Why Wellness Isn’t Optional

I realized, as I reflected at the end of this year, that a core prediction of mine, one I’ve been teaching about for years, has now come true.

Before I tell you what it is, I want to walk you through a few of my assumptions. First, that we’re living in a time of accelerating technological change and that the pace of change for many information technologies is exponential.

For example, to borrow from the illustration that Peter Diamandis and Ray Kurzweil love to share, 30 linear steps take you to the street outside, while 30 exponential steps take you around the planet – 26 times. But here’s the thing about exponential change. In the beginning, it looks like absolutely nothing is happening because the doublings are quite small and maybe even unnoticeable.

Then, all of a sudden, you hit what futurists call the hockey stick point of the exponential curve, and the rate of change goes off the chart.

We stop being able to use linear graphs at this point because they simply can’t capture any subtleties of exponential curves, and we switch to logarithmic graphs — which you may remember from maths in secondary school, and which have finally come in useful.

At this point in an exponential curve, you lose your ability to predict what will happen in the future because the present is already unlike anything that came before. You are literally off the map, in uncharted territory, and for our brains, this radical uncertainty is deeply stressful and fundamentally scary. More about that in a minute.

The second set of assumptions I want to share with you are that as multiple technologies become exponential, including networking and computing, digital biology, artificial intelligence, robotics, and others, the convergence of these technologies creates a multiplier effect.

So, instead of dealing with just one area of technology experiencing rapid, runaway change, we’re seeing many of them become exponential at around the same time. Where the pace was fast before, now it becomes turbo-charged, much like the “insane” (now the “ludicrous”) button on a Tesla car.

My prediction was that as the pace of technological change increases, our experience of the world will become more stressful. The reason for this is mostly how we’re wired.

For starters, our brains haven’t had a hardware upgrade in 50,000 years. Our biological stress response was exquisitely programmed to respond to physical threats in the wild, like running from saber-toothed tigers or hunting dangerous buffalo.

The same stress response happens in modern life when a police siren startles you on the sidewalk, or your boss freaks out at you over a missed detail or deadline. Whether it’s a real threat to your survival or a perceived one, your brain can’t tell the difference and your amygdala pushes stress hormones into your system all the same — and even more so if you have a tendency to overreact and blow things out of proportion.

Our bodies, minds and emotions are not set up to deal with daily floods of adrenaline and cortisol, the latter of which can take days to purge from our system while it creates dangerous inflammation over time. And for those of us with stressful commutes, challenging family dynamics or uncertain work environments, the little stressors that trigger our bodies’ stress responses can quickly become regular occurrences, creating chronic stress that can lead to illnesses that significantly affect our quality of life and shorten our life span.

Second, our brains are programmed to filter out and focus on bad news, not the good stuff. Because of this negativity dominance, research about the balance of praise to criticism tell us that one piece of criticism is roughly equal to the weight of seven compliments. This makes our viewpoint hopelessly skewed and biases us towards reactivity and negativity, unless we do something about it.

This is where the practice of wellness comes in, and why it’s so crucial if we’re going to make a difference in the world and change it for the better. Wellness can teach us to bypass our hardwired stress response in favor of more resilient — and useful — reactions. We can train our bodies, minds and emotions to respond differently to triggers and literally change the structure and function of our brain so that we don’t experience the ill health effects of chronic stress.

To me, this is amazing. To have the knowledge and the tools to take what is an inherently unstable system and make it work for us is deeply empowering. Not only that, but as leaders others rely on us to stay resourced in really tough situations. We can’t do that if we’re not expert at creating the conditions for our own well-being.

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Please share this with someone you think it might benefit. And thanks for reading!