gosh it is weird isn't it seeing lots of people in the 3d anymore i uh i was actually saying to a friend on the train on the way up like actually i'm feeling a bit nervous giving a talk in person again after almost two years and it's like just imagine everyone pixelated and in 2d and you'll feel better so my name is michael matania and i'm the founder of tough cookie and we're a mental resilience training company so we're in the business of equipping people with the skills they need to cope with the adversity in their lives in a way that is both skillful and sustainable across time because as we're going to see over the course of the next 40 minutes most people's social coping mechanisms are actually neither of those things so in tough cookie we have a particular focus on what we call capacity building in our capacity skills to manage thoughts and emotions and why is this important well to illustrate my point to begin with i'd like to invite you all into a short experiment involving our imaginations so i'd like you to lower your gaze to a neutral spot and if you feel comfortable close down your eyes and i'd like you to imagine that you're in your kitchen it's the morning there's sunlight streaming through the window you go over to your work surface and you find a chopping board you then retrieve from its resting place your sharpest knife once you have these two objects i'd like you to find yourself a bright yellow zingy lemon which you place on the chopping board you take your knife feeling the weight of it in your hand and you slice into this lemon cutting it in half you take one of these lemon halves and you slice that in half quartering it now taking one of these lemon wedges between your thumb and your forefinger you raise this lemon wedge to your mouth you open your mouth and you sink your teeth deeply into this lemon wedge releasing its bitter tangy juicy goodness as the juices spread to fill all four corners of your mouth and now notice what physical sensations are happening in your mouth right now and you can open your eyes and look up i'd love to get a show of hands quickly who here during the course of that experience found that they're mouth-watered candle yeah did anyone get that sort of bitter sort of tangy yeah seeing a few nods a few hands okay so what does that experiment reveal to us it reveals to us the power of the thinking mind to influence our physiology we constructed using our imaginations the process of preparing and eating a lemon and then our mouth salivated and you didn't get to choose that just happened to you and if we spent the rest of the conference doing literally nothing other than reflecting on that experiment and what it actually means for your life that would probably be about the right amount of time because it's curious and interesting when it's a lemon and it's saliva right i saw some people smiling as we were doing the exercise but it's a different ball game when it's some anxious what-if scenario relating to the future and your body's being flooded with cortisol and adrenaline and you're actually just laying in the comfort of your own beds that's when it's more of a pickle so seeing as we have done the deep influence of the mind on our entire organism can i just get another quick show of hands who here when you were younger was sat down by an elder and had explained to you okay look you've got a mind all right this is how it works this is how you look after the health of your mind and by the way this is what you do when your mind begins to work against you just a quick show of hands you had that no me neither and so what we do is we make it up as we go along for good or for worse and i'm going to begin this session just by sharing how that played out for me so i'm going to share with you a little bit of my own personal mental health story so i was born in southeast london into a non-traditional family dynamic my father left when i was two which was a good thing because he was a very wounded man and a tyrant my mom who was an orphan didn't really have a support network around her she was trying to raise two boys on a shoestring and she ended up having a nervous breakdown when i was five and she went away for a year she came back it was a very disruptive time for us in a really critical moment in child development and so she worked her butt off to put a roof over our head and food in our bellies but she was so stressed so much of the time that she wasn't able to attune to us emotionally and so like many emotionally neglected children i turned to alternative means to get those needs met to comfort myself to regulate myself which i usually would have found for my mum and so i turned to what i could get my hands on which was flour and sugar now unfortunately unlike my girlfriend i've got metabolism where i actually put on weight and so i started getting fat now being a fat kid in a cultural context where fat bodies are slim are seen as less valuable than slim bodies where the people around me are trained by the culture to have the emotion of disgust elicited by fat by my body that was a traumatizing experience in and of itself but layering on top of that the perception that i was fat because of my own personal moral failure meant that all bets were off in terms of like ripping on me teasing me and on my way here actually i actually walked past a bus stop that i used to sit at to when i'd sit there for hours and not go to school and i just kind of sat at the bus stop today just this morning and just had a quiet moment to myself like wow and so over time getting bullied and growing up in a place called the progress estate which is where stephen lawrence was murdered um i ended up having to toughen up i developed a whole set of coping strategies to deal with my environment and so i became this guy that's me in the middle there doing my best i'm a hard man face and this picture for me is really striking because it really represents the image that i wanted to portray to the world i was wearing a mask i was managing other people's impressions of me which we all do to some degree but i was doing in a very exaggerated way i was angry i was jealous i was smoking skunk every day so i was very paranoid which isn't a great recipe for when you're also an angry person so very violent at the time and my mind got darker and darker and darker and eventually culminated in a psychotic episode which today remains the single most terrifying experience of my life it's basically where your personal reality no longer matches up with consensus reality it's a very isolating terrifying experience and in no real meaningful way could i articulate in this short period of time that we have together what it took to find my way out of that space but it was a long road a decade-long road and it was a road that would bring me into contact with all different sorts of people psychologists therapists wisdom keepers guides researchers scientists all who had a different piece of the puzzle for me and over time i was able to build an image as to what happened in my mind what had happened in my family dynamic to create that within me and what had happened in my culture to create that within me and so that took me around the world and back to london where i joined a charity called minds and i started working for them in front line services and over time went on to co-create the uk's biggest peer-led mental resilience program and then went on to co-design their national mental health strategy for schools i kind of segued into business and corporate culture through a campaign called time to change which is the uk's biggest mental health campaign and i founded a professional network for them called the employer champions network it's all about finding people within organizations who are the acupuncture points who get it about mental health which is like getting a joke in a way and then resourcing them and this eventually led me to found a tough cookie which is a a small startup there's 20 of us the only thing we all have in common is live the experience of recovering from mental illness so that's a little bit about me and my journey we teach this particular curriculum mixed mental arts and uh we're a social impact company and we have this particular focus on adversity coping and resilience and this is what i'm going to share with you today some of our high level thinking around this piece so i just want to let you know up front that all academic references can be provided i'm going to try not to say anything unless it aligns with three core pillars roots in one of humanity's great wisdom traditions an evidence based in the clinical literature and my own direct lived breathed experience so let's jump in human beings anatomically modern homo sapiens have for the vast majority of our evolutionary history being nomadic hunter-gatherers sharing nature with our animal cousins now even just a few hundred years ago the majority of the globe was still inherited by foragers now when we think about the amount of time in our evolutionary history where we've been living in urban environments it is a fraction and then you think about the amount of time that we've been inhabiting a post-industrial digital reality it's a fraction of a fraction now i don't see the emergence into the the digital age as like moving into the agricultural age it's more akin to something like transitioning from a single cell organism to multi-cell organism in its magnitude we're in this profound moment in human transformation now i would only have to get you to sit in journal for about two minutes to realize quite how much of volatility uncertainty complexity and ambiguity we are all contending with every single day the world is bewildering it's staggering complexity and one of the most stressful things you can do to a human being is subject them to too much change too quickly it's called future shock now i would contend that the pace and scale of social and technological change in our environment has accelerated beyond our evolved capacity to handle it so what i want to say is if at times you feel alienated or bewildered or overwhelmed you're not a machine that's broken you're an animal whose mammalian needs aren't being met by its environment because our environments are designed for excellence and efficiency rather than mammalian emotional needs and that's no one's fault it's just where we're at in our civilizational development so the world's tough we also can think about technology-driven disruption we think about the iphone landing in 2007 not before because that was the moment where all of the constituent technologies could be assembled for under 600 which was the maximum that a consumer was willing to spend and that changed everything it didn't just create an app economy it changed how we date tinder how we eat things like deliveroo how we travel uber how we work ie 24 7. i have to set a hard boundary on not checking my work emails on the toilet right mankind's last bastion of privacy it's literally a joke so that's the world as it is now that's disruption in one of the five foundational sectors technology over this coming decades the thinkers who i follow and respect are predicting major disruption 10x disruption like the iphone disruption disrupted technology in all five foundational sectors it's gonna be a very weird decade and we had a taste of it this last year we had a taste of what disruption really means and what happens when you stress systems that are designed for efficiency versus resilience what happened is that google reported a 5 000 increase on google searches for symptoms of stress in 2020 versus 2019 the number of workers according to forbes reporting symptoms of burnout was 69 that's over two-thirds reporting symptoms of burnout last year the number of people with depression doubled so it's been a tough time and i actually just want to acknowledge the moment which not just for me but i'm sure for many of us this is the first time we're sitting in a room like this in the 3d with other people like wow okay what a thing we've just been through what thing so how i have traditionally dealt with the stress and negative emotion in my life tends to be carbs as i said yeah i've never craved a courgette my mom tried our best but the crisps breads those are the biggens yeah that's the numbing quality it has on my stress pints with the lads also takes the edge off things have a big blowout once a weekend renews me for the next week tech smartphones screens the average millennial checks their smartphone 150 times a day now is that 150 reflective intentional checkings of the device or 150 reactions to anxiety maybe we would just is everyone got their phones on them let's just open up our phones for a moment they've got their phones you can just open it up and i don't know if you've got signal in here but if you just maybe go to your favorite thing to scroll on yeah maybe it's facebook maybe it's something else and i just want you to just like just have a little scroll just and just notice how it feels just to see this scroll this infinite feed it's like pulling it's like pulling the handle in a casino yeah i was the meditation teacher at facebook for three years and i know a lot of the people who worked on this and it does mirror literally the gambling machines so i wouldn't say that smartphones are a classical addiction like everything else that we might addicted to in so much as it is a a species-wide environmental shock we're running the experiment what happens when you give apes talking monkeys super computers that give them access to literally infinite amounts of stimulation that fit in their pocket and we're running that experiment now why do we lay awake at night blasting ourselves with blue light decimating our sleep hygiene what are we getting yeah we're getting this sort of cartoon virtual connection to the world and we're drowning out our sense of self and all of its worries so much of the time now whether it's carbs or booze or smartphones these are just crude examples of numbing distraction and avoidance tuning out of stress and negative emotion overworking is also a big one yeah we spoke to google and they reported to us that uh they were having to incentivize their workers during the pandemic to stay at home and not to stay at home to not work right because they noticed that people were using work as an emotional crutch because it's you know what you're going to get it's regulating because you're getting validated and so people were overworking but that's not rest of course and so we don't know how this sort of using work as a crutch and addictive technology interacts it's an open question so these are all incredibly potent coping mechanisms and they have their place on the table of coping but if we over rely on them we get in trouble because their efficacy diminishes over time they have a shelf life and this is what can lead to burnout now on burnout it's a spectrum from i'm feeling renewed i'm feeling like i have capacity i'm feeling joyful grounded connected relational excited about my work and then there's i'm overwhelmed i feel distractive and stuck in my head yeah now or there's i can't get out of bed and we're all along a spectrum and maybe take a moment to check in like where are you along the spectrum of feeling great to completely cooked many of us may have just come back from the august holidays so maybe we're feeling renewed but this is what brings me on to resilience some of you might recognize this it's a japanese art form called kinsugi and it's a an art form where you repair broken objects with gold highlighting the cracks and it's grounded in a philosophy that the way in which you repair something that's broken can make it more beautiful and this is what resilience is all about i know i wouldn't have to scratch very deeply into anyone's life in this room to find some form of tragedy or adversity i'm often struck by the power of the human spirit as my favorite poet and my araya mountain dreamer would say to get up after the night of grief and despair weary and bruised to the bone and do what needs to be done to feed the children our capacity to endure is immense but endurance is not resilience and we often confuse those two things endurances i'm really going through it right now i'm going to clench my fists i'm going to grip my teeth i'm going to crack on i'm going to push it down i'm going to get the thing done i'll think about looking after myself later resilience is i'm going through it right now so now more than ever with all of these things pulling me in all of these different directions it's important that i don't let the urgent overwhelm the important i can yank my hand back and be like this is important that i can parent myself skillfully through periods of adversity and most of us have had no training on this many of us haven't had it modelled by our parents so when it comes to mental resilience it's still very much on the table of discussion because it's an emerging field but a consortium of the major mental health bodies in the uk got together to pose the question what makes a resilient human being and they came back with these a 52-page document uh detailing these three core pillars so well-being social capital and skills to manage thoughts and emotions so well-being it's feeling good and functioning well yeah what are the wellness promoting habits and rituals that i populate my week with that i derive feelings of goodness from whether that's exercising whether that's serving people around me people whose names i know and receiving from them appreciation affection attention acceptance approval raising my perceived sense of self-worth and my serotonin with it maybe it's taking the time to clarify and implement my goals and raising my dopamine levels but we all have our different strategies now social capital i don't really like this word i prefer the word friendship to be honest yeah who are my four o'clock in the morning people where are the spaces where i feel like i belong versus fitting in because the difference in our nervous system between those two experiences is vast fitting in as i'm wearing a professional mask i'm managing other people's impressions of me as robert keegan the harvard psychologist says we've actually got two jobs one is our job and the other one is convincing everybody that we have our [ __ ] together now fitting in that's fitting in belonging is i'm relaxing into who i already am what and all and i'm still being accepted by the group it's also small talk turns out the pandemic revealed that small talk provides a massive invisible buffer against poor mental health that pandemic erased an entire category of friend which are the people that we don't really like well enough that we'd organize an evening zoom call with them but nonetheless we derive feelings of goodness from sweet moments of connection with them throughout the day by the boiling kettle or at the news agent so we also have well we look at well-being and social capital lots of organizations are looking at implementing their sort of wellness month you know where they get people to come in and look at sleep and hygiene and all of these other pieces you know nutrition it's really great yeah we call it cosmetic resilience it's doing something and being seen to do something and everyone comes together and it really pumps them up for a couple of weeks yeah and then default behaviors start to lock back in because it's not the same as deep capacity building because it turns out what it takes to scaffold a human being so that their behavior actually changes which is the only thing that matters when it comes to mental health it's behavior change not intellectual insights turns out this is much trickier and what does best practice look like in managing your inner life in managing your thoughts and your emotions well when researchers study resilient people they tend to study u.s special forces and extreme sports people why they don't study single mums i don't know but that's just the vibe and what they do in one particular study which blew my mind when i read this they took three groups into the lab resilient people non-resilient people and average people now i want you to imagine that you've been brought into a laboratory you've seen it advertise some kind of a study about resilience so you walk in there's people in white coats standing there come in come in you know okay cool they're like getting in this getting this mri scanner and you're like okay i'm going to get in this big old machine and it's all ringing it's like clanging anyone's been in an mri scanner you know it's not exactly calming then they're like ah relax okay what we're going to do is we're just going to put this mask it's oxygen mask we're just going to put it over your face it's okay all right cool they put the oxygen mask over your face and they're like and then they start incrementally turning down the oxygen levels and you start feeling yourself slowly suffocating now we are breath-based beings yeah suffocation is not the one and then we look at what happens in the brain now in resilient people what happens in their brain is at the insular cortex the part of the body responsible for feeling their feelings and their physical sensations lights up but they're not talking to themselves about it you take non-resilient people and the opposite happens they don't really feel anything right they dissociate from it but they analyze it in their head and so it points to a fundamental difference in how resilient people and non-resilient people meet with adversity so mentally resilient people manage their inner lives in times of stress and adversity firstly by allowing themselves to experience full awareness of difficult physical feelings and sensations they don't numb distract or avoid now many of us even if we do allow ourselves to turn towards the stress we focus only on the thoughts and stories and ignore the physical component we don't feel now they learn through exposure to these physical sensations and feelings to regulate how they respond to them note the word respond and responding is different from reacting reacting is acting before feeling responding is action informed by feeling the capacity to respond creatively to adversity rather than react blindly based on default habits we developed in childhood which many of us do and then they use positive emotions to counter balance negative ones and that's a whole other thing that we won't go into now so what i want to say is that when you're stressed and overwhelmed trying to think your way out of that problem in that moment is not the best thing to do because when you're stressed you get tunnel vision your working memory depletes you can't take on other perspectives we also have negativity bias and impact bias which also interacts to create this phenomenon of worry which is anxious what if thinking yeah will my mum get covered if i go and visit her we'll get in the vaccine mess me up in some way give me a long-term health condition yeah is this shirt a little bit too crisp to give a keynote in so what we actually need to do is not do that but i'd just like you to do another quick experiment all right and that's the lower your gaze and close down your eyes and just for 20 seconds i'm going to set you one task which is to not think of white polar bears and you can open your eyes who thought of a white polar bear almost immediately yeah it's called weakness process of ironic control the mind is presenting you with the image of a white polar bear to check that you're not thinking of a white polar bear so when you're stressed and anxious and you know that you don't really have good cognitive capacity so trying to think your way out of the problem isn't going to help but trying not to think about it increases the likelihood that it comes out so you can't do it the way you calm the mind when you're stressed is through the physical body you remember the lemon exercise what happens in the mind triggers the body it's a revolving door so you use the body to soothe the mind and this is what many of us haven't been taught the techniques and the tools and how to do this via something called the autonomic nervous system which is how you as an organism translate mental states into physical states and vice versa we need to learn how to intervene in our nervous system to regulate ourselves in a way that's skillful and sustainable not necessarily relying or over relying on booze carbs and smartphones now the last thing i want to say is that this this diagram is from a professor called professor steven porges who founded the brain body center at the university of illinois and he developed something called polyvagal theory which is the cutting edge of stress management some pieces of it are still up for debate but the people who i really respect the thinkers i really respect all really respect this model so i offer it here so according to this model we are constantly taking cues from our environment accused of safety accused of danger and cues of doom all unconsciously beneath our level of awareness it will be through body language tone of voice all different sorts of things now where we want to be in our organizations is in the green in what's called the ventral vagal when we feel connected and engaged and relational we know we're in this state because we feel calm grounded and collaborative we know meetings when everyone's in this state because they are awesome now when we're triggered the red comes online and when the red comes online it railroads the green and the red is a threat system it's a mobilizing system is it bigger than me run away am i bigger than it fight is it bigger and faster than me freeze which is the blue yeah this is the ancient part of the nervous system it's the part we share with fish and we're using this ancient primal system that's been designed for dealing with predators like bears to manage complex work scenarios and we are only above our deeper mammalian neurobiological nature in the way a surfer is above a wave and it can suck us down in any minute so what we need are techniques to bring us from the red and into the green because if we can equip our people in our organizations with the tools they need to stay in the green this will enable them to manage collective sense making in a world where the pace and scale of change is accelerating and so my invitation to you is when you're thinking about contending with the future to honor and include the role of capacity building of your people in it because within an organization within any group not feeling unsafe is not the same as feeling safe and i'll say that again not feeling unsafe is not the same as feeling safe thank you very much [Applause] [Music]