Emiliya Zhivotovskaya on bouncing back

Show Notes

Life is full of challenges and setbacks. Resilience is what helps us bounce back from them. And just like a muscle in the body, resilience can grow stronger through practice. On this episode, Deloitte Well-being leader Jen Fisher discusses strategies to build resilience, vitality, and a deeper mind-body connection with Emiliya Zhivotovskaya, a leading voice in the world of positive psychology and the science of flourishing.

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The WorkWell Podcast™ is back and I am so excited about the inspiring guests we have lined up. Wellbeing at work is the issue of our time. This podcast is your lens into what the experts are seeing, thinking, and doing.

Hi, I am Jen Fisher, host, bestselling author and influential speaker in the corporate wellbeing movement and the first-ever Chief Wellbeing Officer in the professional services industry. On this show, I sit down with inspiring individuals for wide-ranging conversations on all things wellbeing at work. Wellbeing is the future of work. This podcast will help you as an individual, but also support you in being part of the movement for change in your own organizations and communities. Wellbeing can be the outcome of work well designed. And we all have a role to play in this critical transformation!

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Bouncing back

Jennifer Fisher (Jen): In May 2016, I was diagnosed with breast cancer. Being someone who does and I am using air quotes “most things right when it comes to keeping cancer away” that really didn't seem to matter. It was one of the most difficult challenges I ever faced but it was also one of the greatest learning opportunities of my life. It helped me discover what was really important to me, forced me to focus on myself and my own care, and it helped me build my resilience. We all face challenges in life. Sometimes it is the big things like cancer but other times it's just that day-to-day speed bumps that seem to pop up out of nowhere. So how can we use these challenges to help us grow as people, to be more resilient, that is what we are talking about today.

This is the WorkWell podcast series. Hi, I am Jen Fisher, Well-Being leader for Deloitte and it's great to be here with you today to talk about all things well-being.

[preview] Emiliya Zhivotovskaya (Emiliya): 99.99% of any living species that has ever been alive is actually extinct today, so we are very resilient that we survived, we are like the 0.01% and that is because our body knows what to do. If you get cold, you actually will bounce back stronger. If you break a bone, it will come back stronger. Our body knows how to do this thing and the kind of resilience that many people face is not actually the major life traumas, it is actually now these day-to-day stresses that we actually need to learn resilience skills for.

Jen: I am here with Emiliya Zhivotovskaya. She is a widely sought-after speaker, educator, facilitator, and coach on positive psychology, and the science of flourishing.

Emiliya: I was born in Kiev, Ukraine, at that time it was all USSR or Soviet communist Russia at the time. I was born about 90 miles from Chernobyl and both my brother and I were getting headaches and other symptoms that kind of indicated that perhaps we were really being affected by this. So, we moved to this country, my parents pursuing the American dream. I was given this opportunity to be in this beautiful country when I was 14 and he was 24. My brother was swimming at night with his fiancée and a few friends kind of partying young adults on a hot summer night in Long Beach, Long Island and brother’s fiancée started drowning and he ran in to try to rescue her, and she survived but he passed

away. That was my first major life trauma that I had ever faced. One, it got me needing to be resilient and just needing to step up and do what I could to support my parents and to support our family during this crisis, but it also got me thinking about and connected to this idea that there is so much about the mind and body that we don't know that we can benefit from learning about because my brother passed away and my mom got diagnosed with ovarian cancer shortly after and my dad became a diabetic shortly after. Even though I was a teenager, I remember going, there has got to be some sort of connection here between this trauma that they are facing and what they are experiencing in their body, something that the doctors that we went to never really addressed and nobody really talked to my very strong Russian father who never talks about his emotions and like the stress that he is feeling and what's happening to his cholesterol levels and his diabetes and to his blood pressure. My mother getting ovarian cancer, many people passed away within just six months of that happening and she fought for 10 years and I kept saying hey guys, she has got cancer in her reproductive system, she has lost a child, nobody is talking to her about the wounding, the loss, the pain that went into that. I completely respect my parents' decisions to not seek out psychological support. It is not culturally what they were exposed to but for me it got me passionate about understanding like what is this mind-body connection? It also got me really interested in understanding how do we actually take care of ourselves because my parents didn't have those skills and I found myself researching nutrition and things that my mom could eat as a cancer patient and ways that she could take care of her body and how can I get my dad's blood sugar down naturally, and things that had to do with movement and nutrition that we weren't taught. So it got me really passionate about self-care, understanding how do we prevent these things from happening, recognizing that I didn’t have those tools, my parents didn’t have those tools, seeking out those tools for helping people keep good physical and mental health. And then also around that concept of resilience because people used to tell me all the time when I was growing up things like Emiliya you are so amazing, everything your family has been through, I don’t know how you do it. If I were in your position, I wouldn’t be able to handle that. If anybody here has gone through any major life trauma, you kind of want to be like don't say that to me because what we know to be true is that you do just handle it, right, you do what needs to be done.

Jen: You never know how strong you are until you have to be.

Emiliya: Exactly. It got me interested in this concept of resilience in particular thinking about what does that actually mean and even as a kid those words would play in mind and I literally would think to myself like, am I really special, do I have some superpower because I just do what I need to do to get by. That is what brought me to studying resilience and actually learning that it’s a skill set and it's a mindset and that we can actually teach people how to be resilient, it's not just something you have or you don’t.

Jen: Your story is so powerful, it resonates for me in my own personal journey with breast cancer because there is really no "medical reason for why I got breast cancer,” there is no history in my family. For the most part, I was doing most of the things that they say to do to keep cancer away, but what I wasn't doing was managing my stress. So I think that has a huge impact and had a huge impact on why I developed breast cancer especially at a young age. Now nobody can tell me that definitively but that's what I believe. You kind of went right to the word resilience. I feel like it is something at least in my role but I think

generally now we are hearing a lot more about. So can you tell me what's your definition of resilience.

Emiliya: There are so many different metaphors that we use to describe and define resilience, a very simple one is the ability to bounce back from life setbacks or from challenges and adversities. I actually love some of the imagery that goes with it. We refer to a rubber band as being resilient, which is can it take its shape after it has been pushed and pulled on, and so how quickly can we get back into persevering despite setbacks. The fascinating thing about resilience is that we as human beings are actually incredibly resilient. We are wired with a natural resiliency that our body knows exactly what to do. In fact, the human race is the 99.9% of the exceptions. So, if you look at over the course of evolutionary history, 99.99% of any living species that has ever been alive is actually extinct today. So, we are very resilient that we survived, right. We are like the 0.01% and that's because our body knows what to do. If you get cold, you actually will bounce back stronger. If you break a bone, when your bone heals, it will come back stronger. Our body knows how to do this thing with actually added support. The kind of resilience that many people face is not actually the major life traumas, it is actually now these day-to-day stresses that we actually need to learn resilience skills for. Some of the things that I focus on in the field of positive psychology is looking at how do we actually teach resilience as a skill set knowing that if it's a major trauma. Most people kind of have a default setting that just kicks into gear whether it be September 11 here in the US, whether it be someone dies and you need to step up and take care of what needs to be done. During those emergency type of situations, we have a default setting that people kick into, but with things like your emails getting over flooded, going in to have a vulnerable conversation with a person that you don’t have the skills to communicate with, all of those type of stressors are the types of skills that most of us aren’t actually trained in but we can actually deepen that connection.

Jen: I can relate to that after I got over the fear of it all, I kind of went right into a fight mode and let's get it done, I just have to take care of this and I was just in that mode, but now I find myself getting frustrated by things that are so much less than that, like phone breaking or that they got my coffee order wrong, things like that. What is it that is kind of getting in the way of us not being resilient when it comes to those day-to-day things.

Emiliya: Part of it is that we can break down what stresses us into different factors. There is the mental piece which is the types of thoughts that go through your mind. The thing that will impact one person getting the coffee order wrong and another person having coffee order wrong as well but one person is angry and the person is just sort of okay, often has to do with the thoughts going through their mind or what's the story that we are telling ourselves. Those people go their whole life not even realizing that they are constantly in dialogue with themselves throughout the day telling a story. What is going to impact the way that people see that differently is their mental state or the thoughts that are going through their mind. We want to look at mind chatter as a strong component to stress. As you are going through your experience and it is so great to be here with you live, vibrant, happy, and healthy today is the story you tell yourself, you are like this sucks, but I am going to do what I need to do. So that is the story that kicked your turbo gear, your turbo chargers into gear and you just did what you needed to do. So thoughts and beliefs and stories that we tell ourselves will impact that, but also emotions.

Oftentimes, we are not trained as to what do we actually do with emotions that we feel. If we are feeling angry, if we are feeling disappointed, if we are feeling sad or grief or scared or worried or slightly anxious, we as human beings have this propensity to be able to actually choose our emotional state, and it's a superpower that we are often not trained in how to use. Other animals actually experience emotions by default. My dog will growl at another dog and while she may be get distracted with me calling her name or putting a treat up, her natural responses is see another dog and she wants to growl. She will say, you know what, mommy doesn’t like it when I growl at other dogs, I should simmer that down. One of the things that makes us uniquely human is our propensity to actually control our emotions or to choose an emotional state but that is like a superpower that none of us are really trained in doing.

Jen: I think that is so interesting. But if you are able to recognize not only your own emotions but others, to me that's an incredible performance enhancer in anything that you are doing in life not just in work. Would you agree with that?

Emiliya: So interesting. I just saw a great documentary, Mr. Rogers documentary. If you haven’t seen it, I highly recommend it and there is so much research-based wisdom to what this person embodied and brought, and there is one piece in there that he talked about really wanting to teach children that all emotions are mentionable and manageable. That is actually a very research-based approach and what's happening now is we have this whole movement in both school systems, within organizations around emotional intelligence where we know that one of the things that most impacts a person's success is not their IQ but actually their EQ, their emotional intelligence quotient, how aware are they of their own emotional needs and other people's emotional needs. I think people have made too big of a deal around emotional intelligence because many people go yeah it is really important, then I ask them to define it and people are like, I don’t know what it is but it's a very important thing and it's really simple. It comes down to three ends, can you notice name and navigate emotions, can you notice how you feel, can you put a name to what you feel, and then can you actually shift it or navigate it, turn it up or dial it down if you need, and do the same thing within someone else. Can you notice that someone else is stressed out, name it as may be anxious and then can you help them navigate that state. It is such a fascinating thing when we do look at this initial messaging that we give which is we don't mention emotions, nor do we teach them how to manage it, but if you just look at the fact that all emotions are human, they are not bad, they are just indicators. They are supposed to be chemical messengers that alert us to very specific things. If I am sad, it is alerting me to the fact that I have lost something that's important to me. If I am anxious, it is alerting me that something bad might happen. If I am angry, it is alerting me that I think someone is going to harm me, whether that anger becomes you should have gotten my coffee order correct or whether that anger is something that is legitimately like this is unfair, this is injustice that I need to stand up for, it is teaching people how to navigate that emotional quality that enables them to be resilient.

Jen: So all emotions, would you say you don't have to react to.

Emiliya: The way that I approach it is that we are wired to have an emotional reaction and there is actually a beautiful Buddhist saying around the second arrow where the first arrow is that knee-jerk reaction that you just shoot off at something. We are evolutionarily wired as animals for that, but the Buddhist principle is that the second arrow is our choice, right.

So, it's the ability to choose your reaction or the responsibility to choose the response that you want is something that we can train ourselves to do. We can learn to become less reactive or have a have a weaker firing chemically of the thing that would trigger us and that is something we can actually train ourselves to do. We can train it through mindfulness practices where we are actually first tuning into what am I thinking, what am I feeling, what am I needing, what's happening in this present moment. We can train ourselves away from that, something happens I react, something happens I react, and so whatever the thing that is firing at us may no longer impact us as strongly or there is a space that is created between it that we can really choose how do I want to show up in the world.

Jen: I think that is really important in the modern workplace, this concept of kind of the pause because so much is coming at us at all times that one second pause to say hold on a second, how am I going to respond to this instead of using your Buddhist metaphor of just shooting that arrow off.

Emiliya: Or multiple arrows, it just keeps firing right dozens or arrow.

Jen: We are all guilty of that right, certainly.

Emiliya: I think it is so important for people to explore what does mindfulness actually mean and firstly separate out mindfulness from meditation. Mindfulness is a state of being, it's a way of being in the world and meditation is a practice that supports that. There are many reasons why people choose to meditate. There are people who choose to meditate from a spiritual perspective, it connects them to something bigger than themselves, and there are other ways of going about that. Some people will use prayer or contemplation and other things that get them there. Then there are forms of meditation that I think of as very basic brain training. So we have an emotional response within our brain that's usually coming from what we call our core brain or our limbic system, and then we have our rational human part of our brain which is our neocortex. It is part of us that says okay this isn’t that big of a deal, everything is okay. What happens is that when we practice meditation or anything where we are building our willpower or self-regulations, we are giving more power to our human rational thinking brain and taking power away from our emotional brain. So, for example, let’s say I am at the gym and I have this little compulsion with me, it is like, I wonder if I got an email, I should check my phone. So, every time I give into that impulse, I am giving more power to my emotional brain and taking power away from my prefrontal cortex, the part of my brain that is like the controller. So, I am not going to think of that moment as a meditation moment but it is a mindfulness moment, it’s me catching myself acting compulsively, and saying I don't need to check my phone right now, I can finish my workout and my email will wait. Same thing that is happening for people when they choose to use meditation as a process of training their brain. So you are sitting there and you are going to set a timer for let's say five minutes and you are just going to try to focus on your breath and naturally five seconds later, one second later your mind wanders and you bring it back. It’s the training of bringing oneself back that is actually giving ourselves the benefit of meditation so that we can be in a more mindful place, and I think that many people have misunderstood it that they think that it's about getting to an empty mind.

Jen: I can't just sit quietly and think about nothing.

Emiliya: And then people go like, I have tried that meditation, I don’t do it right as opposed to recognizing that what it is, it is the training, it is the coming back.

Jen: None of us really do it right.

Emiliya: Or so long as you keep coming back at it, you are doing that right. It’s about training the willpower and the self-regulatory response to say this is where I want my brain to focus; not here, focus here; and that's what gives us the ability then to translate it into the board meeting. That is what enables us to translate it into your kids are triggering you and you just need to take a step back and we can train ourselves in those off moments so that we are more masterful in the heat of the momentum.

Jen: It is something from your perspective that does require constant training, you can get better at it but it's something that you have to develop a practice and keep that practice going over time just like you would be going to the gym to keep your body healthy and strong and flexible.

Emiliya: Ideally people would see this as part of their self-care practice that they are building a muscle preventively, so that they use it in the heat of the moment. Otherwise, what happens is people are just trying these skills out in the heat of the moment at which times they actually can still be effective right. We can also talk about the use of our body to create a calm response that then translates into what we are thinking about but oftentimes people are trying to do these things in the heat of the moment, they go, I tried that deep breathing thing and it didn't work for me. Well you tried it for the first time when you were feeling like you had heart palpitations and you were like in the cycle of panicking that you were going to stop breathing. It can help but why not work that muscle when you are calm, when you are already in a state and it doesn't take much time to be able to start building that type of practice so that your body remembers whether it be a calm place, a centered space, or you are building up that muscle of self-regulation, that makes it a lot easier to do in the moment.

Jen: So let's talk about time and how much time you recommend because that is something that I often hear, well I don’t have time whether it’s going to the gym or whatever it is in terms of self-care. I feel like most of the people that I know and probably most people in general when it comes to self-care, it's the first thing that we kind of do away with when life gets busy, which in reality should actually be the thing that kind of bubbles up and stays there and never goes away but I think human nature is to take care of everything else and everyone else that's on my list and on my plate, and then if there is something left, I will give it to myself. So, is it as little as 60 seconds, 5 minutes, 15 minutes, what does that look like.

Emiliya: I have some thoughts on the time piece, but I also want to help people get a little bit of a permission to be human moment to understand that there is a reason for why when we get stressed out, self-care goes out of the window. The things that we think about as traditional self-care of needing to exercise, needing to get our sleep, needing to put food into our body, actually taking the time to eat, those are things that for thousands of years were a default setting. We are not wired to make exercise a priority, exercise used to be the given and we are overriding it. So it is like if you actually had a chance to take a break, we are actually wired to do that. We are not wired to go, going to the gym for an hour or taking

time throughout the day to move like let me make this a priority. It doesn't fire off those motivation centers in our brain the same way. Same thing with sleep, it used to be a given that at sunset you went to bed, there was nothing else to be done. So the fact that people actually have to set goals now around shutting down their technology earlier in the day so that they can get to sleep and actually literally make goals out of getting enough sleep, we are not wired to actually do that well.

If you are out there listening and you are wondering like why does my self-care go out of the window, it's like we are not evolutionarily wired to make these things a priority. So, we actually have to hack our own system to make these types of spaces or these types of goals. Actually, they need crutches, they need support. For example, I have gym memberships to like three different sports clubs that are all part of the same one, like within a half mile radius. I have no excuse, I literally have to walk past it in order to get to my office because I have to hack my physiology. Back to your question around timing, so my statement is some is better than none, more is better than some, and lots is better than more. So I will say that again, it took me a little while to develop but it is like some is better than none, more is better than some, and lots is better than more, and this is supported by research. So even the American Dietetic Association says that if a person has got a pretty crappy diet, they are going to get benefits just by adding some vegetables in and if you are already having some vegetables, get more, and if you are already getting more, get lots, same thing with movement.

So it's amazing to say that the people who will literally get benefit from like a 15-minute walk, if you are not doing anything at all, that 15 minutes actually gives you a significant boost to things like your immune system, things like getting your body filled with more oxygen, you are actually burning more toxins out of your body. So, it's more important to ask people what can they do that's consistent. So for me, meditation has been a love-hate relationship. In fact I say that the thing I do on the cushion, which is I sit down on the cushion, my mind wanders, I try to bring it back, is actually what I do with the cushion. I wander from the cushion, weeks will go back and then I come back. So, the most important thing is I can say after 15 years of trying to do this thing consistently, doing something every single day in that way is just not the way that my body is wired, but do I keep coming back. The research shows us that doing frequency is actually more important than actually duration of time. So let's say it's just coming back to it is like okay my one minute a day, can I set a timer for just one minute a day but keep coming back to, I do it for one minute a day or five minutes, and then there is this Buddhist saying if you don't have 20 minutes for meditation, you actually need an hour and that is like if you can't find 20 minutes in a day but that is definitely as a busy entrepreneur like that is my life sometimes, but what the research shows is that it is more important to actually keep coming back to it and frequency more than duration.

Jen: You are known to talk about the concept of vitality. We hear resiliency, we hear that word, that language a lot, what got you into studying vitality, what does it mean, and how do you apply it?

Emiliya: I am so passionate about the concept of vitality getting it on the map, getting people thinking about their own energetic state. So, vitality is defined as having energy available to oneself and I think of it as a state of high-level wellness, a state where you feel like not only are you not sick but you are very healthy. There are many things that enable

that vitality and I have been passionate about, especially in the field of positive psychology, getting people to integrate the relationship to the body ever since I have been in this field. We in the field of positive psychology have a model called PERMA and PERMA stands for the five pathways that contribute to flourishing. What that consists of is positivity meaning having positive emotions; engagement, feeling deeply connected to the things you are doing; relationships; having high quality connections in your life; having meaning and purpose that's the M; and having achievement. At this point, a decade, I have been saying what about the body that you can't have a life of flourishing if we don't integrate the body. So, we teach the PERMA V model where we actually have a V for vitality.

When we look at enablers to our physical health and well-being, things like sleep. Sleep is the foundation to vitality. People underestimate the profound impact that sleep has on our mental health and our physical health, and things like moving our body enable us to have more energy available to us. That includes things like nutrition and absorption, so not just what we put into our body but how do we give our body the conditions that it actually absorbs the nutrients that it needs. So, vitality is a state of high-level wellness, it is a state of having energy available to you to do the things that you want to do, and it enables resilience because we know that firstly there is a relationship between people who are physically active, for example, have higher immune system. So if you want to talk about being resilient to whether it be bacteria that you come in contact with or virus that you come in contact with, the more physically active we are, the higher our immune system is so we are actually physically more resilient.

When people have gotten their mental health taken care of from a sleep perspective, they are much less emotionally reactive. Everybody has been there where just like you are so depleted because you haven't got a good night sleep and then you find yourself just more emotional, meaning things that are upsetting or extra upsetting, things that are triggering or extra triggering, or our impulse control goes down so drastically when we don't get enough sleep. Same thing with our food and nutrition. So the things that we put into our body strongly impact how compulsive we are. Having too much sugar in your body will make you crash really quickly and we all know that mood dip that we feel. So many of us are coming in contact with the ways in which our body is impacting us. I am also really passionate about things like ergonomics and how we actually hold our body in space and how do we actually keep our body aligned because there are so many things that people start to experience as aches and pains in our body that they just think are normal, its not normal for a body to be in pain and there are things that we can actually do to learn how to take care of our body so that it is more aligned. I am passionate about this topic of body care, I think it belongs in the school systems.

Physical education back in the 20s and 30s used to actually include in classrooms teaching children about how their body works, then we went through this crisis point where as people's fitness level started to go down and we had wars that we needed to overcome, they actually found that children were growing up not physically fit enough for combat. So suddenly we started to have standardized exams for fitness that we needed to meet and then we also had standardized sports that became like competitive and people had free time. So literally gym classes and PE classes became around exercise and sports and moved away from what it was originally intended, which is actually teaching people, here is your body, this precious container and vessel, that's the only vessel you have got for this whole lifetime that doesn't come with a user's manual. You phone comes with a user’s manual,

your TV, everything that you get even like pens will come with a manual now, we don’t get one and we are not taught how to take care of our body. Even if you look at the field of medicine today, it's still missing vitality because a lot of medicine went from being treatment based and then it went to preventative medicine, which is what we hear a lot about today, but that is still trying to prevent illness as opposed to actually devoting more and more research on high-level wellness. So what are the conditions that don't just prevent people from getting sick and actually keep them feeling vibrant, aging well, having the resources within their body to do the things that they want to do throughout their lifetime.

Jen: You have touched on it a little bit but I wanted to dive in deeper to the concept of mind-body connection because I think for most people there is, okay let me take care of the mind piece and let me take care of the body piece and oftentimes we really think of them as two separate things but they are not. It is not like you can cut off your head and still live or vice versa cut off your body and still live. We don’t often I think put those things together or think about them in that way.

Emiliya: Firstly, any people if they probably noticed how many times they reference the mind-body connection throughout the day, they would probably be shocked. That person has such a pain in the neck, I was worried sick, I am heartbroken, we use these words all the time to actually describe this connection between our mind or our emotional state and what we experience within our body. We all live it and within the field of science, it used to be mind and body medicine. Then we actually now call it mind-body medicine, and now it's actually just one word. So just the word mindbody. When you were just referencing even chopping off your neck, so if we were to chop off our neck and you actually would still be separating body from body. Its brain, the brain is an organ that is a part of our body, which actually gets us more connected to a more profound question, which is what is mind. What we now know is that the mind is not just in the brain, the mind is actually all over our body. The mind is outside of the body and it's the in-between and it has actually to do with our perception and our reception of information that we are getting from our skin on the outside, we are getting it for our digestive system which is on the inside. So where is this perceptual organ, it is not in any one place, it’s actually all over our body. So when we think about the mind-body connection, we are thinking about mind as a mental state, a state of cognition, a state of feeling, and it's very hard to separate that out from our body and our physical state. So we want to take care of both of them and what's beautiful is as you take care of one, you often tend to heal the other.

So as I start to control my thinking, I might start to notice that my body will actually release some physical tension. Sometimes, I can approach it through the body. So in fact, if you were to put a person into let's say one of those flotation tanks where they actually are floating and they don’t have gravity holding them up, one of the things that people often experience and how calming those places are is that it actually enables your muscles to relax and that you physiologically cannot have negative emotion without muscle tension. In order to actually be stressed out or to have negative thoughts, you need an element of tension. So our mind gets relaxed because our body is getting relaxed. So whether you are using progressive muscle relaxation or you are getting a massage where you are utilizing your body, those will impact the way that we think and the way that we feel. So I believe in giving people tools for both, I am a little biased, I actually think that the body tools can often get us to those psychological states way faster. So actually when I was doing my

Masters in Positive Psychology at the University of Pennsylvania, we would learn all these cognitive strategies for helping people shift their anxiety levels or shift their depression and these were really great tools that we would learn these fancy cognitive behavioral talkback sentences to their mind, and I feel like well that is great but if you just give me like 10 minutes, I can use some yoga breathing exercises to get them like way less anxious pretty quickly because that was my vitality argument, it was like where is the body in all of this and it's not either/or but the body is such a profound tool if only you know how to use it.

Jen: So what are some of those strategies because I personally could use some tips, but I know that our listeners love to kind of hear someone hacks and some tips and so what are some of your top strategies that you share with people.

Emiliya: Firstly, the body needs sleep, the body needs sleep. I often think to myself, how much better would my brain function today if I learn to respect sleep as an adolescent because I would spend most of my life being like look at this badge of armor of how little sleep I could get by on and it wasn't until I learned the science of sleep that I actually learned to respect sleep. So we go through 90 minute sleep cycles over the course of a night hopefully and the first half of that sleep cycle is all about restoring the body, and then the other half of that sleep cycles is all about restoring the mind. So if people actually looked at the lineup of action items to get accomplished while they are sleeping, things like growth hormone, immune system cells producing new tissue, and also organizing and storing memories out of short-term memory into long-term memory, you would be like well my body has got a lot of work to do, I have got to get to sleep so I could actually get this thing done. It is one of the most simple ways that we can actually take control of our bodily state because we will feel healthier, your immune system will be higher, you will have new cells rejuvenated, and you have more to work with when you start with sleep.

Jen: When it comes to sleep because when I talk to people they say I know I should get 7 to 9 hours but I have gotten five hours for the past 10 years and I do just fine.

Emiliya: So with the exception of very very few people who actually physiologically actually can get by with less sleep that's actually such a small part of the population, most people are actually demonstrating this resilience principal that we are talking about that the body can get by because we are adaptive creatures, we adapt, but part of it is just because they are used to that way of being doesn’t necessarily mean that it is the optimal state, and what you are referring to is that our body’s cleansing process that we get through sleep is so important that, its not that the mind gets secondary but basically what happens is over the course of that cycle, the more times we take that 90-minute cycle over the course of our night sleep, we actually spend more and more time in REM each time. So it is like the first time your body goes through cleansing, it is going to do the most important thing like get the heart pumping, get that toxins out of our body, get the immune system up, do the physical side of things, and maybe it will spend like 50 minutes in REM, then the next time around we get 20 minutes in REM, more and more. This is one of the reasons why usually we only remember our dreams unlike the last cycle and the dream just seems that much longer is literally we are in that REM cycle the place where we are restoring our mind more at the end.

And that REM is so important that when people cut their sleep short, one of the things that actually happens is people will daydream or they will go into an immediate dreaming state

even if they are just taking a short nap and that's because their body hasn’t been getting enough REM and it is so important to get REM because that's where our short-term memories get converted into long-term memory. The body knows it is going to need it, it is going to get it somehow. So, if people are getting by in like 4-hour sleep or like really cutting it super-short, that REM is so important that they will start kind of dreaming in the middle of like being awake and going like wow they are like hallucinating because that is what happens when people are chronically sleep deprived. So what happens is people think that they are doing fine, but I challenge them and if you really think you are doing fine, try it out, just try it out and actually see how you feel to have more energy available to the body. May be after you test it out and you are really going to let yourself tested like few weeks to a month and see what would it be like to just actually let your body sleep without an alarm clock.

Unfortunately, the only indicator that we have it's very scientific, very technical to let you know you are getting enough sleep is you are not tired, but if you feel like you find yourself sleepy, if you find yourself kind of crashing in the middle of afternoon or after a meal, you kind of feel a little tired, your body is probably not getting enough. So we can use the body from that one very simple vitality hack. We do it every night, just actually honor it and respect it's that its not like extra, it's actually essential. Then we can also utilize our body to shift our emotional state and that can come from anything from actually taking some breaths and deep breaths. When I say deep, we actually mean more slow and low into the diaphragm. We actually release about 80% of the waste of our body through our breathing, not through sweating, not through urination, not through defecation, actually through breath because it is the body's ultimate cleansing process. Carbon is a waste product, it's a waste product that comes from metabolizing food, it's a waste product that comes from just burning up fuel, running upstairs, walking around, our body is burning off the energy, and its releasing carbon. When we breathe in oxygen, we release carbon dioxide because this chemical combustion is actually happening to take the carbon out of our body. So one of the things we could actually do is just spend a little bit more time being conscious of our breath, breathing a little bit fuller, getting a little bit more oxygen in and exhaling completely and really taking that time to learn how to use breath as a tool. It's a tool that we are all walking around with that we can just capitalize and leverage.

So taking a few minutes just to breathe consciously. Oftentimes, we just notice our breathing, we slow it down naturally and we can look at this need to inhale and this need to exhale completely is a very simple way to get ourselves feeling healthier and more vital.
Again, there are things that we say all the time like I am going to go for a walk to clear my mind. That is a mind-body connection piece. Literally you actually are clearing your mind because as you are walking, as you are moving your body, your muscles will need the oxygen in order to fire and because your muscles in your heart are getting oxygen, your brain is getting oxygen too. So literally, we are cleansing our mind and cleansing our body because we are actually getting more breath into our body.

Jen: I am so grateful Emiliya could be with us today to discuss all things resilience and vitality. Thank you to our producers and to you, our listeners. You can find the WorkWell podcast series on Deloitte.com or you can visit various pod catchers using the keywork #workwell to hear more. If you have a topic you would like to hear on the WorkWell podcast series or may be a story you would like to share, reach out to me on LinkedIn. My profile is under the name Jennifer Fisher or on Twitter @Jenfish23. We are always open to

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