How often do you think to yourself, “I just need to solve this problem, and then I can relax”? Well, as counter-intuitive as it sounds, it’s putting off your relaxing that’s preventing you from solving your problem. And here’s why:

As I talked about in a previous post, there are 2 types of focus that facilitate problem-solving: eagle vision and mouse vision.

Sometimes it’s really useful to narrow down our vision and thinking to mouse vision and deal with the details, while at other times it’s important to zoom up to eagle vision and be able to get some high level perspective and see the big picture. Flexibility is the key here, and I shared some questions you can use to shift between mouse and eagle vision. But sometimes all the best questions in the world won’t shift us out of mouse vision – because stress is keeping us in mouse vision.

Here’s how it works:

When we’re stressed or afraid, the fight-or-flight reaction is activated, causing physiological changes that are designed to prepare us for running or fighting. The body shuts down or reduces some body functions to be able to enhance others. Some of these changes include:

• Increased blood-flow to the muscles in your limbs (making them stronger for fighting and running – also what eventually causes stiffness when we’re suffering chronic stress and not exercising)
• Decreased blood clotting time (useful if you’re injured and bleeding!)
• Increased heart rate, more rapid breathing and increased sugar and fat levels (to give you an extra burst of energy)
• Reduced blood-flow to the intestines (you don’t need to digest food while you’re fighting or running. This is what gives you the feeling of butterflies in your stomach)
• Increased perspiration (to cool you down while you’re running or fighting)
• Reduced peripheral vision (so we can focus all our attention on the threat)

The stress response is aimed at enabling you to have an immediate physical response to a perceived threat. Now that’s really useful if you’re being chased by a lion, but it’s less useful for most of the stuff that causes us fear and stress these days. Fighting or running aren’t usually the most effective ways to deal with your boss who’s a moron, or the financial pressure you’re under, or the intricacies of family relationships. (disclaimer: sometimes it might be!)

I’ll come back to the stress response in a minute, but first, have you ever heard someone say, “they have such a narrow perspective” or “he needs to see the big picture”? We often make metaphorical connections between vision and thinking, but there’s actually a very real connection between vision and thinking. When our vision narrows and we’re focused on a very specific visual object at the exclusion of everything else, our thinking also narrows and excludes alot of information. And when our peripheral vision opens up and we’re visually seeing more, our thinking also opens up and we’re able to literally “see the big picture.”

So, coming back to the stress response, when the stress response is triggered, both vision and thinking become blinkered, so that we have less information to process and can respond more quickly. Again, from a survival point of view, it might be really useful to not get distracted by the beautiful Saharan sunset while you’re running from a lion, but this blinkered way of thinking is less useful for solving the types of problems we struggle with these days. In fact, compared to hunting, the nature of the work we do to get our “resources” these days usually demands much more careful and complex thinking. We need to solve complex problems by taking account of a great amount of information, and to be able to see the connections between the different types of information, to create new connections, and to tune into relationship dynamics. This can take a bit more time, but the types of stress most of us deal with these days do allow us time to reflect and plan an appropriate strategy.

So if we’re hard-wired so that our stress response creates mouse vision and blinkered thinking, where we filter out potentially important information, how do we take control and open up our thinking and creativity so we can solve the challenges we’re faced with? It’s all about learning how to consciously pull yourself out of the stress response and relax, so that your vision and thinking can open up again.

Here’s how:

While the stress response is an automatic reaction, you can consciously pull yourself out of the stress response using 2 key “neuro-drivers:”

• Breathing
  Slowing down and deepening your breathing rate is one of the quickest ways to relax yourself. There are a variety of different relaxing breathing techniques you can use. A very powerful one for relaxing yourself involves breathing in for 2 counts and out for 4 counts. Do this for 5 mins and you’ll notice that the stress response symptoms go away. For more about using breathing to relax, check out this video and these articles here, and here.
• Vision
  Because vision and thinking are so closely linked, when you consciously open up your vision by going into what’s called “peripheral vision”, your thinking will open up too. A simple way to go into peripheral vision is to start by identifying and focusing on a marker on the wall a few meters away from you. Then, while continuing to look at the marker, start to open up your vision to include as much as possible around the marker and on either side of you. It’s quick and easy and you can do peripheral vision and open up your thinking anytime, even in the middle of a meeting.

If you’d like to understand a bit more about how deep breathing and peripheral vision work to relax you and open up your thinking, check out these excellent free videos of John Overdurf talking about the Mind Power For Life Technique, which makes use of breathing and peripheral vision to relax you and improve your thinking. John even gives a video demonstration of the Mind Power for Life technique in the 5th video.

Enjoy relaxing, seeing the big picture, and solving your problems!

Photo by Scarleth White

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