Speakers
Synopsis
Chronic stress and burnout is a critical issue in today's cyber security work force - one that isn't going away due to the increasing demand and shortage of cyber skills. As a project manager, I see on a daily basis how my project teams are struggling with work pressures and personal pressures in their everyday lives. Additionally, project managers form trusted relationships with both colleagues and clients where they become the confidante and emotional support when team members are in need. To create resilience and better support the valuable people in our industry, leaders need to gain an understanding of human stress in terms of neuroscience, physical wellbeing and mental health. The best place to start this is with our individual selves.
This thought leadership presentation will begin with a neuroscience-based explanation of how stress operates in the human body and how it impacts our well-being. The emotional stress response falls into three main categories, fight, flight or freeze and is accompanied with specific hormonal (cortisol, adrenaline, dopamine and seratonine) and physical response that over time, wires our brains to behave in patterns of specific unhealthy ways that can prolong stress to cause long term illnesses and health conditions.
Then the cost of stress in terms of physical, social and workplace will be detailed along with a summary of the recently introduced WH&S Psychosocial Hazard laws. These impacts and costs will be further illustrated with my own personal journey starting from being diagnosed with chronic stress, extremely high cortisol levels, digestion troubles, blood issues and poor mental health. Concepts such as Maslow’s Hierarchy of Needs, Polyvagal Theory and Nervous System Health assist with understanding our stress, identifying the causes and exploring solutions.
My health-tracker stress and sleep data from the last year, will be analysed to understand what factors increased my stress, affected my body or decreased my stress. The stress trajectory will be compared against sleep quality and mood tracking data to demonstrate how reducing my stress improved my quality of life over time. The story will continue with an exploration of which practical strategies I tested to reduce my stress, which ones produced a measurable result, which ones were easy to implement and therefore the highest value for effort strategies. These strategies will be backed by neuroscience reasoning regarding how and why these strategies work.
Finally, the increased capability outcomes of my positive result that I achieved for both my physical and mental health will be summarised, demonstrating how to overcome chronic stress and burnout and how to move from surviving to thriving on an everyday level. Then I will share the new skills, the increased energy and increase emotional intelligence I gained throughout my stress reduction journey and also identify organisation wide benefits of enabling employees to reduce their stress levels. The presentation will end with statistics on why chronic stress has become a global epidemic, reflecting on how we can improve our societal attitudes to better protect our health as a connected community.
