean you're younger than me but 70s children it means that we've always heard of and used the word stress but actually it's in the last 20-30 years that it's become so pronounced in our language in our everyday language we are starting to use clinical terms like depression anxiety so much more freely in our workplace and even though we use this catch-all term of stress it's actually true

So when we're talking about experiencing stress in different ways, Amanda, are you talking about acute or prolonged stress?

It's both. So life can be incredibly unpredictable and we have excessive chronic stress in peaky situations at certain times of our lives and they can have significant detrimental effects on our mental and physical health. As I've mentioned on previous podcasts, I get alopecia. So if I have that very acute or chronic stress, I can really have a physical response. But often it's much more prolonged for many people.

with that type of stress, I suppose it can creep up on us, can't it? General, you know, cumulative sort of effect of stress that we might not always be aware of just how much of an impact that's having on us. Would

that be fair to say? at that point. But before then, you just think you're running like crazy to keep up.

So to be clear then, building our resilience, Amanda, helps us to create strategies, I guess, to overcome stress. It can be a part of our self-care mental toolkit. Would that be right?

Yeah, exactly. So having the ability to adapt and bounce back from adversity, particularly in recent years for me, has been incredibly helpful because our working lives have been so volatile.

And the social support we know being so critical in well-being in general the most important thing actually isn't it in terms of the research?

It so is.

I'm thinking also that mind must be critical here too. I read some research recently about something called the stress mindset, which was really fascinating. And it's suggesting that the way you think about stress and the word itself can actually have a real impact on the way your body actually reacts to a stressor, which I found fascinating. Have you heard of this stress mindset thing?

I haven't. So does that mean if we tell ourselves we're stressed, we're going to feel more stressed? Is that what you mean by it?

The research focused on whether we have a negative perception of stress and the effects of stress versus a positive one. So for people in the research who saw stress as being a mobilizing, a performance enhancing thing, that was their sort of predominant mindset that that had actually tangible effects on their physiology and their perception of stress versus other people who had an overwhelmingly negative perception.

That makes a lot more sense. So our mindset and how we believe and perceive stress to impact us, influences how it actually impacts us. I do agree with that because if you think about all of our research, cultivating a positive mindset is one of the most important things for combating negative stress. Because in order to make that stress go away, we need to make choices. We need to remain positive.

So this podcast is looking at the neuroscience of resilience, isn't it?

It is. And I'm particularly interested in how the brain adapts with and adapts to and deals with stressful situations. Because if we can understand this, we can learn to be more effective when we're faced with different So

can you help me understand this in a little bit more detail, Amanda, in terms of what the brain's doing and some of these neurotransmitters that are related to resilience and stress?

Sure. So the first one to say is that the brain, of course, very obviously, is the central hub of the nervous system. And it plays such a pivotal role in our response to stress and adversity. And if we look at it from a neuroscientific lens, we get a real insight into the biological functions of resilience. the neurotransmitters that we keep talking about, genetic factors, neural networks, and all of these shape our ability to overcome challenge.

So by understanding neuroscience, we can effectively understand resilience?

Totally, because neuroscience helps us understand how we live our lives, why we make the choices we do, and how we experience stress.

It's a fantastic word as well isn't it? Can you say a little bit more about neuroplasticity? I mean I think most of our listeners will be familiar with the word but yeah won't really know too much necessarily about how it relates to resilience.

Neuroplasticity is all about creating those connections and forming those networks and the brain has an amazing capacity to restructure and to adapt and it helps us with our ability to maintain resilience when confronted with adversity and stress because it It creates the links between critical aspects.

So clever, isn't it? And so amazing that this happens. So for me to try and understand this more than so neuroplasticity helps in the development of coping mechanisms and skills. This helps us to adapt flexibly to stress.

completely so we keep talking about choices christian and choices are really key because if we make healthy choices what we're doing is we're training our brains to recognize the stress and connect it to a healthy action a healthy choice a way to deal with that stress but we will not recover if we do not make those healthy choices because we won't create the right pathways for feeling good so actually to deal with stress in the future we've got to learn how to deal with stress today

what happens in the brain when we're feeling unsafe and we talk about psychological safety so if you're not feeling safe or we're anxious or stressed? What's going on there?

So our brains are very much wired to be aware of safety risks. And that risk awareness system in the brain is fast, it's responsive, it's attentive, it's aware, and it remains alert in order to keep us safe. And this is driven by the amygdala. And the amygdala is responsible for the fight or flight response. It's very efficient, it's very attentive, and it continues to operate without us knowing.

So there's that priming aspect that you talked about before, making associations.

Yeah, it is. I wouldn't necessarily use priming in this instance, but it is about making associations, looking for patterns, looking for risks and seeing how big the problem is.

Which I suppose makes a lot of sense in terms of keeping us safe doesn't it and that sort of a brain's way of keeping us out of danger and looking for potential threats so i suppose that's something that we have to be able to do

absolutely

so if i get this straight the amygdala is responsible for so many different things so we've talked about memory decision making emotional responses flagging that fear and anxiety and aggression response so it sounds like it's a whole lot of responsibility for one apparently rather small brain part it must be absolutely exhausted

it must It must be, particularly if we're stressed. I mean, that's the point, isn't it? I mean, that's completely bonkers. And 99% of it is automatic. Well, some people say 97, some people say 99, but I can't imagine being attentive to that many pieces of information. But when we're stressed and anxious, it means that we're really, I suppose in your words, then priming that amygdala to be on high alert.

So it actually grows over time, the more stress we experience, particularly chronic stress. Is that right?

Totally. And this really means that we have a negativity bias because we're unconsciously looking out for threat and danger more than anything else and it results in us attributing danger and risk to pretty harmless situations it could be an abrupt email it could be a challenging deadline a flippant comment or a critical remark and you start to add all of those pieces together and build it into a story which is much bigger than the reality because of that high alert of the amygdala

so being on this high alert a lot of the time i guess obviously there's protective and positive benefits but there are also negative impacts of that as well you mentioned negative bias. Can you say anything more about that in terms of the impact of being on autopilot?

I can do it from a personal perspective. I know that when I am stressed or anxious, I can overemphasize how I negatively feel about very small and irrelevant problems. So I will get really het up about contextually really small things. I'll really sweat the small stuff, which is crazy on reflection. I won't be able to sleep worrying about something so minor. When I've woken up, I think at the end of the day, if I do manage to get back to sleep, I think, my goodness, Why was I worried about that?

We've certainly been the victim of catastrophizing things sometimes, particularly under a lot of stress. And they call it black and white thinking when there's no sort of medium gray area. It's either kind of wonderful or absolutely terrible. We've talked about the amygdala and what that's involved in, Amanda. What about the prefrontal cortex? Isn't the role of this part of the brain to do the job of balancing things out?

So the prefrontal cortex is responsible for cognitive control. Control, decision making, moderating social behavior and expression. And it helps us to control and mitigate any biases. And it's pretty much the reasonable part of the brain. And it helps us to manage the response from the amygdala and rationalize the extent to the risk and stop the emotional response and bring in a more rational one.

is that also something to do with the speed of the signals and the response

totally so the amygdala is faster quicker stronger

i read recently the prefrontal cortex is only really fully developed when we reach our mid-20s and it's regarded to be a newer part of the brain so it's less well developed and not even as efficient as the amygdala is that correct

yeah well think about teenagers and then i'll just stop talking there so yeah i I think you just see it in teenagers who are growing, who have not yet managed to completely manage their stress response. And the really important point is that stress is the enemy and prolonged stress can really cause the prefrontal cortex to physically shrink and weaken. And at the same time, that stress can help the amygdala to grow and strengthen. So we need to manage that stress.

I've heard of those people too.

Yeah. And someone yesterday in a client event that was a guy from the Netherlands talked about, as we know it, eustress, actually performance stress. And I was talking to him about, so what tips him over? What are the triggers that stop him from feeling like he's performing to actually not coping? And so some people manage to keep that very high level of performance, but most of us end up responding quite negatively to that prolonged stress.

I'd imagine he's got a positive stress mindset or at least gained it over time.

Yeah, if he's listening, he'll know who he is.

So let's change tack now. Can you tell us about the chemicals that we release when we're stressed?

So ultimately, we talked about the amygdala and that's responsible for helping us send signals to the adrenal gland to release adrenaline and cortisol.

So you mentioned adrenaline and cortisol, Amanda. Can you help us understand just simply what these chemicals are? Because I think many of us have heard of them, but might not know exactly what they do and how they link up.

So we talked about the adrenaline, and cortisol being released by the adrenal gland and it's a result of the sympathetic nervous system activating the release of both of these neurotransmitters and chemicals and so both of them help with the stress response so cortisol is the thing that makes us feel frustrated or tense or anxious so the feeling isn't great but it helps us to stay alive by numbing pain by activating the body and with in combination with the adrenaline it's really preparing our

So it's not all bad. So, you know, stress can help us to have released testosterone as well, right? So stress chemicals can be a positive thing.

They can. And the testosterone particularly is helpful with the power and courage part of it. It gives us the belief and both men and women in times of difficulty when we're preparing ourselves to challenge we release testosterone just a small amount

i've heard that too much testosterone though and high cortisol if those two come together is linked to aggression or selfish behaviors

yeah and so we need to balance them so we need to balance the positive neurotransmitters and chemicals with those i will use the word negative but the adrenaline the cortisol the testosterone which may end up in us demonstrating behavior or experiencing emotions that are not very helpful.

So it's not just a case of having or needing to have high levels of these neurotransmitters, there's very much a case of them having to balance with each other.

Absolutely.

You mentioned earlier, Amanda, the sympathetic nervous system, you know, what is that? And how is it different to the parasympathetic nervous system?

So they are two parts of the autonomic nervous system.

Yeah, I know a friend who when she's feeling stressed, she suffers stomach aches, which is just feels like she's just she's just uncomfortable in the stomach. You know, she's not obviously digesting and she just feels really tight there. So I guess what you've just said about the role of the parasympathetic system, enabling that proper digestion to occur kind of explains that, I guess, right. So when she's more relaxed, then it sort of calms down.

Interesting. You often hear about people who have quite strong physical responses to stress, particularly in their stomachs.

Absolutely. So So the parasympathetic nervous system calms the nervous system through the release of certain neurotransmitters, right? So how do we release the positive neurotransmitters and hormones that help us to feel happier, healthier?

Great. I think that's a really good way to focus the rest of this podcast, actually, because if we talk about the positive ones and what we can do to access them, that would be a really good way of helping people become more resilient.

yeah we'd love to i for one would like some extra tips as well we can always do with some more tips to build our resilience so yeah did you want to kick off and then i might have some questions along the way

yeah i'd love to christian but just before we do that let's just remind the listeners that we had a fabulous podcast that you and i published a few weeks ago on the dose book and that was a brilliant summary of the positive neurotransmitters that can be released as a result of healthy actions and tips so while we're going to go through a few here today if anyone's really interested don't forget to buy the book Dose because that's a brilliant book at looking at the impact of dopamine, oxytocin,

weeks ago. Yeah I was really enjoying recording that as well.

It was great wasn't it? But the ones I want to talk about today are dopamine, serotonin, oxytocin, endorphins, melatonin and acetylcholine.

Great so let's start with dopamine and serotonin.

That would be good. And the reason that's good to start with these two, because they're both neurotransmitters and also neuromodulators. So what it means when they're a neuromodulator is that the release of dopamine, the release of serotonin helps to enhance the parts of the brain that enable the release of the other neurotransmitters. So in other words, they have both a positive impact themselves, but they also have an enabling impact for the release of other positive neurotransmitters too.

Interesting.

And then serotonin is a lot stickier, also a neuromodulator. It's harder to access, but once you access it, you feel good for longer because it's stickier. And some of the things you can do to release serotonin, as well as spending time with loved ones, you could meditate, you could walk in the sun, you could do some exercise.

I could definitely do those too at least half of those I'm already doing so it's good sometimes it's about just recognising the things that you already do that help and then making sure you schedule them in and make sure you do them more

totally and if you're remember again the podcast on the dose book by Ian and Dulcy I loved the cumulative the chunking thing where you yeah if you put some of those habits together

stacking yeah

stacking that's it not chunking I think of a chocolate aren't I yeah and so you know if we go for a swim or we go for a walk and eating a banana if we put these things together they have a greater than cumulative effect

and you're more likely to do those enjoyable habits because you know you're already doing them and you're doing it at the same time. So they're so easy to do. What about some of the other neurotransmitters?

So the next ones I suppose we could look at are oxytocin, which is the love hormone. It's really hard to access this one. Women access it when they're feeding their babies after birth. We release oxytocin after lovemaking. So it's one that really comes at a very extreme level of interaction with a loved one. There are some arguments.

i shouldn't take it too seriously when i read stuff about hugging somebody for seven seconds and i get all the oxytocin i ever need right

yeah i'm not sure that actually is the case but you might get some serotonin

very specific

yeah

yeah that person feel good anyway yes

exactly you feel good. The next one's endorphins. So that's the painkiller. And laughter is the best thing for that. For me, I'm a big Mickey Flanagan fan. I've just been to see him at the event in Apollo. Brilliant night out. Love, love, love Mickey Flanagan. I also went to see Dawn French recently as well. Both of them were great. And just laughing is just so great. So watching a comedy, laughing, and again, just creates the opportunity to reduce the impact of that feeling of pain.

And what about the business of sleep, isn't that? Melatonin.

Yeah, melatonin. So melatonin and cortisol are not best friends. So the more cortisol we have in our system, the reduction of melatonin results. When we wake up, we wake up because we get a boost of cortisol in the morning. That's what wakes us up when the alarm goes or when we wake up at a certain time. And then throughout the day, our level of cortisol drops and it's replaced with melatonin.

it affects the quality of sleep perhaps

it does it just gets you there but it doesn't keep you there and so what we really want to do is activate that parasympathetic nervous system we talked about earlier in order to kind of have a healthy level of melatonin at the end of the day and have that prolonged sleep we can actually do it quite a lot of it through food so there are a number of melatonin rich foods that we can eat for example cucumber asparagus corn corn it's very good for helping us release melatonin but also the obvious

what about all of the lovely relaxing stuff that you can do to promote melatonin on that relaxation

i mean you know them better than i do probably christian because of your therapy background all of those things around meditation breathing they're all fantastic for for helping us with the release of melatonin because they activate the parasympathetic nervous system, the calming system.

And hot baths as well. Something I don't do enough of. Oh,

yes. I'm a big hot bath person. And in fact, hot baths are really good for the last one, which is acetylcholine. So acetylcholine. Sorry, I always say that wrong. And my brother, if he's listening, he'll be texting me saying, sis, you said it wrong again because he did neuroscience in his master's. And he and Jade keep saying to me, you're doing it wrong. Oh, well, I'm fundamentally flawed. This is the one that helps us with balance and perspective.

so it's great for focus and attention or eggs and fish we eat

yep and in fact there's a brilliant list though it's eggs fish mushrooms soy beef I mean all of the kind of meats pulses basically and nuts seem to be really good and broccoli actually all my favorite foods I should be much more focused I think than I probably am given what my diet is

that's a really fantastic overview Amanda what's the impact of us releasing these neurotransmitters and does it have an impact on our mood the way we think for example

that's exactly why we're talking about it because the amazing thing is how we think and the words we use in our head have a real impact on how we see the world and the neurotransmitters that we're releasing has an impact on how we feel and therefore the words we use so it's truly important there's a massive link between those neurotransmitters the feelings and then the word the dialogue we use to talk to ourselves.

So it's a positive self-reinforcing loop between those things.

Absolutely.

So changing tack again, what is the impact of resilience? Is there a link with some of the other things we talk about, such as procrastination and imposter syndrome, even psychological safety?

They are all connected. So if we take imposter syndrome and low self-belief, what we found from our research is that when we are low on resilience, resilience and more likely to experience negative affect. We are more likely to feel like we are an imposter and have low self-belief. So that's not surprising. We've also found that when we are low on resilience, we are more likely to procrastinate. We're less likely to be decisive and to commit to a decision.

Because that sense of resilience can, I guess, spread very quickly, particularly from a leader and a manager to their colleagues in the same way that stress or a strong emotion can. It can be contagious, can't it?

It really can.

I learned some really great tips for creating resilience or enhancing my own resilience from a neuroscience perspective from the book you just mentioned, Dose.

sure

something that i was struggling to get into was taking a cold shower every day to get that endorphin rush so that's instead of taking a cold shower so what i occasionally do is i will fill the bowl with really cold water put some ice in it and i'll actually put my hand in some ice for 20 30 seconds and that gives me a kind of apparently that hit of dopamine serotonin that is a good start to the day if i'm not feeling resilient enough for a shower but i think if i'm in the shower and i want that

so the first one the hand in the water is all about endorphins isn't it and the second one is all about serotonin and if you were to then combine that and stack it with another thing which is the things you've succeeded on that day or to write a list of the things that you want to do tomorrow then you be getting dopamine too because you'd have the motivation reward one too what's great about those examples is they are accessing different neurotransmitters so the cold water endorphins the

interesting so i got confused i thought me my hand in the ice water was supposed to be making me feel happy but actually it's for pain relief particularly but it's good for my resilience i guess isn't it at the beginning of the day if i can do that I can do anything.

And so some of the stacking things that I've been doing is that I make sure that I get up and open the curtains and get daylight. I will try to avoid the blue screen in the morning. I will have a glass of water by the bed and try and drink water first thing in the morning. And the two activities I will do is I'll go to the gym and I will walk the dog.

it's helped us both. And we are also doing our best to help clients to assess and to build their own resilience individually and with teams and organizations. So before we finish, can you say just a few words about how Be Talent are measuring resilience?

We have a questionnaire. It's called the Be Talent Resilience Questionnaire. It measures nine bipolar sets of emotions, so positive and negative affect emotions, and helps us to understand how an individual experiences those emotions on a good and bad day. So what emotion are you more likely to experience on a good day? And what emotions are you more likely to experience on a bad day?

So thanks so much, Amanda, for sharing recent thinking on resilience and neuroscience. And this draws us to the end of the podcast.

It does indeed. And I wanted to just say that we've recorded nearly 50 podcasts now. It's bananas. It's not that I'm running out of topics, but I would like to make sure we record things that people want to listen to and are interested in. So if you have got any ideas for the topics that we should be covering, please feel free to email us at thecpo at zircon-mc.co.uk and we're considering all the different ideas.

There are common questions sometimes, aren't they, when we have conversations with clients. I'd just like to say to our listeners, if you are interested in receiving information about our Be Talent Resilience product or booking onto our accreditation training, feel free to contact us at hello at betalent.com.

And finally, one of the things that we were talking about internally is that if you love this podcast, I hope you do, could you share it with one person who you think might be interested in listening and might find it beneficial? That would really help us. So thank you everyone for listening. I hope you have a wonderful and successful day.