EP #1234: How to Manage Stress & Heal from Trauma Through the Science of Resilience & Self-Care

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Lisa is joined by Elizabeth Stanley who talks about her book, Widen the Window: Training Your Brain and Body to Thrive During Stress and Recover from Trauma

Elizabeth Stanley, PhD in her own words:

I’m a professor at Georgetown University who teaches about international security. My passion is understanding the social structures that drive human behavior—especially during stress, trauma, uncertainty, and conflict.This has led me to teach, speak, and write about a wide range of topics:

• Why are wars so difficult to end?
• Why does technology often exacerbate uncertainty?
• Why do features of the post-9/11 military make suicide and psychological injury more likely?
• Why do some of our society’s most common coping habits undermine our resilience?

Integrating insights from many different fields, I explore how we can change social structures to create better outcomes. I help people learn how to access choice, even during the most challenging situations.I used to be a firm believer in “powering through.” A U.S. Army veteran with a PTSD diagnosis who thought it would be cool to pursue two graduate degrees simultaneously, I was a pro at it—or so I thought.It took losing my eyesight for me to finally understand that there’s an easier way.I’ve spent 20 years studying the neurobiology of stress, trauma, and resilience—initially as a way to save myself and then to help others heal, too. There’s nothing I teach that I haven’t learned from personally in my own mind and body.Along the way, I developed an evidence-based approach to resilience called Mindfulness-based Mind Fitness Training (MMFT)®. I collaborated with neuroscientists and stress researchers to test MMFT’s efficacy in four research studies. I’ve taught these tools to thousands in high-stress environments, including first-responders, healthcare workers, corporate leaders, and combat troops.Growing up as an Army brat, I moved ten times before college, mostly overseas. After an ROTC scholarship at Yale, I served as a U.S. Army intelligence officer in Asia, Europe, and on two Balkans deployments. A Harvard-trained political scientist, I also have an MBA from MIT’s Sloan School, focused on technology strategy and organizational behavior. After several years of clinical training, I became a certified practitioner of Somatic Experiencing, a body-based trauma therapy. I’ve also ordained as a Buddhist nun in Burma.In addition to longtime yoga and awareness practices, I enjoy running, hiking, gardening, creating art, and spending time in nature with my rescue dog, Chloe. We love to commune with the animals and host friends at a Virginia farm, featured in photos on this website.



Book description:

Stress is our internal response to an experience that our brain perceives as threatening or challenging. Trauma is our response to an experience in which we feel powerless or lacking agency. Until now, researchers have treated these conditions as different, but they actually lie along a continuum. Dr. Elizabeth Stanley explains the significance of this continuum, how it affects our resilience in the face of challenge, and why an event that's stressful for one person can be traumatizing for another.

This groundbreaking book examines the cultural norms that impede resilience in America, especially our collective tendency to disconnect stress from its potentially extreme consequences and override our need to recover. It explains the science of how to direct our attention to perform under stress an