UConn Health

June 28, 2013 | Carolyn Pennington - Schools of Medicine and Dental Medicine

Hijacked by Your Brain

Stress is a fact of life for most people, but understanding the alarm system in your brain can provide a new way of managing stressful situations.

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Stress is a fact of life for most people, but understanding the alarm system in your brain can provide a new way of managing stressful situations.  During an interview on NBC Connecticut, Julian Ford, clinical psychologist at the UConn Health Center and author of Hijacked By Your Brain, offers tips on how to better handle the stress in your life.

  • Measure your stress. Take 5 seconds, rate your stress level on a scale of 1 (no stress) to 10 (worst stress ever), and go back to what you were doing. Just paying attention to your stress level can lower it. The amygdala, the part of your brain that creates stress reactions and alarms, just wants to keep you alert so you will be calm and confident when faced with triggers like a fight with your significant other or a deadline at work. When you measure stress quickly and regularly, your brain’s alarm calms down because it knows you’re paying attention.
  • Identify your triggers. People, places, situations — myriad things can trigger our stress alarm based on memories or immediate worries and anxieties. When you think about what triggers you, you can realize why you feel stress; and realizing why — not fixing something — turns down and even resets the alarm.
  • Pay attention to rhythm. Your ideal day has a pattern where you have time to solve problems and time to reflect on what’s most important. Pull up your calendar and look at the way you spend your hours at work. Most of us constantly respond to the needs of people around us, which continually turns on our alarms. That’s not wrong; it just needs to happen in a pattern that you have determined is optimal for you.
  • Tweet one thing you learned today that really matters to you. Research with survivors of the worst stress—war, poverty, incarceration—has shown that when they think about what’s most important to them, it turns down their alarm. It’s strange to say, but Twitter is one way to re-focus on our core values, hopes and dreams, simply by putting into (a few) words what you’ve learned today.

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