When I was a fashion executive, I was addicted to coffee. I would start each day with it and schedule meetings based on where I could get the best cup. To say I lived on coffee while teetering on the edge of burnout is an understatement. It was my lifeblood in a fast‐paced and toxic work culture. While I liked the designer I worked for, there was an expectation that my life should revolve around work, and large quantities of caffeine helped fuel the lie. Some days, it boosted my ego, because the caffeine high can make you feel powerful, and I told myself that she saw me as superhuman and absolutely crucial to the company. But it also made me accessible every minute of the day because I was constantly anxious from the coffee, and my needs fell to the wayside.

Coffee became my adrenaline crutch. Whether in my hand, on my desk, in the car, or on the subway, you never saw me without it. I grew up in Denmark, where it's customary to sip coffee throughout the day, but I was downing espresso and cappuccino all day. It was noticeable enough that even when my parents visited, they asked me if I was okay due to the amount of caffeine I was consuming and the accompanying anxiety level.

Then everything came to a head when both my parents were diagnosed with cancer three months apart, and they came to live with me in the United States.

Despite this, I kept working insane hours, living on coffee, and not facing the reality of my parent's cancer treatments or the impact it had on them. I was high on caffeine to achieve absurd career goals. Coffee highs boosted my focus on accomplishment while I ignored the people closest to me. Isn't it ironic that we paint coffee shops as places to connect, whereas in reality you find people furiously hammering away on keyboards, isolated, and high on fake energy?

Once my mom died unexpectedly—and without me saying good‐bye—that became the wakeup call. I hadn't paused to go back to Denmark with her, where she was in treatment, thinking she would recover as she had twice before. She wanted to connect and spend time together, but I was off working and fueling work with my liquid adrenaline crutch. I'm not blaming coffee by any means. But what I realized was that I had built patterns that kept me alienated, stressed out, and in a constant state of emergency, while ignoring the actual emergency in front of me.

I was living and working in survival mode, while missing every essential cue needed for human interaction and basic self‐care.

Are You Working and Living in Survival Mode?

Your epiphany doesn't have to be as extreme or dramatic as mine for you to take a moment to pause and reflect on whether you're stuck. You already might hear that nagging voice in the back of your mind whispering that you're operating out of reactive, unhealthy patterns where everything is urgent. Maybe you see aspects of yourself in my story where you put everything else on hold: your health, relationships, family, or your personal growth.

When we run on empty and neglect recharging, we end up working in survival mode.

While it may appear that I'm comparing people to machines, remember that the human body needs rest and maintenance, just like mechanical devices to operate fully and not break down. Sure, we want to feel like we have the energy and power of a race car, but more often than not, we never gear up for the big race. Instead, we show up with a run‐down hooptie with dents, dings, and engine issues day after day.

Survival mode is an adaptive system that the body enters when experiencing danger or crisis. You've likely heard of it as fight, flight, or freeze, which is how humans react when faced with a stressful situation.

• We might grow angry seemingly out of nowhere (fight).
• We might find ourselves rushing as fast as we can, without thinking about anything other than getting through the situation (flight).
• We might feel paralyzed, foggy, overwhelmed, and don't know what to do (freeze).

The reality is that we probably feel aspects of all three during most workdays. Throughout the centuries these are our normal, conditioned human responses. We scan for changes in our environments that signal threat or danger, like being chased by a tiger, or nowadays, the stress of a tight or unrealistic deadline.

Because our bodies are still part of nature—and our hormones and reactions are based on the perception of danger—we adapt. That's great when we have to push through and get something done for the next few hours. The problem is that we now live in a constant state of survival mode, and it's wearing us out.

Consider the following: during spurts of survival mode, our digestive system shuts down, body temperature changes, and blood flow goes to the extremities. We might look pale, flushed, or even feel dizzy. The longer we stay in this prolonged state, the more inflammation occurs.

Survival mode is great if we're experiencing an actual threat, but in the modern world, the threat has become survival stress, the fear that something may hurt you, causing the body to naturally respond with a burst of energy to allow you to survive the dangerous situation (fight) or escape it all together (flight). It manifests itself as worrying about deadlines, presentations, meetings, tasks, and projects. We use and abuse our bodies' ability to access this hyper‐focus to move as fast as possible and crush our workplace fears.

And why do we do it? Because we can!

Humans are amazing and resilient. When we need to face down danger, we can run on empty. Survival mode triggers an adrenaline rush that can feel incredible because it gives us the extreme focus and the additional energy we crave. It's why our culture embraces coffee so much, as it's a kick of cortisol in a cup. It's important to keep in mind that cortisol isn't bad, as it's a natural hormone and the hormone that gets us moving, motivated, and focused. We need some cortisol in the mornings to have the necessary energy to get going. It also helps control our metabolism and our immune system.

But more is not better. Better is.

As the afternoon rolls around, we actually need less cortisol in order to calm down and prepare for sleep. The thing is, though, that the more we stay in survival mode to get through our day, the higher our cortisol levels stay throughout the day. This then depletes our natural resources and ability to recover. Because the body is a regenerative system, when cortisol is chronically high, inflammation also rises in the body. It's like increased wear and tear with no repair.

Still, cortisol is essential in how we respond to stress and an inter‐connected cause and effect. When we feel stressed about a situation, cortisol rises because it's part of our alert system and helps us navigate danger. However, when cortisol remains high, we feel more anxious, stressed, and overwhelmed. This is because spiked cortisol levels affect not only our reflexes and functions but also our mind and how well we can make decisions under stress. This said, even in our day‐to‐day stress, pressure with work and life, adrenaline rushes, raising cortisol levels, and living on coffee, our stress and anxiety continue to rise to alarming and unhelpful levels.

As an example, do you remember that moment as a kid when you ran so fast that you fell over because your legs couldn't keep up? That's what happens to our mind; it begins to run faster than we do. Our thoughts and nervous system hit overdrive, and our mind gets flooded with cortisol. As a result, instead of feeling like we have things under control, we end up more anxious and stressed.

Long‐term overuse of the body's survival mode system and chronically high cortisol levels can cause weight gain, high blood pressure, loss of libido, inflammatory diseases, and mood swings. On the flip side, ending up with cortisol levels that are too low can cause depression, fatigue, muscle weakness, and metabolic issues that can become life‐threatening.

If we're honest though, fear of future disease doesn't motivate change right now, because when we are under pressure and stress we only focus on getting through the challenge in front of us.

Essentially, that's the nature of stress and the reason why we tend to abandon self‐care even if that's when we need it the most. It's also how we get stuck in the same pattern over and over again because under stress, we want immediate relief and results, which is why we tend to fall prey to excessive food, TV watching, and drinking at night. We let ourselves off the hook, recognize how depleted we are, and we want our mind to stop thinking.

What most people don't realize is that 95 percent of our thoughts and habits are unconscious, while roughly 5 percent we actively engage in. Under stress, we run on that 95 percent, which means we're losing our ability to be curious, creative, and constructive. We fall back on old habits, doing what we've always done, and get stuck on repeat. We can end up in survival mode when we don't drink enough water, eat food, or pause and rest throughout our day. These are our most basic human needs and self‐care we abandon when we get busy and we become reliant on much more expensive and fancy recovery options after a long day or work week.

When we don't drink enough water throughout the day, we end up dehydrated. Even if we're only slightly dehydrated, the lack of water can make us feel foggy, forgetful, fatigued, and confused. We can also become irritable, impatient, snappy with our comments, and angry. A prison study some years ago found that when encouraging inmates to drink more water, aggression went down. Sometimes when the elderly start showing symptoms of confusion, weakness, and agitation, they can be mistaken for the onset of dementia, when in reality, they might lack fluids.

You might think, “Come on…it's just water.”

I get it. But at the same time, most people I talk to don't drink enough water and believe it or not, one of the leading reasons why is because they don't have time to pee! Adding to that, when we get through the day on coffee and other caffeinated drinks, which are diuretic, we become even more dehydrated.

When we operate this way, our bodies will understand this lack of water, food, or sleep as survival stress. Adding to this, our brain is the organ that consumes the most calories, so when we run low on fuel like glucose that we absorb from food, we end up hangry. I don't know about you, but I'm not pleasant to be around when I'm hangry, and I certainly don't enjoy being in meetings with hangry people.

If you're reading this, I'm sure you want to do good work, build a healthy lifestyle, and be successful as opposed to living in a constant state of duress and stress. However, since we cannot avoid stress in our daily demands as its part of life, let's take a different approach.

Stress Is Like a Pothole

Just prior to my marriage in 1990, I bought a Harley‐Davidson motorcycle as a self‐expression and identity statement: “I may be tying the knot, but I am still very much my own woman!” While learning to ride, I was constantly warned about the dangers of potholes because you can easily crash if you hit one. I was told, “If you look at the pothole, you're going to hit it, so you have to look in the direction you want to go.”

This piece of wisdom applies to many aspects of life because that's how our attention works. Instead of focusing on what we want to avoid, we need to focus on what we want to achieve. Or as I like to say, “Our intention fuels our attention!” If you focus on the path you want to take, the motorcycle follows.

In the same respect, when stressed, we tend to focus automatically on what's not working—the potholes in front of us—rather than pausing to be curious about what we need to make it work. Sure, part of the automatic hijacking of our minds helps us to stay safe when in danger, but when focusing on changes and challenges in front of us we need a different mindset so that we can focus on what's possible.

To find the way forward, we need to pause and ask questions that help us solve for what we are working to achieve and get past the pothole by tapping into what we care about, why something matters, what change we want to achieve, and the impact it could have. When doing this, instead of asking ourselves why something is not working, we ask ourselves: “Why does this matter and what do I need so that I can make it work?,” which is far more powerful.

I learned the magic of asking better questions from my dad as a child and then later on when I studied hypnotherapy. My training in mindfulness aligned with this process as well and helped me understand how we can tap into the power of the mind simply by pausing and changing the question.

This seemingly simple tool can create tremendous change and impact. When under stress and as our mind becomes hijacked by fear, society has taught many of us to “just ignore” our fears and be brave. However, it's far more powerful to listen to our fear and ask what we need to feel brave. That's a question our mind knows what to do with, and it can help get us out of the pothole when we land in it.

Coaching people for 18 years, I have consistently seen how stress gets us stuck in the inner dialog of what's wrong. Asking what we need so that we can steer toward a solution is how we build a roadmap for ourselves and the scaffolding that supports a healthy life, enjoyable work, and a care‐driven culture.

Of course, work and life will never stop causing us stress, but we can change how we respond to—and navigate—stress so that it doesn't get us stuck in the pothole, teetering on the edge of burnout.

We Can't Control What Happens, But We Can Control How We Respond

Change is constant in our modern world and something we think we have to be resilient to withstand. However, by Power‐Pausing, we learn to be curious and adaptive. It allows us to change and grow without getting stuck in stress and worry, resisting change, and triggering us into working in survival mode to push through.

We often wrongly believe we have to control our environment to avoid or manage stress. But instead, we can improve our ability to navigate stress by pausing and listening to become aware of our stressors and triggers, so that we can make discerning choices about how we can and want to respond. Learning to work more productively with stress is key to reclaiming our health and happiness.

I know all this might sound like a great promise but to harness change, we must recognize that we can't avoid stress unless we decide to leave our jobs. Of course, if your work environment is toxic, this is maybe the best answer. However, even if we do that, it's important to remember that work isn't the only source of our woes and stress. Life is too. What we can do is change how we respond to what happens and learn to ask better questions to focus on what we need so that we can get through. When we practice this, we better support ourselves in avoiding life's potholes. By focusing on Power‐Pausing when stress is hijacking our mind, we create the necessary space between trigger and reaction, which is essential to getting unstuck and moving forward.

Throughout this book, you'll learn how to tap into your exceptional human advantage and use your mind to work better for you by using the tools of The Self‐Care Mindset^® to harness your innate ability to change and grow.

For now though, I invite you to practice Power‐Pausing to get unstressed.

Think of it as a worry‐free zone for just a moment. Take a couple of deep breaths into your belly, stretch your body, air out your mind from having to focus, and move your nervous system out of hyper‐alert activity every 45–90 minutes for 5, 10, or 15 minutes at a time throughout the day. See if this lowers your stress levels while helping you recover your attention. Additionally, use Power‐Pausing to check in to see if you need water, food, a snack, or whatever will help you stay nourished, recharged, and refueled for what's next on your schedule.