How to Move From Survival Mode to Calm: Three Mental Fitness Skills That Can Help

# Mental Fitness Empowerment Podcast Episode

[00:00:00] **Karina Schneider:** Hello, everybody. Welcome back to the podcast. Today, I am bringing to you a bonus episode from a dear colleague of mine, Shefali Khokar, , who will introduce us to the concept of mental fitness and can walk us through some strategies that we can use every day whenever we're faced with, , challenges at home and at work.

Shefali is a personal leadership and mental wellbeing coach accredited by the International Coaching Federation. She brings to this episode a , vast experience, , coaching many diverse clients across a wide range of professional and personal, , challenges and topics.

I learned a lot listening to Shefali in this episode, and I hope you do too

And if you want to learn more about Shefali and her work, do check out our show notes after you listen to the episode

## [00:00:48] Intro

[00:00:48] **Shefali Khokhar:** Hello, I'm Shefali. I'm a personal leadership and mental wellbeing coach. Today, I'm excited to share with you a framework of practice that strengthens mental [00:01:00] fitness. What is mental fitness? It is the ability to respond positively to challenges related to our performance, relationships, and wellbeing.

Before I say more about the framework itself, let me bring in an example that we can use to understand it better. Let's take something that's a pretty common scenario for most of us. So take a deep breath, and watch from a distance this mild to moderately stressful situation It's a Monday morning, and a project manager is on her way to work, perhaps also dropping her kids to school on the way, and she sees a notification on her phone for a new email from a particular colleague.

She immediately thinks, "This can be no good." But against her better judgment, she opens the email right away. The content makes her angry, and she thinks, "This [00:02:00] person is trying to make me look bad." She pauses whatever she was doing and immediately sends a defensive or aggressive response back In the moment that feels necessary, but the whole thing starts to escalate Relate to any of that in bits and pieces?

Now, this is one email. There are hundreds of such stimuli and interfaces that we encounter each day: emails, interactions, traffic, family life. What's happening to our body and nervous system through all this? If each burst of stress lands on top of a previous stress response with no cooling off for weeks and months on end, the stress can become chronic.

And chronic stress left unmanaged can become burnout In addition, we might notice that our [00:03:00] responses are actually not effective to the situation either I want to go back to the definition of mental fitness as the ability to respond positively to challenges related to our performance, relationships, and wellbeing.

How can we protect and strengthen this ability while dealing with inevitable stressors? The Positive Intelligence model of mental fitness answers this very question. It's been developed by Stanford lecturer and coach Shirzad Chamine. It is very widely applied and tested, research-backed, and scientifically grounded.

I personally love how simple, practical, and consistently effective it is for clients, and I lean on it myself personally as well. So to understand this model, keep in mind a somewhat simplified image of two distinct kinds of mind, the survival mind and the [00:04:00] sage mind. They actually map onto distinct clusters of brain regions as well biologically Sherzod calls the survival mind as the saboteur mind, a term which I personally don't like to use, so we'll go with survival mind here.

The survival mind operates to keep us safe and alive by detecting threats and reacting through fight, flight, freeze, and fawn responses. It motivates us to act through negative emotions like anger, fear, anxiety The sage mind, on the other hand, has properties like calmness, curiosity, creativity, compassion, clarity.

It motivates us through positive emotions. Positive intelligence is the ability to shift from the survival mind to the sage mind as needed. Most modern-day situations do not require a survival [00:05:00] response. An email or a thought do not need the same intense survival response as an actual physical threat

So how do you build this ability? Through practicing three core skills. The first is the skill of catching yourself in negative thought patterns, which are typical of being in the survival mind. This can be no good thought," on seeing the email notification, for example, was a threat detection response.

The easy way of catching yourself in negative thought patterns is to notice negative emotions, which go hand in hand. We are more likely to notice the negative emotions like anger, fear, irritation, anxiety. You can practice this by checking in with yourself several times a day. What were your emotions and thoughts during the key moments thus far in the day?

The goal is to build awareness towards your [00:06:00] own internal experience, such that eventually you get better and better at noticing and catching yourself in the moment when you're having a negative response The second skill. Once you catch yourself in the negative response, this next skill becomes important, which is called self-command.

You move yourself from the survival mind to the sage mind through self-command practices. These practices are essentially a kind of intense burst of mindfulness, getting grounded in the here and now through focused sensory experience, such as through sound, touch, smell. The goal is to be able to do it in the moment when you are experiencing a negative emotion to break the loop or circuit.

you build up to it by first practicing it by itself several times a day to build the muscle, so to say, like going to the gym. And [00:07:00] then you start trying to do it in actually triggering situations. The more you do it when things are fine, the easier it is to access it when the heat is on.

The third skill. The first was to catch the negative, uh, emotions. The second was to practice self-command to move to the sage mind. The third is actually responding from the sage mind. Remember how we said that the sage mind has superpowers like empathy, curiosity, creativity, purpose, big picture, and clear-headed action.

There are many ways of operationalizing these, but one that does a great job of activating several of these powers together is to ask this question about the situation If this situation were actually a gift to me, what might that gift be?

It doesn't have to be a big gift or even big enough to outweigh the pain of the [00:08:00] situation. Just see if you can notice a gift. In doing that, you are already bringing alive curiosity, creativity, and big-picture thinking with this. Empathy as well, in the sense of connectedness, in the sense of things working for me rather than against me.

Now, it's important to notice that this is not about toxic positivity, pretending everything is great. No. Because we do not ignore the reality. We do not ignore the information of our negative emotions, but instead, we work calmly and constructively with them. So let's bring this to life with the example that we had started with.

Let's say our project manager has been practicing these three skills over the last quarter. So when she sees the email notification on Monday morning, she becomes aware of her anxious thoughts about it. She takes a couple of intentional [00:09:00] breaths and decides to open the email only once she's reached office.

When she reaches work and opens the email, the contents do make her angry. She notices her anger and closes her eyes. She listens for the farthest away sound she can hear. She hears the coffee machine grinding. She hears the sound of someone laughing at the far end of the office And then she listens for the closest sound Her laptop is humming She can hear the sound of her own breath

She listens to her own breath for a few seconds longer The whole thing takes about 20 seconds. She opens her eyes and asks herself, " What's the gift here?" She can now think of several She sees the pattern of constant back and forth with this colleague on other projects [00:10:00] as well, and her own anger as an opportunity for more structure and boundaries.

She picks up the phone and calmly talks to the colleague, proposing a 15-minute check-in, which should now be a weekly event. It will now save her multiple emails per week and protect her mental peace. Notice how this is a very different way of responding than the first scenario, and this one is rooted in effectiveness, empowerment, respect, and health Now that's a very quick look at positive intelligence framework.

When it comes to applying it in burnout situations, it's very important to keep in mind which stage of burnout someone is in. If someone is approaching burnout, it can be very useful to learn to break the negative loop of survival mind The more you can quickly move [00:11:00] out of negative thought spirals, it will help at this stage.

Self-command practices through sensory focus will help strengthen sage mind as well If someone is in clinical burnout phase, however, the cognitive work demanded of the first and third skill might be too much. It is safer to do somatically grounded practices like the self-command practices. And it's always good to check with your personal support professional what will be suitable for you If you are out of the clinical burnout phase and working towards reintegration, again, strengthening the sage mind and breaking the negative circuit would be very helpful What is important for anyone, and especially if you are approaching in or emerging from burnout, is to be gentle in any practice.

Do not aim for perfection. Do not expect negative [00:12:00] thoughts to go away altogether. That has not happened yet for any human being. Do not allow this or any practice itself to become a stressor. Give yourself a pat on the back every time you catch a negative thought rather than thinking, "Why am I having the negative thought?"

That's all for today. Be gentle. Take care. Thank you