How stress is killing us (and how you can stop it). | Thijs Launspach | TEDxUniversiteitVanAmsterdam

Fish are remarkable creatures, they are very aware of their surroundings, they can smell predators from miles away and know the availability of food or potential mates and yet there is one thing that fish are not aware of: they are in the water, so I think. There are certain similarities between fish and us people. I think that we human beings also don't notice some of the important things and even our lives and I want to talk to you about two of those things: one is a good life, a busy life and the other. Secondly,

stress

levels, even dangerous levels of

stress

, are acceptable and they are normal, so our lives are becoming busier than ever and part of this is that we like it, we feel productive, we like the frenetic pace. and there is never a dull moment.

We like that, but as a psychologist I can see a different side of the same coin, which is stress, and even unhealthy amounts of stress that are becoming normal for us today, so let's do a little experiment. Can I have some lights in the house? so let me see you okay let me ask you some questions yeah there you are so the first one is raise your hand if this applies to you, are you affected by burnout, whether it be personally or by someone closer to you, which one of you is it? pretty good, so the next question is that stress has a negative impact on one of the following things, the rule of proper sleep between you.

Wow, let's lose, okay, the diet, okay, the amount of exercise you do, okay, and the amount of free time you have. life, okay, that's most of you, basically, so next, the million dollar question, who among you would think you would be a happier person if you were less busy or less stressed in life? Well, wow, that's a lot of you, so let's look at another kind of point on this one and let me explain these numbers to you. I think you might know them. These are symptoms of exhaustion in the Netherlands, like those from the Central Statistics Office in 2016.

They are divided by age groups and by sex as well, so you have the light blue, those are the males and the dark blue are the females and I'm sorry, they are in Dutch, but you can see the man there. Sorry, the age groups are 15-25, 25-35, etc., right? So what you see here and I can try to do that, yeah, okay, so one of the first things we need to notice is that aside from retirees and high school and college students, the burnout amount is about 15%, this is a lifelong prevalence. And another thing to keep in mind is that between the ages of 25 and 35 there is significantly more burnout, so this is a problem and it is a problem if you think that most people don't even reach the burnout stage, but They are stressed in their lives and years and years and years, so a couple of the different things that are associated with stress are a weaker immune system, obesity and other diet-related problems, even some forms of cancer, some types of cancer and even, in some studies, premature death, which is very serious. so there are a couple of things, well for me the question is why, right, I'm a psychologist.

I like to research things, so why are we at this frenetic pace? Well, it turns out that it's not one thing, it's several things, it's many things. so let's start with our jobs, it's one of the most obvious places to look for work related stress, that's why our jobs are getting more and more complicated, we work more overtime than ever, we spend an average of more than two hours sending emails every day frequently. In addition to a regular workload and the boundaries between our working hours in our free time are breaking down because we can access our email and our things from home, so that's our job, then our daily life also becomes every more and more frenetic, so we suffer. of FOMO, which I'm sure you know.

FOMO is right, fear of missing out, which means that we put in all kinds of different activities and try to fit them into a limited space in our day, which means that we live at a frenetic pace and that we also lacked the opportunity to relax in the middle and to make matters worse, as the previous speaker also mentioned, we are addicted to these things that take up every free moment we have, so that is bad and also between our ears. We are also busier so there are psychological elements at play, for example the expectations we have of ourselves, so we need to be attractive, fit, financially successful, socially successful and happy all the time, every day, or else we feel like losers, that's a bad thing, our expectations are playing on ourselves too, so let's take a step back and look at what stress really is because we're talking about this for a while , so yes, stress, according to the textbook definition, is something involuntary. physical and psychological response to a stressor, so there are a couple of things to keep in mind here: it's something you don't choose to stress about, you just become stressed, it's something that happens in your body and it's something that happens in your head, and It is always so. a response to a certain stressor well, what could the stressors be?

Well, these things, as far as health is concerned, family conflicts, taking a test. Hawk, basically, public speaking is fine, it's right up there with the most stressful things according to some people demanding a social life, work-related stress, stress or and everything that entails, right, it's deadlines, difficult conversation with clients or clients, it's your boss, the pressure to achieve FOMO, we've talked about it, endless to-do lists, who has them, yes, me too, right, well, devices that continually want things from even in the moments when you are Well you wouldn't be available, so these things are potential stressors, so what happens when you encounter a stressor?

Well, this somewhere in your brain like a couple of centimeters here and your hypothalamus, a heart, a couple of hormones are excreted. which starts a chain reaction that ends here in the adrenal glands, above the kidneys, excreting adrenaline and cortisol and under the influence of adrenaline, body changes of adrenaline and cortisol occur, this way your heart rate begins As your breathing increases, your breathing rate rises through your muscles. tense your resources go to your arms to your legs you also have tunnel vision and some feelings of panic so why would this happen? Someone knows? Surviving, yes, in a way prepares your body to do one of two things: fight or flee, this is the This is the famous fight or flight response, this is how we still react when faced with danger, so this comes from from a different time.

This comes from a time when we were not looking for job opportunities, but looking for our food, and when we are not looking for our lunch in the cafeteria but looking for berries and in the woods, and the probability of encountering a difficult or dangerous situation was much larger than it is now, so the probability of encountering, for example, one of these things was much greater. higher, so this poses a problem because our cultural evolution was much faster than our physical evolution, so in different circumstances we now face the same system, we just don't encounter as many tigers anymore, except in zoos , but the tigers that you find yourself in these types of circumstances, so it is deadlines, job interviews, conflicts with your bosses, etc., but our body still reacts in the same way, it still reacts this way as if it were a tiger, so to add insult to injury, here we stress different things over a multiplicity of things and we also stress for much longer and we know that prolonged exposure to stress is a really bad thing and leads to all kinds of problems and can eventually lead to burnout, so what is a burnout?

Burnout is basically one of the definition is that this system becomes damaged so that things that you wouldn't normally encounter and would find very stressful, now you would think are very stressful, so that's a burnout, it's bad that it costs you a couple of months. Basically, that's the bad news. The good news is that you can do things about it, and I think being able to deal with stress effectively will be one of the most important skills you will have in the workplace later on. What can you do well? Basically, it's not that hard baby, so one thing you can do is take care of yourself, which sounds like a big cliché, but it's really true.

One thing you should know about stress is that it often presents itself as a cognitive problem. problem, so yes, then you worry about something, you worry about being in a certain situation and what you should do, but actually your physique, how you are physically, has a lot of influence and influence on that, so if you feel When you are fit, you handle stress better and you feel less stressed, so taking care of yourself involves the following two things: getting enough sleep, which is enough. Get a good eight hours of sleep, seven or eight hours a night regularly, so at your usual bedtime and wake up time, next. is taking care of your diet, which is eating lots of vegetables and nutrients and not so much sugar, as well as doing some exercise regularly, which helps your stress tolerance, being careful with alcoholic drugs and that kind of thing because they can influence in your stress tolerance even in the long term and be careful with your caffeine intake, who among you has drunk more than, say, five cups of coffee today?

Okay, you're a healthy bunch, so that's a couple of you, yeah, okay, caffeine really is a disaster. with your hormonal balance and the last thing is to schedule some time in your week without any activity, so that's the time to schedule not doing anything at all, like vegetables on the couch, integrate things, think about things correctly, so These are the basic things, another thing is this. breathe, so this is a good place in the presentation because I can hear everyone, okay, so I want to do an experiment again. I want to invite you to close your eyes and just regularly inhale through your nose and exhale through your mouth, so what?

What you can try to do is lengthen your exhale well, and as you sit there with your eyes closed, I would like to invite you to pay attention to how you are breathing right now in your words and exhalations. The way the breath enters and leaves your body you may even be able to detect a sort of rising and falling sensation that goes with that, so the next thing I want you to do is shift your attention to how you are sitting at that moment, so your body sensations, so your feet on the floor, your back on the chair, just notice and if you get distracted by a thought, just bring your attention back, that's okay, so the next thing I want you to do is notice the sounds that are coming out.

About that, you can notice it now and shift your attention to the thoughts that are happening right now in your head, what kind of things are going around in your head right now, okay, and then at your own pace you can come back. to the room, okay? so I sort of seduced you to seduce you into doing a little mindfulness exercise. We know that certain types of activities like mindfulness can train your brain to focus more and be less focused to have more stress tolerance, thus increasing your stress tolerance. Mindfulness is one of those things Yoga is another one of those things, sometimes some types of meditation or deep work, types of activities always to train your brain to be more focused, so again we are faced with a choice, like with the last speaker.

I think the choice is real and you have to make it and it's an important choice and one choice is: either you deal with the stress or the stress deals with you. Stress is inevitable in our daily lives, but you can change the way you relate to stress and that is actually a very important thing and you can start by doing some of the things that I have talked about today and I think this would be a very good plan, thanks.