Stress to Success + Resiliency with Dr. Stephen Sideroff

Ever wondered how stress could actually be the key to your success? Dr. Stephen Sideroff, an internationally acclaimed psychologist, joins us on Reignite Resilience to unravel this paradox. From his pioneering brain research to groundbreaking clinical work, Dr. Sideroff explores the critical role of stress management in mental health and addiction. He introduces his innovative resilience model, "the path," offering a fresh perspective on how we can transform stress into a driving force for success and longevity. You'll gain eye-opening insights into the intertwining relationships between chronic illness, obesity, declining lifespans, and overwhelming stress, while learning practical steps to manage and harness these challenges effectively.

This episode goes beyond mere stress management, delving into the deep-rooted causes of our stress responses, often tracing back to childhood and even prenatal experiences. Dr. Sideroff shares how mastering acceptance and grounding can serve as initial steps on the path to resilience. He also discusses how to rewire our brains through neuroplasticity and neurogenesis, contrasting maladaptive patterns with healthier perspectives. As we navigate the complexities of our stress-filled world, especially in the age of social media, Dr. Sideroff’s insights guide us on how to not just bounce back from stress but to bounce forward, growing stronger and more resilient with every challenge. Tune in for a transformative journey toward mastering resilience.

Transcript

Pamela Cass: 0:06

In the grand theater of life. We all seek a comeback, a resurgence, a rekindling of our inner fire. But how do we spark that flame? Welcome to Reignite Resilience. This is not just another podcast. This is a journey, a venture into the heart of human spirit, the power of resilience and the art of reigniting our passions.

Natalie Davis: 0:29

Welcome back to another episode of Reignite Resilience. I am your co-host, Natalie Davis. I am so excited to be back with all of you and Pam, welcome. How are you? I am fabulous.

Pamela Cass: 0:40

It is a clear blue sky outside. It is a gorgeous kind of summer day. It's like 80 degrees here. It's amazing.

Natalie Davis: 0:48

Lovely, lovely.

Pamela Cass: 0:49

Well, I'm not getting to enjoy that You're not here.

Natalie Davis: 0:52

I am not, I'm not, but it is beautiful and sunny here and I was able to walk around a little bit. I'm actually in South Carolina part of this week and what was funny is I was getting ready to get on the call and I thought is it Friday? What day of the week is it, since we are infamous for recording on Fridays?

Pamela Cass: 1:09

It is not a Friday. It is not a Friday, Exactly Well.

Natalie Davis: 1:13

I am so excited. We are, I think, full swing into summer and we've mentioned it to our listeners before. We have a fabulous lineup of guests that are coming on here in the next couple of weeks, and today is no exception. I'm really excited for our guest today because, as all of you know out in listener land, we focus on resiliency and how we can really overcome adversity and realizing that adversity can pop up in our lives in many ways, shapes and forms, and so today we have a specialist within that space.

Natalie Davis: 1:46

I'm not going to say specialist, an expert, that's the word I'd like to use. So we actually have Dr Stephen Sitteroff, who is an internationally recognized psychologist, an executive and medical consultant and an expert in resilience, longevity, optimal performance, addiction, neurofeedback and mental health. All of that just wow, wow, all in general, he has published pioneering research within these fields as well. He's also an associate professor in the Department of Psychiatry and Biobehavioral Science and Rheumatology at UCLA's Geffen School of Medicine, and he was the founder and former clinical director of the Stress Strategies Program of UCLA Santa Monica. Today we have Dr Stephen Sideroff. Welcome, how are you?

Stephen Sideroff: 2:34

I'm doing great. It's a pleasure to be here with you.

Natalie Davis: 2:37

Oh my gosh, the pleasure is ours. It was really wonderful, so I would love to hear how you started down this path. When we talk about studying resiliency longevity I think that's something that it's a little bit sexier. People like to know about longevity, but when we talk about studying resiliency, how did you find yourself in this space?

Stephen Sideroff: 3:00

You know, I started my career actually in doing brain research and I was looking for where and how learning and memory took place in the brain. But the one problem with doing research with animals is that you can't ask them how they're feeling. You can't ask them what their experience is like. And I wanted to work with people and be able to help people make changes in their lives. And that's when I shifted into clinical work. And my early clinical work was in addiction, and one of the things I was at that's what got me to UCLA is a postdoctoral fellowship by the National Institute on Drug Addiction and I was looking at conditioned aspects of addiction. And one of the things that popped out to me so powerfully is how stress made all the difference in the world with people. It contributed to their becoming addicted and it made them more vulnerable if they were abstinent and made them more vulnerable to relapse, because stress increases craving. And when I broadened my range into all areas of mental health, emotional health, I found the same thing was still true that we can be doing well, we could be going along pretty well, but as the stress has piled up in our lives, our coping ability started to get stretched and fall by the wayside, and we began having physical symptoms, emotional symptoms and even cognitive impairment, and so that's why I wanted to focus in on helping people deal with stress. Not only did I recognize these connections, but I also realized that our world was getting more and more complex and more and more stressful. So that's what led me into working in the area of stress.

Stephen Sideroff: 5:08

I started a stress center at Santa Monica Hospital and focused on that in many of the work I did. I started doing corporate programs, but the interesting thing was that, as much as people were clamoring for better ways to deal with stress, I also discovered that people were very resistant to dealing with their stress, and that further broadened my wanting an approach. That was, people were wanting more than managing stress. People had resistance to managing stress, but people have less resistance to becoming more resilient, and that's why I shifted my focus onto resilience. But it's important to realize when we deal with stress, when we deal with resilience, that a certain amount of stress is actually good. A certain amount of stress helps motivate us, mobilize us, helps us focus, helps us be goal-directed. In fact, I challenge both of you. If you think about all the successes you've had in your life. I guarantee almost all of them have been associated with what Stress, stress.

Pamela Cass: 6:26

Some sort of stress?

Stephen Sideroff: 6:27

Yes, so what happens? Our brains put these two things together Success, stress and one of my very early mentors in neuroscience, donald Hebb at McGill University, said neurons that fire together wire together, and we now know that that's true. So we all have this stress seeking behavior, because in our lives it's always been associated with success. This led me to develop a model of resilience that was comprehensive, but also a program that I refer to as the path that helps people really engage in a process of change and transformation, because that's really what's needed from the outdated ways that we have to deal with stress. Wow, wow.

Natalie Davis: 7:30

And that model that you referenced. I want us to dive into that, but here a little bit later, if we could. Is that the model that you used for your book, the Nine Pillars of Resilience? Exactly?

Stephen Sideroff: 7:38

So I've distilled down from all my years of experience everything that contributes to our becoming more resilient, and I've distilled that into this model of nine pillars of resilience.

Pamela Cass: 7:54

Beautiful. So why is it that people are resistant to stress? Is it just because they associate it with success?

Stephen Sideroff: 8:07

associate it with success. That's one key reason. But you know, our stress response is our survival response. It's a survival mechanism and it's what mobilizes us under threat and danger. But it was originally in the caveman era, 20, 30,000 years ago. The fight or flight response was what we needed to escape from danger. But how many of the stresses that we deal with today can we handle by either fighting them or running from them?

Natalie Davis: 8:42

Yeah, very few.

Stephen Sideroff: 8:44

So what happens is our bodies mobilize for fight or flight and then we have to hold that energy in. Okay, so the problem is that we don't have an unlimited amount of energy, right, we have a certain amount, a limited amount of personal energy, and our internal mechanisms are continually making choices. We're choosing, basically, between two things defend and protect, or heal and grow. And every time we feel under danger, under threat and it could be anything, it could be a conflict with a friend, it could be am I going to pay the bills? It could be anything we go into that fight or flight mechanism. And so our brains are saying we need to protect. But where are we going to get that energy from?

Stephen Sideroff: 9:42

Well, now we can't send energy, for example, to the kidneys to purify our blood, heal and maintain, because we're over here trying to protect ourselves. And so when we grow up, through our childhood lessons and learning, we come to experience the world perhaps as dangerous. We come to experience the world perhaps as dangerous. We experience the world as being populated by people who are going to judge us and be critical of us. Some of our early lessons, early learning, all of those contribute to the imbalance between going in to defend and protect a stress response, and going into heal and grow our recovery response. And so this is how we all get into trouble we with that imbalance in spending too much time defend and protect and not enough time and heal and grow.

Pamela Cass: 10:44

Have you seen people that are living lives like at high stress, like consistently, that have a hard time, like living in that defend in, that heal and grow stage, because they feel like it's natural for me to feel stress, so it's almost like they seek out to live in that defend and protect stage?

Stephen Sideroff: 11:05

Definitely, definitely. You know, I see a lot of clients who, on a Sunday, they'll go out in their backyard and they'll get into their lounge chair and they may be there for five minutes and they're going I should be doing something, I have this, I have that, I have this. People do have a very difficult time taking time to recover. Yeah, because there's always something that needs to be done. There's always something that's unfinished. Yeah, you have a drive to always try and finish what's unfinished. So, yes, people have difficulty going into the recovery mode because we all have so many things bombarding us that pull at our attention. Yeah, yeah, wow.

Natalie Davis: 11:57

Well, stephen, when you staying in that space of individuals that often live in that stress feel or that sense, I think, that state, when they start to feel overwhelmed by that stress, how can you help them get beyond that feeling?

Stephen Sideroff: 12:15

Well, so first of all, let's kind of get the basic framework here, because we have a growing rate of chronic illness, we have a growing rate of obesity, we have a growing rate of all different kinds of illnesses and, for the first time in recorded history, our lifespan has actually gone down for the first time in recorded history actually gone down for the first time in recorded history. So these are all of the impact of what you and I are talking about right now, and a lot of people do come to me with a feeling of overwhelm, and so the first thing I have to say to whoever comes to me and to everybody in your audience the first step is acceptance. The first step is let's get our grounding, let's find a foundation. The first step is recognizing that it's taken a long time to get to this place of overwhelm. It's not like going to the wall and flipping a light switch and now it's not there. There are certain habits and patterns that got us all to this point and we have to learn some new lessons.

Stephen Sideroff: 13:34

We have to be willing to engage in a consistent program to literally rewire our brains, and the good news, the very good news, is that that's possible. The very good news is we are equipped with this tremendous capacity of neuroplasticity and neurogenesis also, you know, when I first started in my career, the belief system was that you're born with a full complement of neurons and then it's downhill from there. You just lose them right there, just lose them right. And in recent years we have found that actually the opposite is true. The opposite is the case, in that we are capable of rebirthing new nerve cells all through our lives, into old age. Yeah, and now? If we combine the fact that we're birthing new nerve cells with new behavior, new learning, we can literally rewire our brain based on the new learning. But it takes practice and it takes a period of time, which is why, in my book, I lay out a program to do this, step by step.

Pamela Cass: 15:01

When you say habits and patterns, do you see common habits and patterns with people that have high stress, or is it just unique for everybody?

Stephen Sideroff: 15:11

Well, no, it's a very good question Because I do see patterns in general, in general. Okay, so think about it, you're born. I refer to this as our developmental mismatch. Earlier I was talking about our evolutionary mismatch in that we have a stress response that doesn't match our environment. Right, we also have a developmental mismatch, and by that I mean we learn the lessons of life in our childhood based on our typically based on our primary family.

Stephen Sideroff: 15:49

Okay, we don't go out and sample hundreds of families to see what's real in the world, our little family. The assumption is that's the world, that's what we adapt to, and we adapt to that little world because, as children, we're dependent on our caregivers to meet all of our needs. We are dependent on them for our survival. So we better learn the lessons of our primary caregivers really well to stay in their good standing, and so these lessons can be directly taught to us, or they could be simply learned by modeling. So if you have a mother or a father, as an example, who's anxious, or you have a family under a lot of stress, they're having difficulty paying the bills. What's the message to the child? The message is the world is dangerous. The message is you have to be on guard.

Natalie Davis: 16:53

And it's okay to live in this constant state of stress because they see that all the time Right.

Stephen Sideroff: 16:59

Right. Whether it's okay or not, that's their reality.

Natalie Davis: 17:03

That's the reality.

Stephen Sideroff: 17:05

Yes. And so you grow up and you walk out your day or you start your day. What's going to go wrong or where's the danger? It doesn't matter whether there really is or not. All you have to do is wonder about it and your body mobilizes. If you have a parent that's always judgmental and critical of you, you learn that that's the way people are in the world. So you walk into a group of people and again you're on guard. Am I going to be judged? Guard, am I going to be judged? How am I going to be judged?

Stephen Sideroff: 17:41

So the lessons of childhood because there's our survival learning, they get imprinted in the neural networks of our brain and it's like does a fish know it's in water? Right, it's, yeah, it's all it knows. This is all we know growing up. So, as an adult, coming to me, coming to my book, coming to my program, it's the awareness that those lessons probably are not effective lessons as an adult, but first we have to identify them and then we have to contrast them to what would be a healthy lesson. And that's the biggest challenge in becoming resilient.

Stephen Sideroff: 18:30

Because I'll say it a different way, I will say that we have tremendous capability of adapting, but we adapt to our childhood environment and then, to some degree, that adaptation freezes to that environment because it colors the lenses through which we see the world, as I've just described to you. And so then, if something matches those lessons, we go oh, yes, of course. And if something doesn't match those lessons, such as someone giving us a compliment, we go oh, you know, we dismiss it. Right. And that's how those childhood lessons stay, maintained by how we interpret, and selectively interpret, what happens as adults.

Pamela Cass: 19:24

Interesting. Is there any research on babies while they're in the womb, living with a parent that is in a stressful environment? Does that impact them in a way that when they're born they're already kind of almost wired for that high stress?

Stephen Sideroff: 19:41

Yes, yes, because the embryo shares the blood supply with the mother. Yeah, and so if the mother is stressed, she's sending stress hormones through her bloodstream, but that's getting sent into the babies as well, the embryos as well. So, yes, the baby can be sensitized to stress and the stress response.

Natalie Davis: 20:15

Wow, wow, wow. So, as I mean, as you talk about, like that developmental mismatch, it happens well before mimicking or watching behavior and actions and words, or even just having a emotional intelligence of picking up what's happening within the space, like the actual space at the that the children are in.

Stephen Sideroff: 20:35

It happens before birth yeah, one of the approaches I have in psychology is called gestalt therapy. I don't know if you've heard about it, but gestalt therapy is a brilliant approach and one of the founders his name was Fritz Perls. He would say that, therapy in therapy, when you're a child and you're growing up, you swallow everything that you're told right. And when you're in therapy, it's like you bring up what you had swallowed and you chew on it, and if it tastes right, then you swallow it and integrate it, but if it doesn't taste right, you spit it out. And so it's up to all of us, as adults, to challenge our belief systems, because we didn't choose them, we just absorbed them from our childhood lessons.

Pamela Cass: 21:37

And it's up to us, as adults, to decide if they support us or if they don't support us so is it hard for people to manage stress because it's so pre-wired in their brains that they just don't even almost like. It's just like become normal for them, so they don't even know how to manage it well.

Stephen Sideroff: 21:57

Well, we do adapt to higher and higher levels of stress and tension in our bodies, like right now. If you check in with your shoulders, you may notice that there's some tension there. You check in with your jaw, you may notice that as well. So if we're continually stressing our bodies and our bodies go into that fight or flight mode, we never really fully recover. We always stay at a little bit elevated levels of tension, but we adapt to it. So we don't even know until we start addressing it. And so there's so many reasons that I've been laying out as to why we have this imbalance, and not the least of which is how much in our day and our lives is stressful. But one of the things that I tell people is that there's the stress out there and then there's our stress response. We can't control what's out there typically, but we do have control over our stress response, and so part of becoming more resilient is recognizing, eliminating some of the responses we have.

Stephen Sideroff: 23:19

For example, you know there may be stuff going out on out in the world that you're upset about, but you have no control over it. So I would say you know a lot going on out in the world. In your community. You do what you can do, you take whatever actions you can, but once you do that, you want to let go of your reaction. You don't want to be continually frustrated, angry, upset because a politician says something or does something.

Stephen Sideroff: 23:53

Once you do what you can do, then you need to let go. If you're upset with a friend because they don't get you, they don't listen to you the way you would need them to listen to you. You can give them feedback, but at some point you need to say you know that's who they are, they're not going to change, so that you don't keep getting upset about the same behavior because the only person that that's affecting is you. So we need to be more in control of, more aware of our stress responses and begin making choices and recognizing that we can have greater control over our response to stress.

Natalie Davis: 24:41

I have to say that that really resonates with me.

Natalie Davis: 24:44

Just this week I've watched this massive discussion take place on social media and we haven't talked about social media but I'm sure we can.

Natalie Davis: 24:56

But I've watched this conversation take place on social media.

Natalie Davis: 24:58

But I'm sure we can.

Natalie Davis: 24:58

But I've watched this conversation take place on social media and I mean the emotion that, the emotional charge that I had in watching it and feeling this conviction that I needed to do something, that I needed to step in that I was disappointed in some of my peers and members of this community because, you know, I didn't anticipate or expect them to show up the way that they were showing up in the discussion and it was actually yesterday that I had to sit back and I said, okay, I cannot control how they're going to show up, what they're going to think, and I really need to separate myself from this because it became all consuming where I was going back to the discussion to check in to see what else was said and who else is chiming in and what else is being done, and then I realized timeout.

Natalie Davis: 25:45

This is not for me and it's not mine to continue to go to battle on, but I would imagine that social media is not helping us in this space, because there are a lot of people that go to social media for exactly this as another outlet for their stress response well, and the problem too is is that as soon as you start watching things like that, it will send you more things like that.

Pamela Cass: 26:11

so then you're just getting more and more and more, and so then you open it up and you're like just inundated with it and just becomes completely overwhelming. And so it's almost like just inundated with it and just becomes completely overwhelming, and so it's almost like self-perpetuating it is yeah, it is yeah.

Stephen Sideroff: 26:24

And so, natalie, what you did was great. Exactly what you did. Hold on a second. What's going on here?

Stephen Sideroff: 26:32

Yeah, and in fact you know you talked earlier, asked earlier about being overwhelmed, and what do you do and that's exactly what I teach people to do is, when you realize that you're being sort of carried away by whatever it is, and you notice this emotional reaction that you're having, you are being carried away by something outside of yourself, and so it's exactly what you want to do. You want to literally go like this and give yourself a time out, as if you're in a game in which go to the sidelines, go to the bench, take two minutes to breathe and let go, because when you're caught up in that, your brain doesn't function well. Yeah, to the lower centers for more survival behavior, and you lose the ability to connect to your prefrontal cortex. And, just as in a basketball game, when one team is running away with the game, the other coach calls a timeout to break the momentum. That's what you want to do anytime you're feeling overwhelmed, carried away. Time out, go, sit down, give yourself two minutes to recover and then approach the situation from a clearer head.

Natalie Davis: 28:10

I think that's a great nugget. And one other piece that you touched on that Pam and I often talk about, both on the podcast and with our coaching and training that we do offline is really challenging our individual belief system, because I know that in my own personal journey I've discovered things where I realized that that's not mine right. I picked that up from family community wherever I grew up, and it's not my truth any longer, or even my belief that I want told to be true, and sometimes that's hard because it goes, like you mentioned, because of the environment that we grew up in. Once we take that opportunity to challenge our beliefs, it may actually go against the beliefs of the people that are closest to you, and I think that in itself is an opportunity for individuals to work through things.

Stephen Sideroff: 29:01

Right, and you're bringing up something that's really important, because a lot of us feel this loyalty yes, to our family or to our peers, and so if we for us to look at some of their thinking and behavior and disagree with it, that there's a threat there, they won't, I won't be part of that group anymore. They won't, they'll reject me, they won't like me, and so sometimes it takes a lot of courage to stand up to new beliefs. But that's at the heart of resilience, right, that's at the heart of you know, people talk about resilience as the ability to bounce back to where you were Every time you engage in any kind of stressful behavior, any kind of challenge, any kind of process in which you are working hard to get over, get through, get ahead. You want to learn a lesson from that experience so that the next time you encounter a stress you are actually better prepared, and that's why I refer to that as the ability to bounce forward.

Natalie Davis: 30:28

We hope that you've enjoyed part one of our two-part interview with Dr Stephen Sideroff. What phenomenal insight we have when we are looking at stress and how we respond to stress. Quick question for you all Are you responding from the defend and protect standpoint? Are you heading into that recovery mode where you can heal and grow? Make sure that you come back and join us for part two of the interview, because Dr Steven Sideroff is going to give us additional tools, because Dr Steven Sideroff is going to give us additional tools, techniques and practices from his nine pillars that you can put in your tool belt starting today. We'll see you soon. Thank you for joining us on today's episode of Reignite Resilience. We hope that you had amazing ahas and takeaways. Remember to subscribe on your favorite streaming platform, like it and download the upcoming episodes, and if you know anyone in your life that is looking to continue to ignite their resilience, share it with them. We look forward to seeing you on our future episodes and until then, continue to reignite that fire within your hearts.