Category Archives: Wellness

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Neutralize “Killer Stress” to Boost the Bottom Line

Who experiences greater levels of stress: management or employees? Managers seem to think they do, but hard research data makes it clear: Employees experience greater stress, and that affects the company’s bottom line.

It doesn’t have to be that way: Effective leaders can create an organizational culture that reduces “killer stress” and encourages “challenge stress,” which produces gains in productivity and performance.

Despite its reputation, all stress is not bad. What we call “challenge stress,” actually stimulates people to perform at their best.

“Killer stress,” is the kind that comes from feeling like you don’t have control over your work. Killer stress is unhealthy and in many individuals triggers fight, flight, freeze or stalking behavior — not what good leaders want to find in their organizations.

Here are three actions you can take to reduce killer stress, increase challenge stress and boost your company’s bottom line. 

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Neuro Wi-Fi: Power of Mutual Empathy

Happy Girl
#4 Feel Others’ Emotions

Mutual empathy is a powerful connector that is made possible by the mirror-neurons in our brains. These neurons act like an emotional Wi-Fi system. When we feel the emotions others feel it makes them feel connected to us. When we feel their positive emotions, it enhances the positive emotions they feel. When we feel their pain, it diminishes the pain they feel. If someone expresses emotion, it’s okay, and natural, for you to feel it.

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New Mummy Movie: Connection is Life-Giving



Recently I was speaking at a university about the importance of connection and Connection Cultures to help students, faculty and staff thrive in institutions of higher education. After I spoke, the president of the divinity school came up to me and said I needed to see a great new comedy entitled Warm Bodies.  He informed me that the movie is about mummies who are brought back to life by human connection.  How great is that!  Check out the trailer above.  I plan the watch the movie on iTunes this weekend.

It’s been said that artists have their finger on the pulse of the culture.  Warm Bodies is a case in point, even if its protagonist had no pulse to speak of.

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New Insights on Emotional and Behavioral Disorders

In Untangling the Mind: Why We Behave the Way We Do, D. Theodore George, M.D., a psychiatrist and neuroscientist at the National Institutes of Health, describes a new model for understanding America’s surge in emotional and behavioral disorders.  Earlier this year, a report by the National Research Council and Institute of Medicine of the National Academies found that comparing a peer group of 17 wealthy countries, Americans under 50 now have the lowest life expectancy and fall at the bottom (i.e. were the worst) of nearly every morbidity category from deaths by substance abuse, sexual-related diseases, infant mortality, violence and sedentary lifestyles that contribute to diabetes and cardiovascular problems. The report points out that in the years following World War II, America was near or at the top of the peer group.  It rightly concludes that something clearly is wrong but, unfortunately, fails to provide a satisfactory explanation.  The problem has become so acute that earlier this month the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention released figures that show suicide rates haven sharply increased so that more Americans now die from suicide than from motor vehicle accidents.

Fortunately, Dr. George’s book helps us understand what’s going wrong.  In his view, traumas experienced by 75 percent of the population result in faulty brain wiring that makes people vulnerable to the stressors, threats and fears we experience in modern life, including the chronic stress many people experience in today’s workplace.  The faulty wiring misinterprets threats and fears by blowing them way out of proportion.  This results in emotional and behavioral disorders.  When people don’t feel well emotionally – i.e. they are angry, anxious, withdrawn, bored, depressed, etc. – they frequently cope in ways that result in addiction (e.g. substance abuse, promiscuity, porn addiction, eating disorders, cutting).  Although these addictive behaviors provide temporary relief, they hijack the brain’s reward system and eventually kick in the anti-reward system so that people need a fix of the coping behavior to feel better from the unpleasant sensations of withdrawal.   

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Your Work Culture: Live-Giving or Killing You?

Are you working in a “culture of connection” where you feel a sense of connection to your supervisor, your colleagues, your day-to-day job tasks, and your organization’s mission, values and reputation?  A connection culture is life-giving as compared to a culture of indifference or culture of dominance that drain the life out of you.   To learn more, check out the video interview I did with Michelle Pokorny of Maritz Motivation following the keynote speech I gave at the Recognition Professionals International Annual Conference in New Orleans.

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Harvard Study: Happiness = Positive Relationships

Check out this Atlantic article about Harvard professor George Vaillant re-visiting the research from his study of human thriving, which happens to be the longest longitudinal study on the topic.  Vaillant’s study concludes that happiness comes from experiencing love in relationships over the course of one’s life.  To learn more, I encourage you to read the fascinating article entitled “What Makes Us Happy?” written by my friend Joshua Wolf Shenk (it was the Atlantic’s cover story in June 2009).

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Connection Cultures Help Students Thrive, Part II

Here’s additional evidence that Connection Cultures help students thrive.  Many students today are struggling with stress, loneliness, anxiety and depression.  Tragically some students lose hope and commit suicide.  A recent report by entitled Connectedness & Suicide Prevention in College Settings concluded: “in the wake of repeated suicide and suicide prevention efforts we have learned [a] valuable lesson: we should not be preventing suicide.  Instead, we should be be promoting life.  Research unequivocally shows that connectedness, belonging, and mattering are all linked to decreased rtes of mental illness including suicide… Colleges and university settings provide an invaluable opportunity to prevent suicide and promote thriving through active engagement in connectedness building efforts.”  If you’re interested in helping prevent student suicide, check out this excellent report.

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Stress + Loneliness = Disaster

Like many people today, Erin Callan, the former CFO of Lehman Brothers, slowly slipped into a life where her job was #1, ahead of every relationship in her life. To have sufficient energy to work an exhausting schedule throughout the week, she spent weekends sleeping.  Eventually she reached a point where what she did was who she was.  When she left her job around the time of Lehman’s demise, she was devastated.  As Jason Pankau, my friend and business partner says, “when you are what you do, when you don’t, you aren’t.” Recently Ms. Callan told her story in a very thoughtful essay that appeared in The New York Times.  Be sure to check it out at “Is There Life After Work?”

The other night my wife and I watched the DVD extended-cut version of the movie Margaret.  The movie’s story is about stress, relational disconnection and loneliness in the lives of a teenage girl and her mother, an Off-Broadway actress.  Anna Paquin gives a tour-de-force performance as the teen traumatized after she witnesses a bus hit a pedestrian after running a red light and the woman dies in her arms.  She seeks comfort from her divorced parents with little success (her father lives in California, while her mother is pre-occupied with the opening of a new show). Desperate for connection to help soothe her pain, Ms. Paquin’s character begins to look for connection in all the wrong places including alcohol, drugs and having sex with a male acquaintance who already has a girlfriend and one of her high school teachers (played by Matt Damon).   I don’t want to be a spoiler so let me encourage you to rent the DVD.

Today we live in an age where relationships are devalued and tasks that increase wealth and status rule supreme.  The problem with this is that human beings are hardwired to connect.  Insufficient connection leads to feelings of anxiety, emptiness and depression, and an unsustainable life.  We thrive only when our lives include meaningful relationships.  Ms. Callan’s essay and the movie Margaret provide vivid reminders of that, so to is the recent sad news that in America, deaths from suicide now exceed deaths from motor-vehicle accidents (note that the Centers for Disease Control has found that promoting connection in a community reduces the risk of suicide).

Are you investing sufficient time in developing and nurturing the meaningful relationships in your life?

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Your Leadership is Killing Me!

Why do people react so strongly when they don’t have a voice in decision-making? Research suggests there is a rational biological basis for this reaction.  It comes down to this: feeling that we have little or no control is detrimental to our health.

The famous Whitehall studies in the U.K. established that there was an inverse relationship between level of hierarchy, power, control, status and cardiorespiratory disease/mortality rates in members of the British Civil Service.  More recently, a group of researchers found that participants in a Harvard Business School program for leaders had lower stress (as measured by cortisol levels and self-reported anxiety levels) versus people in the local community who didn’t manage others.  The researchers also found that leaders with more powerful positions had even lower cortisol and self-reported anxiety.  Here is a link to the published research and to a New York Times article about it entitled “It’s Easy Being King.” 

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Feel Lonely and Left Out at Work?

Recently, I’ve sensed more people feel lonely and left out at work.  With years of layoffs, those who remain carry greater workloads.  This crowds out time to connect with colleagues.  Managers are also stretched and have less time to connect with the people they are responsible for leading.  When I ask people at the seminars I teach which element of a Connection Culture — Vision, Value or Voice — they would like to increase in their workplace culture, it’s nearly always Voice.   One result of this is that there has been a decline of connection, community and the spirit of unity in organizations.