Something happens. The tire goes flat, the layoff comes, the scale reads what it reads. And then a sentence starts running in the back of your head. That shouldn’t have happened. I should weigh less. They shouldn’t have fired me. You barely register it. It plays like a radio in another room, and it produces a feeling, and the feeling produces a behavior, and the behavior produces the day you are having.
The stress paradox is that the thought causing you the most pain is also the one that feels most obviously true.
Of course they shouldn’t have fired me. Of course I should weigh less. The belief feels like clear sight rather than distortion, and it feels useful, like it is the thing that will finally motivate change. It almost never is.
Treating stress as a condition to be managed rather than a belief or thought to be examined leaves it running.
My guest is Andy Bernstein.
Andy is the creator of Active Insight and the founder of the Resilience Academy. He is the author of The Myth of Stress, republished in paperback as Breaking the Stress Cycle, and he has taught at Wharton Executive Education since 2007, where his sessions have been audience favorites for thousands of leaders. His corporate clients include Merrill Lynch, Morgan Stanley, Johnson & Johnson, Google, Coca-Cola, and Genentech. He is also a former Muppets screenwriter, which turns out to matter more than you would think.
Andy built a process for dealing with stress that is seven steps, done on paper. You do not lie on a couch. You do not say a word. In this conversation he walks through all seven steps live, twice.
Challenging the way other people think is something we all do constantly. Challenging your own thinking is something we rarely do.
Some highlights.
03:32 Losing his father at 14 and his sister at 16
06:00 Byron Katie, The Work, and a job he never meant to leave
08:26 Active Insight
14:51 Where our idea of stressors came from
19:25 Evolution and the adaptive exception
24:41 The lingusitics of “should” and “shouldn’t”
29:33 The seven steps, walked through live
30:43 What is negation
36:50 Running the process on “they shouldn’t have fired me”
39:19 The showdown with yourself
43:37 If time doesn’t heal all wounds, what does
44:34 The Grant Study and not pushing love away
47:00 Doing it in your head, and when that isn’t enough
53:49 The psychology of subtraction
Enjoy!
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