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Growth Spurt: When Stress Makes You Selfish · The Growth Project

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  You.
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  Hey, this is Milt Lauter with, this week's edition of The Growth Spurt. I want you to think for a moment. What is your normal reaction to stress? How the stress affect you? How does it affect your ability to think critically, to solve problems creatively, to communicate effectively, to connect with those that you really care about? How does it affect your ability to stay connected to others, to stay connected to your.
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  Why? Because what I know stress, stress makes you selfish. Stress separates you from others. It separates you from the things you can control. Why is that? Or autonomic nervous system was created to protect us from threats. It triggers that fight or flight mechanism in our brains. And and what that really means, how it was taught to me in graduate school was a caveman walked out of a cave, and he saw a saber tooth tiger sitting right there.
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  He had to stop and think, Wonder what I do? He's dead. So immediately his brain senses danger. Cortisol is a stress hormone. The signal to your adrenal glands and adrenaline floods the body and activates everything you need to survive and deactivates everything you don't. So there's some physiological reactions to stress
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  that are automatic.
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  And so what is that? Well, the first thing is glucose is secreted by the liver because you need more energy to fight or flee. The more oxygen. So you start breathing deeply. You need more blood flow. So your heart starts pounding. You got to get rid of that excess energy. So you sweat. You maybe your your face turns red.
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  You start splotchy. Your digestive system shuts down. No need to eat if you're getting ready to die. Your your urinary tract and your bowels. Everything shuts down to prepare you to fight or flee. Well, then what happens to our eyes? Where does our focus shift? Our focus shift on the threat that's right in front of me? Think about that caveman.
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  He's not worried about the saber tooth tiger that is in all. From the distance, he's got to worry about the one that's front and center. So most of us in life today are not faced with life or death situations. We aren't faced with this do or die mentality, but our brain still thanks for your because the brain has a hard time distinguishing between a real threat and a perceived threat.
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  So when that autonomic nervous system is triggered, stress makes you focus on the threat and it really makes you focus on you. So what makes you selfish? Because when I am under stress, I'm not only are not aware of how much stress is impacting me, I can not be aware of how my stress impacts others, how it impacts my ability to communicate effectively or to be present in the moment, or to be calm or to be joyful.
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  And so that reaction to stress, if I understand that stress is made me selfish, just makes me focus on me, makes me focus on my threats, and then it separates me. It separates me from others. It separates me from the things I can control, what separates me from my purpose. It sets me separates from the things that bring me joy.
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  And so as you think about your normal reaction to stress, how a stress making you selfish, how to stress separating you from the things that really matter in your life, how is stress separating you from the things from the people that really matter you? The other benefit when stress that cortisol a hormone, makes you selfish in separation. The antidote to that?
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  There's a lot of antidotes to this stress, gratitude and joy and laughter and vulnerability and connection and a shared experience. And maybe that's another growth spurt, another conversation of ways to fight that. But what those produces oxytocin, and that's the bonding hormone. And so what we're constantly trying to do at amplifies is really raise your awareness, encourage you to take action, and to help you hold yourself accountable to the things that you really believe in and who you want to be.
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  Until next time, continue to be better and pursue better.