Loopwell Author Series | Dr. Aditi’s 5 Resets for Stress
What We Learned from Dr. Aditi’s Fireside Chat
By: Cecilia Pandiscia
We live in a stressful time, that is no secret. Global tragedies, polarized politics, the balance of personal life with professional demands, relationships, and even the Instagram notification on your phone, lend our lives to feel overwhelmingly stressful. Fact is, 70% of people have at least one feature of stress and burnout, which is characterized by the inability to disengage. It’s no secret that stress is not good for our health, even thinking about our health is stressful. Dr. Aditi Nerurkar is a Harvard stress expert who has dedicated her life to debunking the misperception of stress, and providing tangible resources to reset our mindset on stress and burnout. She joined us for our Loopwell Author Series to help people combat stress and burnout with her book “The 5 Resets Rewire Your Brain and Body for Less Stress and More Resilience”. Our time together not only helped us better understand how specific stress triggers burnout, but we took away key practical advice that we can utilize on a daily basis.
Get Clear on What Matters Most
Dr. Aditi’s first Reset is to determine Your Motivation, Objective, Small, and Timely Goals, also known as Your MOST Goal. This process works stress backwards, by determining your goal or desired destination, you can create a clearer path of resilience to lessen stress.
Dr. Aditi writes “the most empowering aspect of this relationship between stress and resilience is that if your brain can be taught how to experience less stress, it can also be taught how to build more resilience” (Nerurkar). Using the MOST method sets the foundation for your mindset to balance stress with resilience and provides clarity in your mind for a path forward.
Find Quiet in a Noisy World
We live in a world that is oversaturated with distractions and our brains are constantly being overstimulated. Dr. Aditi dove into the abundance of scientific research about how the fast-paced information stream is detrimental to our sleep and thus our stress levels, and coined the phrase “Popcorn Brain” to describe what happens to our brains when we spend too much time online. Her prescription for Popcorn Brain? Limits.
Her best recommendations are no more than twenty minutes twice a day scrolling, opt out of push notifications, keep your phone away from your work station while focusing, and bedtime is a no-phone time.
Sync Your Brain and Your Body
We often feel stress in the body before the mind and some feel it vice-versa. The mind-body connection is paramount in the resilience to stress relationship and Dr. Aditi notes this in her third reset tip to sync your brain and body. Her most effective tactic in doing so; breathing.
Her Stop-Breathe-Be method which intentionally brings your physical body to a complete stop, communicates to yourself to BREATHE and be fully aware and conscious of your breathing, and grounds us by bringing deliberate attention to our physical and mental state, is renowned as the most immediately effective mind-body connector.
Come Up for Air
Most people take pride in their ability to multitask, which ultimately is a myth. We really can only complete two tasks by focusing on one-at-a-time in rapid succession. Instead, we should monotask and setting our tasks up in a time blocked format will yield greater productivity and overall success. More importantly, we need to come up for air to give our brain a breather without sacrificing productivity. Taking breaks and making them count alleviates the suffocating feeling of stress. Many of us feel a decrease in productivity– our inner voice says to work longer and more to make up for the loss, however Dr. Aditi taught us that a brief respite for just for 3-5 minutes will help our brain function better by allowing the neural process of consolidation.
Bring Your Best Self-Forward
While the majority of us experience stress or even burnout, stress is a unique experience for each of us. While all stress is not bad, we all struggle with our own inner critic at different volumes and frequency. Dr. Aditi shares her final Reset tip of silencing our inner critic through gratitude and authentic expression.
Gratitude can be done by writing therapeutically or a Love Letter to Yourself. This can be a cathartic experience and provide support and acknowledgement of the stress in your life. Living a Lifetime in a Day balances the six elements of living a fulfilled life. Bringing the components of childhood, work, vacation, community, solitude, and retirement can realign focus and engage us more in our lives by providing balance of what makes us fulfilled.
As much as we may wish, stress is an inevitable component of our lives. Dr. Aditi’s mind resets not only acknowledge the stress and burnout we all experience, but provide applicable strategies and tools for us to balance and navigate the reality of stress and live our lives fully present.
If you couldn’t join us with Dr. Aditi, stay tuned for the upcoming Loopwell Author Series, a monthly series of author-led workshops, coach-guided discussions, community book chats, and more. You can also join us to practice what we’ve learned in our upcoming stress-reduction classes like Breathwork for the Soul and Radiate and Rise.
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Breathwork for the Soul - April 11
Radiate & Rise - April 16
