Believing we have drained our brain is what drains our brain. Yet most people think that the exhaustion they feel at day’s end is caused by a hard day at work. Yet, if we look at it closely, for most of us the only physically taxing thing we probably did at work that day was walk in and out of the building from the parking lot and type on our keyboards. The rest of our exertion was primarily mental.

Is it possible that the two-pound wonder called the brain is able to expend most of our physical energy simply through thinking?

The answer is no. Sitting at your desk performing cognitive functions doesn’t take much energy. Our brain only needs 12 watts of energy to operate smoothly, which is one-fifth the energy it takes to light up your desk lamp. On top of that, the brain burns only 11 calories an hour, which is the equivalent of one minute of modest exertion on an exercise bike. Clearly, this is not enough to cause exhaustion.

Is it the difficulty of a mental task or the amount of time we concentrate on the task that leaves us exhausted?

Again, the answer is no. Mental fatigue is really not about the task. For example, millions of neurons connecting through a multitude of neural circuits are active when we follow a movie with a plot as complex as The Matrix, or read a book as intricate as War and Peace, or pondering our opponents next move in a chess or card game while planning our own. Yet we can focus on these complex activities for two hours straight and at the end feel stimulated by it.

So what exactly is causing the fatigue that can lead to burnout?

It’s our mental attitude. Research has found that if you believe a task is going to be difficult, it
will be. If you expect a meetingto drain your energy, it will. If the fear of failure overwhelms you, it’s likely to result in bad decisions that lead to failure. In short, we get what we expect to get. A chronically anxious, negative attitude repeatedly activates the stress response system. Stress hormones flood your system with adrenaline and cortisol, elevating heart rate, raising blood pressure, and debilitating the higher order brain function that generates the savvy, creative insight and optimism that solves problems. You’re more prone to emotional upsets, memory lapses, and mistakes. We human being generate all sorts of stress reactions purely in our heads, exciting wild emotions that send the mind and body into an uproar and leave us physically exhausted. More often than not, the driving force behind it isn’t our job or the task or even our boss. It is our attitude towards  people, tasks, and events.

Type A personalities, for example, are the highly competitive workaholics who tend to be overly-reactive and aggressive. Type-A’s face a much greater risk of cardiac death than the more peaceful Type-B’s. But it’s not hard work, a difficult challenge, or even long hours to blame for Type-A’s heart problems. It’s the stress from the hostile struggle their aggressive attitude generates.

Attitude is everything, even in those moments when you feel stressed and anxious. Shifting your perspective when you are afraid of failing to feeling excited in the challenge can make you less likely to burn out in a demanding job. A study in Germany found that professionals who were skilled at shifting their anxiety in this way were less likely to be  frustrated or drained by their work. In another study, students who viewed their stress as excitement reported less emotional exhaustion, did better on exams, and earned higher grades. A positive mindset provides an immunity to emotional exhaustion and predicts greater success with all our goals. A positive shift in attitude, when sustained over a few weeks, can literally rewire our brains for the Good Life.

The technical term for the way a change of mindset rewires our brain for greater success is called neuroplasticity. Neuroplasticity has huge implications for business. Results of over 200 scientific studies on nearly 275,000 people (APA 2005) have found that every key business outcome improves when people are emotionally positive.

• People are 31% more productive, three times more creative, and a positive mindset increases sales by 37% (Lyubomirsky, 2005).
• We are ten times more engaged with work (Achor, 2012), and prosocial in ways that achieve superior customer service (George, 1991), and facilitate teamwork that is highly collaborative. (Barsade, 2002).
• In addition, a positive mindset fosters supportive relationships, which in turn predicts a longer and healthier life (Danner,2001), and lowers health care costs for companies (APA,2002).

The brain scans on the right show the difference in brain function when we’re positive and well-adjusted compared to when we’re stressed and depressed. Multiply the difference by 1000 and you have the loss in brain power in a company doing nothing to alleviate stress.

A Kit to Jump Start Your Mindset

It takes a specific practice to change our mindset. But if you build a practice and every day apply the simple steps are proven to change our attitude, with 4 to 6 weeks your brain’s emotional set point will reset to positive. My book The End of Stress helps you build the practice.  In the mean, click here for a starter kit that helps move in this direction.

Science may have discovered the proverbial fountain of youth, but before I described it, I want to orient you to its polar opposite, which is stress. It is well established that there is no greater threat to our health, happiness and success than stress. Stress is serious; it can shorten life span by a decade or more. It is not something we should someday do something about. We need to attend to it today. Yet nearly 80 percent of Americans are doing little to alleviate their daily stress, and corporations and health plans do little to teach people how to transcend stress.

Here’s the central issue: Stress dumps toxic hormones into our system that can damage our DNA, kill brain cells, cause heart disease and cancer, dampen our immune system, switch our emotional set-point to negative, and age us prematurely. We see the premature aging in the stressed faces of every president as they leave office.

Premature aging starts with your chromosomes. Chromosomes contain your DNA and at the end of each chromosome are caps called Telomeres that protect your DNA, keeping everything intact and functioning properly. Imagine that the shoelace in the image is a chromosome containing strands of DNA. When the protective tip is gone, the lace unravels.

Similarly, when stress hormones fray telomeres, DNA strands become damaged and generate abnormal cells that age your body and brain prematurely. Our immune system is highly sensitive to shortening of telomeres, which means we are more susceptible to acute and chronic disease. Stress also physically changes our brain and can make us more susceptible to dementia and alzheimer’s later in life.

Brain scans can show a physical difference in a healthy brain verses a stressed brain. You can see that the scan on the left is not as lit up as the scan on right. The scan on the left represents a person living a stressful life. The scan on the right is from a person who is not stressed and as a result has the optimal brain function to be successful, healthy and happy.

On top of all this, stressed employees are less engaged, which thwarts an organization’s efforts to succeed. Research shows that nearly 60 percent of employees who are highly stress are disengaged, while other research shows that companies that achieve high employee engagement outperform their competition by as much as 400 percent. People with a distracted wandering mind tend to be stressed. They disconnect and disengage, which shortens their telomeres. On the other hand, people whose minds are present, engaged in the moment, tend to feel positive, connected and happy, preserving telomere length. The icing on the cake is that the more positive and peaceful you are, the more your brain generates the intelligence, creativity, and emotional strength needed to excel. Make no mistake, state of mind maps to the bottom-line.

The Good News

The good news is that the damage stress does to your body, brain and pursuit of excellence is reversible. How is this reversal achieved?  Through a shift in mindset.

Scientists from a range of fields have been uncovering evidence that the mind plays a crucial role in how healthy you are and how well you perform. Forty years of research in cognitive therapy have established that all our moods are created by the thoughts we believe, determining what we expect will happen. The signals that your cells listen to are shaped by your mental state.[i] Our beliefs and expectations can cause or ease pain, heal or inflame wounds, fend off infection or promote it, reverse heart disease or cause it, slow the progression of cancers or accelerate it. Telomere length determines all of this and its length is driven by our mental state. Pessimism is associated with shortened frayed telomeres and a shorter life span; optimism is associated with healthy telomeres promoting a longer healthier, more youthful life.

Here is a case in point: Nobel Prize laureate Elizabeth Blackburn studied mothers caring for severely disabled children. The daily demands on these women are extremely stressful and the study found that a large percentage of them had shortened telomeres and an excess of 10 years of extra aging in their blood cells. Stress was killing them. But not all the mothers exhibited accelerated aging. The telomeres of mothers who’d cultivated a positive, peaceful attitude were still intact. One women said if she hadn’t fostered a good attitude, her friends would have left her, and she would have to face life alone.

Mind matters. There is nothing that generates greater health, well-being and success than your state of mind. When you stop thinking primarily about yourself and your problems, fearing failure and worrying that you’re not good enough, you undergo a truly heroic transformation of consciousness. As your mind changes, all the world changes accordingly. Our state of mind creates the life we live. The difference we make in the world depends on the way we choose to live, and the biggest difference comes from allowing love, joy and inner peace to be the statement our life makes every day. Mother Teresa once said that she used to believe prayer changed things, but found that prayer changes us, and we change things.

It is common for people to think that a change of circumstances will solve a stressful life, but circumstances are only 10% to blame for a stressful life, which means changing circumstances does not make a big difference.

The change that makes the biggest difference is a change in mindset, a change in attitude. It accounts for 40 percent of whether you live a life of stress or a happier, healthier, more successful life. And now there is growing evidence that a shift to the positive can down-regulate the stress gene. There are only two mindsets you need to understand.

• One mindset is negative generating an inner experience of contraction that feels like the walls are closing in on you. It is built on the fearful thinking that activates the brain’s stress response system, dumping toxic stress hormones into your system that makes you over-react and worry.

Last week, I had dinner with a friend, who is a successful business man, and he wanted to know what my business strategy was for 2018. I told him that this year, my #1 strategy is to devote each day to creating miracles. “Really,” he said, perplexed. He knows that I endeavor to work as hard and as smart as the next person trying to succeed, but he didn’t know what to make of this.

Here is how the dictionary defines miracle.

Who doesn’t want to have that happen. Honestly, the older I get the more I have learned that I require miracles to bend the world in my favor. After all is said and done, it is the only way I know to catch a break in my quest to reach the heights I am determined to reach. And my experience has proven to me that the miracle I need is always there. So how do we empower it?

Empowering a miracle is simple, although not always easy. It requires a change of mind that shifts my experience from confused and blocked to clear and open to receiving, which is another way of saying from a dark mind to spiritual light, which is what occurs when I make the shift from fear to love. My fear of failing can become a strange room where I grope around in the dark, imagining scary things that are not even there. Making the shift to spiritual light happens when I let go of my fear. Letting it go is like the glow of light that fills a room when the glass chimney of a kerosene lamp is placed over the lit wick. In that light I am powered with optimism and vision, which is a miracle all its own. Eventually the miraculous arrives from out the blue, moving my aims forward. It always astounds me when it happens. 

I sometimes think that making miracles is like winning at solitaire. At first there is this haphazard arrangement of cards set out in front of me, representing the chaos I am challenged to put in perfect order. There usually comes a discouraging moment in the game when I feel stumped and think there is no solution to the cards fate dealt me. But then I notice the one card hidden in plain sight that if freed will allow everything to fall into place. Botta Bing Botta Boom. I just need to step back from the effort and the solution arrives like light.

We human beings are called the crown of creation because of our brain. Yet for far too many people, the brain does not seem to crown their lives with health, wealth, and love. Quite the contrary, it seems to malfunction in self-defeating patterns of stress, anxiety and depression. We now know that this means the brain’s fear center (the amygdala) is taking charge of our experience reducing us to fight or flight stress reactions that dump toxic stress hormones into our system.

Fact #1: Stress is Serious!

Chronic stress means the stress response system is turned on nearly full time and a build-up of stress hormones:

• sinks higher brain networks involved in memory, learning, and decision-making, and conversely causing the amygdala to expand, producing higher levels of anxiety,
• switches the brain’s emotional set point to negative, predisposing us to anger, aggression, insecurity, and depression,
• deletes our energy and disrupts our sleep,
• temporarily lowers IQ by as much as 40%,
• causes marriage and family dysfunction,
• dampens the immune system making us susceptible to acute illnesses that can later become chronic, and
• damages chromosomes, causing chromosomes to produce abnormal cells that can lead to premature aging and life-threatening illness.

Stress is serious. It is life-threatening serious. It is not something we should someday do something about. We need to shift stress whenever it raises its ugly head, and we can.

Fact #2: The 50-10-40 Factor

This leads to the second fact to keep in mind, which is if we have a problem with stress, it is not necessarily our fault, but it is our responsibility to change and science says we can. Fifty percent (50%) of what causes a predisposition to stress is an up-regulating stress gene you inherited which was probably reinforced by your family of origin, wiring your brain for a hyperactive stress response system. This is going to drag your mind and your day into self-defeating bouts of anxiety, engendering a nebulous sense of threat when none exists.

It is common for a beleaguered mind to think that a change of circumstances will solve a stressful life, but research shows that circumstances are only 10% to blame for a stressful life, which means changing circumstances does not make a big difference.

The change that makes the biggest difference is a change of mindset. It accounts for 40% of whether you live a life of stress or the good life. And there is growing evidence that a shift to the positive can down-regulate the stress gene, placing you fully in charge of your quality of life.

Fact #3: Everything is Mindset

New research has established that your brain takes its direction from your state of mind. So, here is the third fact to consider: Everything for a human being is mindset. This is a conclusion reached by some of our best scientists. And, there are only two mindsets you need to understand.

One mindset is negative generating an inner experience of contraction that feels like the walls are closing in on you. It is built on the fearful thinking that makes you believe you are a victim of circumstances. The stress hormones that a negative mindset produce shrinks higher brain networks.

The other mindset is positive, generating an inner experience of expansion that makes you feel like the sky is the limit. It is built on inner peace, love and optimism and makes you believe you are larger than circumstances. A positive mindset not only amplifies higher brain function, it also stimulates the growth of new connections within the higher brain to increase your potential to reach even greater heights.

Fact #4: Success is Inner Peace, Succeeding is Letting Go of Fear

This leads to the fourth fact, which is that stress is psychological fear and peace is neurological power. To say it another way: Success is inner peace, succeeding is letting go of fear. This basic shift in mindsets promotes neural integration, which:

• improves executive function increasing your proficiency at planning, strategic thinking and decision-making as well as improving memory, learning, reasoning, cognitive flexibility, error detection, and goal directed action.
• supports emotional regulation so that you feel vibrant and inspired, but not so emotionally charged that you become manic, chaotic, or rigid.
• promotes response flexibility by activating neurons that signal you to pause before acting, inhibiting rash impulses and allowing you to reflect on options.
• achieves attuned communication facilitating the interpersonal resonance that promotes better communication, harmony, and the capacity to transcend a limited self-interest in favor of a greater good.
• increases empathy, generating the capacity to enter another’s world so completely that you lose all desire to judge them.
• makes you tolerant of differences and enlightens you with self-knowing awareness and foresight directing you forward.
• fosters innovative thinking, integrating the creative insights produced by the brain’s right hemisphere with higher brain function to become more imaginative, able to think out of the box when a new approach is needed.
• generates holism, quieting shame-based, self-defeating thought processes to achieve the level of self-confidence and self-worth that allow you to maximize your inherent strengths and talents.

Who does not want their brain functioning like that.

Fact #5: It is Simpler Than You Might Think

The fifth and final fact to remember is, as far as I am concerned, the best news of all. The daily mindful practice that generates the change that changes everything is quite simple adding little to your to-do list. It is about learning to function from an empowering to-be list. And better still, brain change occurs faster than you might imagine, in as little as 4 weeks with practice.