Dear community,
A very happy Diwali from our family to yours! Here’s wishing everyone love and light.
Our ‘Let’s sleep better’ series will be capped off by a personal piece I wrote on the mental health costs of breastfeeding with Slate.
While we wait for that, I want to share a useful framework for recognizing and cutting short our own cycles of reactivity — helpful especially for the holidays!
I teach a trauma-responsive leadership class for public health professionals through a company called Lodestar, and we’re in the middle of a cohort now.
In its honor, I want to share an insightful Harvard Business Review article by Tony Schwartz and Emily Pines that encapsulates the changes we're looking to facilitate in our course — how to be thoughtful and deliberate in our responses, rather than reactive and impulsive.
These skills are useful at work, for sure — and they are also useful in our relationships with loved ones and ourselves.
The article describes the “invisible drama that operates inside us all day long… mostly outside our consciousness… and consumes our attention and drains our energy.”
Any of us can “revert to survival behaviors in the face of perceived threats to our value,” which we face frequently — and often subconsciously. Whether we’re feeling belittled, criticized, left out, or discriminated against, it’s important for us to know that social threats trigger the exact same stress response pathways as seeing a lion in the woods.
And when that stress response is activated, our prefrontal cortex and deliberate, rational decision-making and thinking, are inaccessible — we are instead led by our emotional (limbic) brains, with emotionally reactive and impulsive behaviors.
Trauma-responsive leadership and relationship-building is therefore first about making the subconscious conscious. It’s about noticing and modifying our instinctual reactions — so we can instead lead from the smarter, more expansive parts of our brains.
This (admittedly hard) work allows us to be better leaders, colleagues, friends, and family members — and ultimately more in control of our relationships and actions.
From the article:
“All leaders have two selves.
There’s the self we prefer to present to the world — the one that is run by our pre-frontal cortex and is measured, rational, and capable of making deliberate choices.
And then there’s the self, run by the amygdala, that is reactive and impulsive and often causes us to fail to meet our commitments or overreact in frustration.
The antidote to reacting from the second self is to develop the capacity to observe your two selves in real time… and then make deliberate rather than reactive choices about how to respond in challenging situations.
Watch out for times when you feel you’re digging in your heels. The absolute conviction that you’re right and the compulsion to take action are both strong indicators that you’re operating from that second self. [This, admittedly, is an area of active growth for me.]
[N]oticing can be a powerful tool for shifting from defending our value to creating value.”
Here are two questions to ask yourself if you notice you’ve shifted into your emotional brain — to allow you that intentional pause to expand knee-jerk narratives (‘They’re lazy’ or ‘They don’t like me’) to be more complete. Instead of firing off that email or WhatsApp response, this powerful pause ultimately allows us to respond in ways more aligned with our values and mission — and to more effectively achieve our goals:
“What else could be true here?” A single (especially if automatic) story is never complete on its own.
“What is my responsibility in this?” We have the most control over our own actions and feelings, and not those of others, and this can uncover some empowering (if sometimes difficult) truths for a way forward.
If you enjoyed this, check out these other posts:
Wishing you more deliberation and less reactivity,
Dr Devika Bhushan