How stress is killing us (and how you can stop it). | Thijs Launspach | TEDxUniversiteitVanAmsterdam

fish are remarkable creatures they're acutely aware of their surroundings they can smell predators for miles away and they know the availability of food or potential mates and yet there's one thing fish are not aware of what's that they're in water right so I think there are certain similarities between fish and us people I think human beings also don't notice some of the important things and until our lives and I want to talk to you about two of those things one is a good life is a busy life and the second is levels of stress even

dangerous levels of stress are acceptable and they are normal so our lives are getting more busy than ever and part of this we like right we feel productive we sort of like the frantic pace as well there's never a dull moment and we like that about it but there are as a psychologist I can see a different side to the same coin which is stress and Eve even unhealthy amounts of stress that are becoming normal for us today so let's do a little experiment can I have some house lights on as well so let me

see you okay let me ask you some questions yes there you are so the first one is raise your hand if this applies to you are you affected by burnouts either personally or by someone else close to you who among you that's a fair amount okay so next question the stress have a negative impact on the one of the following things right sleep rule among you Wow let's loss okay diet okay amount of exercise that you have okay and the amount of spare time that you're having your life okay that's most of you basically so

the next one the million-dollar question who among you would think that they would be a happier person if they'd only be less busy or less stressed in life okay wow that's a lot of you so let's let us look at another sort of point in this one and let me walk you through these figures I think you might know them these are burnout symptoms in the Netherlands like from the Central Bureau of Statistics in 2016 they're split by age groups and by sex as well so you have the light blue those are the males and

dark blue are the females and I apologize it there are in Dutch but there you can see the sir I'm sorry the age groups is 15 to 25 25 to 35 etc right so what you see here and I can try to yes okay so one of the first thing to notice is that apart from pensioners and well high school students and sort of college students as well the amount of burn out is about 15% this is lifetime prevalence and another things to notice is that 25 to 35 years old there's significantly more burnout so

this is a problem and this is a problem if you think that most people don't really even get to the stage of burnout but are stressed in their lives and years for years and years and years right so a couple of the different things that are associated with stress are a weaker immune system obesity and other diet related problems even some forms of cancer some types of cancer and even in some studies premature death so serious serious stuff so there are a couple of things well for me the question is why right I'm a psychologist

I like to investigate stuff so why are we at this frantic pace well it turns out it's not one thing it's multiple things it's a lot of things so let's start by our jobs it's one of the most obvious places to look for a work-related stress so our jobs are getting more and more complicated we work more overtime than ever we are we spend an average of two plus hours emailing every day often on top of a regular workload and the boundaries between our working hours in our spare time are crumbling because we can access

our email and our stuff from home right so that's our job then our daily lives are getting more and more frantic as well so we suffer from FOMO which I'm sure you know FOMO right fear of missing out which means that we put all kinds of different activities and we try to put it in a limited space of our day which means that we live on a frantic pace and that we sort of lacked the opportunity to relax in between as well well to add insult to injury as the previous speaker talked about as well

we are addicted to these things which take up every spare moment that we do have so that's bad stuff and also between our ears we get busier as well so there's a psychological psychological elements at play for example the expectations that we have about ourselves so we need need ourselves to be attractive fit healthy financially successful socially successful and happy all of the time every day right or else we feel like losers so that's a bad thing so our expectations are really playing us on us as well so let's take a step back and look

at what stress really is because we're talking about this for a little bit so yeah stress by textbook definition is an involuntary physical and psychological response to a stressor so a couple of things to notice here it's something you don't choose to be stressed you get just get stressed it's something that happens in your body and it's something that happens in your head right and it's always always a response to a certain stressor well what could be stressors well these things so health concerns family conflicts doing a test Hawk basically speaking in public is well

it's up there with the most stressful things according to some people demanding social lives work-related stress stress or and everything it's it entails right it's deadlines difficult conversation with clients or customers it's your boss the pressure to achieve FOMO we've talked about it never-ending to-do lists who has those yeah me as well right okay devices that continuously want stuff from you even at times that you are well would be unavailable right so these things are potential stressors so what happens when you encounter a stressor well this somewhere in your brain like a couple of centimetres

in here and your hypothalamus one heart a couple of hormones are excreted which initiates chain reaction ending here at your adrenal glands on top of your kidneys excreting both adrenaline and cortisol and under the influence of adrenaline adrenaline and cortisol bodily changes happen so like this your your heart rate starts to rise your breath rate it goes up your muscles tense your resources go to your arms into your legs you get some tunnel vision as well and some panicky feelings so why would this happen does anybody know surviving yes it sort of prepares your body

to do one of two things right fight or flight this is the this is the famous fight-or-flight response so this is how we still react when when confronted with danger so this stems from a different time right this stems from the time when we were not hunting for job opportunities but hunting for our food and in which we are foraging not for our lunch at the cafeteria but foraging for berries and in the forests right and the likelihood of encountering a difficult or dangerous situation was way higher than it is now so the likelihood of

encountering for example one of these things was way higher so this poses a problem because our cultural evolution so if went way faster than our physical evolution so in different circumstances now we are faced with the same system only we don't meet that many Tigers anymore right except in zoos but the Tigers that we do meet are in these kind of circumstances so it's deadlines its job interviews its conflicts with your bosses etc but our body still reacts in the same way still reacts in this way as if it's a tiger so to add insult

to injury here we stress about different things about a multiplicity of things and also we stress for way longer and we know that elongated exposure to stress is a really bad thing and it leads to all sorts of problems and it can eventually lead to burnout so what's a burnout burnout is basically one of the definitions is this system getting damaged so that the things that you would sort of normally wouldn't find and find very stressful you'd now think are very stressful so that's a burnout it's a bad thing to have it cost you a

couple of months to in recovery basically so that's the bad news the good news is that you can do stuff about this and I think that being able to deal with stress effectively is going to be one of the most important skills that you have in the workplace later on so what can you do well it isn't that difficult baby basically so one thing you can do is take care of yourself which sounds like a huge cliche but it is really true one thing you should know about stress is that it often presents as a

cognitive problem so yeah so you worry about something you worry about you being in a certain situation and what you should do but actually your physique how you are physically has a lot of influence and fluence on that so if you feel fit you deal with stress better and you feel less stressed so taking care of yourself entails the following couple of things well get enough sleep which but what is enough sleep well about eight hours seven or eight hours a night regularly so at a regular going to bed and waking time so the next

thing is take care of your diet which is eating a lot of veggies and nutrients and not as much sugars well have some regular exercise as well which helps for your stress tolerance be careful with alcohol drugs and those type of things because they can sort of influence your stress tolerance even in the long run and be careful about your intake of caffeine who among you have have drunk more than say five cups of coffee today okay that's you're a healthy group so that's a couple of you yeah okay a caffeine really really messes with

your hormone balance and the last thing is schedule some time in your week out of any activity so that's time you schedule to do nothing at all like veg on the couch integrate stuff think about stuff right so these are the basic things another thing is this breathe so this is a nice place in the presentation because I can hear you all you okay so I want to do an experiment again I want to invite you to close your eyes and just breathe regularly in through your nose and out for your mouth so what you

can try to do is to elongate your outward breath well and as you're sitting there with your eyes closed anyway I'd like to invite you to pay attention to how you are breathing at the moment to your in words and outputs breath the way the breath comes into your body and exits maybe you can even detect a sort of a rising and a falling sensation that goes with that so the next thing I want you to do is to shift your attention to how you are sitting at the moment so your bodily sensations so it's

your feet on the floor it's your back in the chair just notice and if you get distracted by a thought just bring back your attention that's fine so the next thing I want you to do is to notice that sounds that are going on that you can notice now and to shift your attention to the thoughts that are occurring right now in your head what kind of things are going around in your head at the moment okay and then at your own pace you can get back to room okay right so I sort of seduced

to seduce you to do a small mindfulness exercise we know that certain types of activities like mindfulness can train your brain to focus more and to be less to be more stress tolerance so it boosts your stress tolerance mindfulness is one of those things Yoga is another of those things sometimes some types of meditation or deep work types of activities always to train your brain to be more focused so again we're faced with a choice just like with last speaker I think the choice is real and you have to make it and it's an important

choice and a choice is this you either deal with stress or stress deals with you stress is inevitable in our daily lives but you can change the way you relate to stress and that's really a really important thing and you can start by doing some of the things I've talked about today and I think this would be a really really good plan thank you [Applause]