In a recent NPR News article, Rhitu Chatterjee discusses how nearly a quarter of Americans who are experiencing high levels of stress could be alleviated. She says there are already a range of science-backed tools and strategies to help people recover from chronic stress and cope better in the long run, referring to The 5 Resets by Dr. Aditi Nerurkar, a physician and researcher at Harvard University. 

Dr. Nerukar told NPR, “Stress and burnout — a syndrome of chronic workplace stress — are both at ‘unprecedented levels. But our brains and bodies were not designed to sustain this high level of stress and burnout with no respite or recovery. Rest and recovery are not just nice-to-have luxuries. They are essential for our brains and bodies to thrive.”

The following are the five reset “road map” for anyone struggling with chronic stress and burnout from Dr. Nerukar’s The Reset book, which is the main story of the NPR article.

• Find what matters most to you. “During periods of stress, our brains rely on the amygdala, a tiny, almond-shaped structure deep inside the brain. ‘Its sole purpose is survival and self-preservation’,” Dr. Nerukar explained. “This part of the brain puts the body into flight or fight mode. ‘Your heart starts racing, your lungs start bringing oxygen into your body. The blood is shunted away from your vital organs to your muscles’.”
  • “Nerurkar’s first reset aims to get the person ‘out of the amygdala, cave person, fight-or-flight survival mode,’ and into a more resilient mode. That’s why she says it’s important for each individual to first figure out what their goal is and why it’s important to them. She offers an acronym, MOST, to guide your goal setting.
    • “M — for a motivating, exciting goal.
    • “O — for a goal that’s objective and measurable.
    • “S — for a goal “that’s small enough to virtually guarantee your success,”
    • “T — for a timely goal that you can reach in a few months.
• Stop scrolling and carve out some quiet time: “This second reset is mostly about creating boundaries for our digital lives. Nerurkar cites research that people touch their phones — taps, swipes and clicks — an average of 2,617 times a day. ‘They are scrolling through the headlines or social media or their email. Think about what that is doing to your brain and your body. Think about what that’s doing to your stress‘. Dr. Nerukar suggests:
  • “Our brain circuitry starts to pop from that extended time spent online. Our brains aren’t popping, but it feels like a sensation of popping.”
  • “She suggests setting time limits for daily scrolling. ‘Aim to spend no more than 20 minutes a day scrolling on your phone’.
  • “When you open your eye, give your body and brain the ability to open the other eye and just rest in the moment, acclimate to the morning, the light. Giving yourself that little moment of pause, of grounding at the start of your day can be a game changer.”
• Harness the mind-body connection to lower stress: ” ‘This reset specifically focuses on first understanding and tapping into your mind-body connection’. Dr. Nerurkar offers several kinds of deep breathing exercises to do that, including one called “Stop-Breathe-Be” that she has been using for many years.
  • “When I had a busy clinical practice and I was a medical resident in training, I would see 30 patients a day. I would knock on the patient door, and before entering, I would stop, breathe and center myself. And I would say this to myself under my breath, ‘Stop, breathe and be.’”
  • “Daily movement is a really important piece of managing stress. Not only is movement good for the brain and the body, but in fact not enough movement — or rather no movement, being sedentary — is bad for the brain and body.”
  • “Adding movement to one’s daily life needn’t involve paying for a gym membership. It can be as simple as a 20-minute walk once a day or shorter walks several times a day.
• Take breaks between tasks: “For many people today, “constantly working and not taking breaks” has become the norm, says Nerurkar. “The Slack channel, the emails, everything going at once, multitasking — it is something that all of us do because it’s part of modern working life. Multitasking is a scientific misnomer. There’s no such thing when we are multitasking. What we are actually doing is task switching, doing two separate tasks in rapid succession. Dr. Narukar suggests:
  • “It essentially means doing one task for five or 10 minutes and then you take a short break. Then you do another task for five, 10, 20 minutes and take a short break and then do that next task. And so at the end of an hour, you have completed all four of your tasks, but you are not doing them all at once.”
  • “Monotasking protects our brains from stress and burnout, and so do regular breaks.
  • “When we take a break, we are allowing new information and ideas and things that we’re processing during the workday to consolidate and form and cement in our brains. It gives our brains pause, rest and respite.”
• Quiet the nagging, negative voice of a stressed-out brain: “When there is a negative experience it becomes sticky in your brain like Velcro and Teflon for positive ones. The same amount of good and bad may be happening to you at the same time, but when you’re feeling a sense of stress, you hold on to those negative experiences and there’s a heightened sense of negativity, because your amygdala is trying to keep you safe,” Dr. Nerukar explains.
  • “A proven way to make the brain less sticky for negative experiences, she says, is a daily practice of gratitude journaling. She suggests writing down five things each day that you’re grateful for.
  • “There will be days that you might want to think of 20 things to write down.”
  • “Studies have shown that a regular practice of gratitude journaling lowers stress and boosts mood.
  • “Gratitude shifts your brain away from Velcro to Teflon. And it does that through the scientific principle of cognitive reframing. Essentially, what that means is what you focus on, grows.”

As a bonus reset rule, Dr. Nerukar suggests rule of two, meaning only picking two tasks at a time, which will ‘make it more likely for you to succeed and for those changes to become daily habits’. “The Resilience Rule of Two is how your brain responds to change,. Change is a stressor for your brain. Even positive changes in your life can be a stress.”