The Cost Of Chronic Dysregulation & Why Resilience Needs A Rebrand

In this episode, we’re exploring why 'resilience' needs a rebrand. 

The old model went out of fashion. It was all about pushing through, staying positive and performing no matter what - especially in the work environment. But in a world of relentless uncertainty and rising pressure, many of us aren’t just tired - we’re chronically dysregulated.

True resilience has had to adapt. It looks different now and our work with organisations confirms the shift. It’s about learning how to regulate your nervous system, protect your attention, create inner steadiness and stay grounded when everything around you feels unstable.

Because when we can’t find peace internally, we often start looking for it in the wrong places - through busyness, distraction, overworking or the habits we use to numb and soothe. This conversation is about resilience 2.0: building the kind of internal strength that helps you think clearly, lead calmly, and stay rooted in what matters most - at work, at home, and within yourself.

Transcript

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The Midlife Mentors: Hello, and welcome to another episode of The Midlife Mentors with me, James. And me, Claire. We're a little bit late doing this, because we're in Ibiza. I'm just getting it out now. I feel like we say that a lot at the moment. Sorry! Yes, we were in Ibiza this week, weren't we? We were, it was lovely. Yes, 3 nights, little break, which was just amazing, just popped over there.

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The Midlife Mentors: And, yeah, just skidded into the weekend, really, haven't we? We have always. It was busy. As soon as we got back, it just felt quite, quite full-on. We've been pretty busy with, with one thing and another, and work stuff.

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The Midlife Mentors: But we have found town… found a time. Found time! Found timelessness. To record this podcast on a very relevant theme, actually. We're calling it on what we're calling Resilience 2.0. So we're going to talk to you about, I guess, the new model of resilience that we need in this new age, because we're going to… we've got some research figures for you about just kind of how overloaded people are feeling.

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The Midlife Mentors: Particularly within a business context. Yeah, and I think this has been born out of conversations we've had with some of our corporate clients that we work with, and then some agencies who work with wellbeing within organisations.

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The Midlife Mentors: And we were having this conversation that actually, resilience was almost like…

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The Midlife Mentors: we had stress management. So, when I first qualified as a stress management consultant, way, way, way back, it was… it was a fancy buzzword. It was like, oh, going into organizations, helping with… help them manage their stress, stress management, and all of that kind of stuff. Then it went into resilience, and that was the new word, and that was all very fancy, and it was the buzzword, and they were like, oh, resilience programs. Then it kind of has gone through a bit of a downturn.

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The Midlife Mentors: And it just wasn't very fashionable to talk about resilience, even though James and I have talked about this for so long.

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The Midlife Mentors: But what we're noticing, and what other people are noticing in that corporate well-being space, is there is now an uptick

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The Midlife Mentors: in wanting to talk about, well, helping their employees become more resilient. But like James said, we're kind of calling this Resilience 2.0, because it's shifted from being quite an external thing, like a real tick boxing.

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The Midlife Mentors: Thing in organizations, where it was very much about be productive, push through, be adaptable, stay positive, manage your stress level so that you can be all these things for this organization.

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The Midlife Mentors: And it's… there's an… there's an awakening, almost, that the new resilience is more of an internal thing, and the more that they can help their employees regulate their central nervous system, protect their attention, create that kind of… help create an inner steadiness within themselves, the better they are going to be, yes, individually, but in the long term for the organization too.

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The Midlife Mentors: There's just been that, like.

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The Midlife Mentors: it doesn't… it is a shift that we've noticed, and so we're going to talk to you today about why we believe that shift has happened, and of course, as we always do, give you some hints and tips about how to do that at the end. Yeah, I mean, I think it's an interesting one. Like, I get to speak to literally dozens of leaders in organizations every month.

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The Midlife Mentors: And they're all telling me a very similar… similar pattern of things. They just feel like… like, massive pressure to make faster decisions, to, react

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The Midlife Mentors: to AI, and a lot of it for them is feeling like, like, long-term goals almost are out the window. They're kind of sidelined in favor of, like, short-term reactions to whatever the latest tech or geopolitical situation.

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The Midlife Mentors: it's throwing up within the organization, and there's a real drive as well to adapt and use AI, but without really understanding

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The Midlife Mentors: what the end goal of its use is. It's almost like putting the cart before the horse, and, you know, we've got some stats we're going to quote later on, but it's leading to, like, tremendous pressure in leadership teams, and a lot of dysregulation. I know it's something you want to talk about, the regulated and dysregulated nervous system, and…

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The Midlife Mentors: Certainly, I think what we see when we're out there talking to people is, like, saying people are dysregulated now, because there's this constant stress and pressure. Yeah, and I suppose what do we mean by dysregulated? We're going to talk about that, probably, in a little bit more detail in a minute, but I think it's… it's less about…

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The Midlife Mentors: stress management, like I said earlier, it's less about tackling stress.

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The Midlife Mentors: And it's not so much… we've always had stress, but it's… it's like…

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The Midlife Mentors: the world has sped up, unless you've noticed, or you've been living under a rock. Things are speeding up, the world is getting crazy, and it feels quite dark out there. And so, a lot of us, because we're trying to react, like James said, very, very quickly, we're having to make

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The Midlife Mentors: Decisions very, very quickly.

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The Midlife Mentors: we're operating not from just a dysregulated nervous system, but a chronically dysregulated nervous system, like, all the time. And so, yes, we're going to talk more about this from, especially the stats around an organisational perspective.

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The Midlife Mentors: But when we're operating from that dysregulated place, we can't see the wood for the trees. We lose our perspective completely. We find it more difficult to parent, to make decisions, to lead people in our organization. We find it really hard to navigate the constant change that we're all expected to live through.

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The Midlife Mentors: Because our body is feeling under permanent threat. It's… it's this constant pressure. So it's no wonder that we're exhausted,

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The Midlife Mentors: No wonder we feel like everything is harder, including work, and no wonder we're reaching for things that we're using to try and numb out

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The Midlife Mentors: or calm down our central nervous system. You know, it could be everything from alcohol, you know, even, like.

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The Midlife Mentors: Scrolling through, doomscrolling, just, like, anything that we think might calm our central nervous system down or distract us from being, kind of, like, on edge all the time.

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The Midlife Mentors: So…

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The Midlife Mentors: Yeah, I think we just kind of wanted to frame it in that way, before going into the stats, really. But this is some of the stuff that we were seeing, but now it's been backed up by some recent research. Yeah, so, like, as I said, we've got a lot of anecdotal evidence from talking to leadership teams and leaders about

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The Midlife Mentors: The kind of pressures that they feel that they're facing.

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The Midlife Mentors: But, there was research by Gartner. So, in 2016, most workplaces had, major changes, two per year.

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The Midlife Mentors: In 2022, and this is obviously some years back, it had already gone up to 10. 10 major workplace changes per year. I suspect that figure is far higher now. But the real kicker here, also from Gartner, 70% of organisational change initiatives fail.

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The Midlife Mentors: I suspect that's higher now. Employee willingness to support changes dropped over 40%.

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The Midlife Mentors: I suspect that's a lot higher now, and only 32% of people successfully achieve healthy change adoption. What's really interesting is, like, this is more recent, over 50% of organizations have redesigned roles because of AI, and again, I suspect that's probably even higher if you survey.

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The Midlife Mentors: But they're not just, redesigning roles, they're redesigning goals as well. And I think there's this relentless pursuit, of course, you know, if you're running a business.

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The Midlife Mentors: the bottom line is important. Where can you find more efficiencies? And AI would seem to offer that, but often.

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The Midlife Mentors: It feels like it's being leveraged in without really looking at

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The Midlife Mentors: where it fits in the overall strategy, it's kind of like, we have to have this shining new tool and make it work for us, rather than looking at, like, well, how do we make it work for us effectively? What are the things it can do? Where can it carry the load? Where should it not carry the load? And we're better with the human-centric workforce.

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The Midlife Mentors: But my point of this is that the change isn't occasional any longer, it is relentless, and this is what I see all the time when I'm speaking to people.

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The Midlife Mentors: humans just aren't built for this level of sustained uncertainty. Yeah.

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The Midlife Mentors: And I'm just… it's really interesting, isn't it? Because we can say, yeah, but it's… we've always had…

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The Midlife Mentors: a fast-paced way of life. We've always had change. That is so true, but it's never been at this scale.

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The Midlife Mentors: Because technology has just changed everything. Whether we want to admit that or not, or whether we want to argue against that or not, it has changed everything. You know, it was only 2007 that we got a smartphone. It was only 20 years ago that we got a smartphone, not even 20 years ago. And look…

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The Midlife Mentors: At what has happened since then.

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The Midlife Mentors: So… and like Jane said, I just… I believe, and the research shows it, and the people we speak to, we are just not supposed to be operating this fast, with this much change, adopting and changing and reacting all the time, like this. And tech…

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The Midlife Mentors: has changed the game completely. It has just shifted us into a gear that our body, mind, and soul can't necessarily cope with. Yeah, and I think an undercurrent of this, particularly for mid-lifers, so, you know, if you're listening to this, you'll be in our audience, is another layer of uncertainty, which is job security, right? Because we're seeing, we already know that companies are hiring far fewer grades

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The Midlife Mentors: graduates, because those entry-level jobs, they can

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The Midlife Mentors: to a large extent, be done at AI, but we're seeing more and more, like, senior level, and it's not just individuals, I've known people, the whole team has just been told, you're no longer required. And again, you know, it's happening so fast. In the old days, if you worked in a company, it'd be like, oh, we're gonna go through a restructuring process.

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The Midlife Mentors: we've got this consultancy firm in to look at how we're gonna do it. They conduct interviews, they do… you know, it would go on for weeks, if not months, and then you get this structured redundancy rollout. Now it's literally like people just going, your whole team is gone, here's your payoff, like, thank you. And that is…

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The Midlife Mentors: 99.9% of the time due to tech adoption. Yeah, and we're not saying this to frighten you, and if you listen to the amazing podcast episode we did with Lindsay, who's just brought a book out, called The Age Rebellion, her whole thing and that whole conversation, go back and listen to it, because it's a great podcast, it was very much about not trying to scare people around, like, job redundancy and AI taking over your role.

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The Midlife Mentors: But to plan.

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The Midlife Mentors: to not bury your head in the sand, because I think…

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The Midlife Mentors: you know, even… even us, I, I don't like… I'm not a massive fan of the,

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The Midlife Mentors: the speed of which tech is going. AI… I'm not a fan. I don't like to look at it. I like to bury my head in the sand. But, unfortunately, it is here, and it is impacting us on a work level, and so, therefore, it's impacting us on a personal level. So it's very much about

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The Midlife Mentors: okay, this is not something to be frightened of, it's about a balance. Not something to be frightened of, not something to get yourself in a panic about, but it's about something to prepare for, and that Age Rebellion conversation was really, really amazing. So, knowing that you have lots of skills, knowing you are an amazing person with gifts and skills and a whole heap of experience behind you that you can employ.

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The Midlife Mentors: Either as a self-employed person, or in some other way. So I just really wanted to say that this is not about

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The Midlife Mentors: yeah, talking about AI and how everyone's losing their jobs, and it's all, like, falling apart. Absolutely not, it's a new… it's a new opportunity. Yeah, it's also providing loads of opportunities. Amazing! And also, kind of forcing us… ourselves to look at our values and what our purpose is, which can only be a good thing, because then we're a light in the world. Yes. It's kind of forcing us to… to do other things. So, so,

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The Midlife Mentors: It's not just that we're mentally tired, I just really want to reiterate this, it's not we're just mentally tired, we're just, like, completely overloaded, and I don't know whether James might want to talk to this, but, you know, we do talk about fight, flight, and freeze quite a lot, and a lot of people are stuck in these places. Yeah, so our nervous system essentially has four modes, right? And the first one is the regulated mode, where we should be most of the time, that's when we're

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The Midlife Mentors: in balance. In flow? Yeah, you know, everything's in flow, it feels good, we're not detecting any major threats, we can afford to, you know, maybe worry about something insignificant.

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The Midlife Mentors: When we're dysregulated, you know, when we have the fight or flight, which are two really well-known ones, but the other one is, like, flop or freeze. So you might know, if you ever, like, get a bunny rabbit that's cornered, sometimes it will just, like, roll over and play dead, or possum, or freeze completely. Bunny! But humans can do that as well, so it could be… that could show up as,

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The Midlife Mentors: You know, just becoming…

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The Midlife Mentors: just feeling overwhelmed, overburdened, and just not being able to process the information, and kind of going into a kind of stasis, almost. So it's probably more common than we think, because we focus so much on fight or flight, because they're very obvious, action-orientated, you know? If you're going to fight something, you're going to be, oh, no, I'm not accepting that, blah, if you're flight, you're like, oh, I'm going to go and do this instead. Freeze is just kind of like, oh.

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The Midlife Mentors: literal rabbit in the headlights, I don't know what to do, and you become highly ineffective. Can I just add there that actually what I see from my own personal perspective, when I had burnout 3 years ago, was that's when you're in freeze. When you're in burnout, that's the moment you're in… Stress is, like, fight, or flight, it's, like, energetic, it's still, like, running around.

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The Midlife Mentors: kind of trying to get things done, and feeling really, really stressed and overwhelmed, but you're still, you know, for a woman, it's kind of, I suppose, operating in that very masculine space. You're, like, running around, doing things, you're really productive. Well, actually, you're not very productive, that's the thing, you think you're being really productive. But then, when you move into that, like, total overwhelm…

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The Midlife Mentors: And your body, your mind, your soul is…

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The Midlife Mentors: he's burnt out, that's the freeze. Like, that's the rabbit caught in the headlights, like, I don't know, actually, I can't move. Now, we've covered stress a lot on previous podcasts, I've gone into the whole thing. I mean, I think the key takeaway is that this stress response is designed for a fleeting moment to help you evade whatever the threat is.

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The Midlife Mentors: And it's very effective for that.

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The Midlife Mentors: what it's not designed for is this constant harm of stress, you know, the news, email alerts, pressure to adopt AI, economic uncertainty, political division, geopolitical situation, all these things are just constantly aren't keeping us in a dysregulated state. So, we're not in the regulated, then we get a moment where we're dysregulated and we come back to regulated, it's just…

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The Midlife Mentors: dysregulation, dysregulation, dysregulation. Yeah,

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The Midlife Mentors: And, you know, here's the thing, I'll just give you some examples that you might really resonate with. So, we're all dysregulated, guys. I'm just gonna say that right now.

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The Midlife Mentors: unless you are a monk, we're all gonna be… if we're living in the world right now, we're all gonna be dysregulated to some degree.

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The Midlife Mentors: And, you know, this might show up at work, where you're making those poor decisions, you're not as creative, you're a reactive leader, and you…

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The Midlife Mentors: might not be able to stop yourself escalating conflict, you know, like, when conflict comes, because you're being reactive, it escalates. You might be emotionally volatile, unable to prioritize, it's all just too much. You get that tunnel vision, reduced empathy, and a kind of a resistance to change, which is actually what we're seeing in the stats as well. I would say that that's because there's so much

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The Midlife Mentors: change, it's so frightening for people, even if they don't consciously know it, that they're in that kind of freeze zone, and they're so resistant to change that they're just frozen in the spot.

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The Midlife Mentors: Yeah. Oh, it's hardly surprising, you know, what I'm hearing is it's kind of like, yeah, here's another change initiative we're gonna roll out. It's like, we haven't even finished the last one, it's literally not even finishing one, and then the next one's coming, you know, having to deal with multiple change.

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The Midlife Mentors: initiatives all at the same time, or overlapping heavily. And also dealing with other dysregulated people. Yeah. If you're a leader, you've got a big team, you're leading… you're dysregulated, everyone else is dysregulated, it's a lot. It really is a lot. Yeah, that can, of course, then it's gonna show up in your personal life as well, right? We… we… when we're stressed, we get more tired, we get more fatigued, our patients get low, we're snapped at loved ones, we disconnect, we haven't got the energy for going out and doing the fun stuff that

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The Midlife Mentors: does energize us.

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The Midlife Mentors: So, it's easy then to lose perspective, you know, stress over time will rewire us to actually be more anxious, we become more negative-focused.

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The Midlife Mentors: We get that anxiety, numbness, hopelessness. You can't access wisdom from survival mode. This is something that Claire and I were actually talking about it on our way back from the gym. When you're in these high-stress situations, the way our…

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The Midlife Mentors: physiology and psychology works is, it's just trying to get you out of that situation with a very narrow focus, you know.

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The Midlife Mentors: If you're attacked by a tiger, you want one thing that's going to work right, not, like, a thousand different methods you could use, then you've got to, like, decide which one to do, which is great for that physical threat. But when we're overloaded like this, we become blinkered

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The Midlife Mentors: to what some of the other options could be, and sometimes the outside perspective, this will get a lot, saying, well, have you considered this? And people are like, oh, wow, that makes… that's so obvious, why didn't I think of it? Well, when you're in a stressed state.

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The Midlife Mentors: you don't even see the obvious. And I think, just talking to coping mechanisms and coping behaviour, like, when… when our central nervous system is this, like, this high alert, and it's so dysregulated, we, of course, we all seek relief. Again, this is all of us. I still do this, James still does this, we'll seek that relief, and it's not necessarily, like, dramatic addictions. It's not… what we're trying to do there is we're trying to get that dopamine here.

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The Midlife Mentors: We're trying to feel better any way that we can. You might go on vintage and buy yet another sports bra for yourself.

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The Midlife Mentors: Vintage! Vintage is my… is my coping mechanism when I'm stressed. It's true, guys, it's true! And James's. Another pair of jeans. I'm weaning myself off. Yeah, another pair of jeans. Touche. So,

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The Midlife Mentors: Yeah, it's little micro-addictions, as we say, like micro-relief behaviour, like scrolling, it could be constant busyness, it could be online shopping, it could be… it could be the bigger things that cause more trouble in our life, like alcohol, kind of overeating, a sugar addiction, you know, watching TV too much.

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The Midlife Mentors: Also, it can be things like…

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The Midlife Mentors: perfectionism, because we want that kind of external validation, we want relief from other people saying, well done, you did a great job. Yeah. Yeah, people pleasing, perfectionism, or being obsessed with being productive, because you think that that's going to bring relief. If you can just do that la- that little bit more.

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The Midlife Mentors: you're gonna feel better. Well, that never works, does it, people? Because your list keeps getting longer. You are addicted

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The Midlife Mentors: to the productivity, so you're always going to fill a vacuum. When there's a void, the vacuum will be filled, if you don't know how to cope with this in a…

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The Midlife Mentors: way that's going to help regulate your central nervous system.

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The Midlife Mentors: So yeah, we do these things to numb, to feel that sense of temporary control, to escape, like, the internal discomfort that we might be feeling.

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The Midlife Mentors: And I just want you… I want to say this so strongly, this is not because you are weak, because there's something wrong with you, because other people are doing it better. It's not at all. This is how we are built.

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The Midlife Mentors: Like, it's actually how our brain is built, and it's because we are living in such a time as this, and it's crazy out there, so we're all feeling slightly or massively dysregulated. Yeah, I want you to have some compassion, because it's easy to fall into, you know, what I'm going to call the hopelessly numb loop, right? It's… you're dealing with all this stuff at work, so by the time you get home, you're just exhausted, so it's like.

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The Midlife Mentors: I just want to switch my brain off, I'll put the TV on, eat whatever's, like, easy to put in front of myself.

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The Midlife Mentors: conversation goes out the window, and you think, like, I need to make a change, but right now, I haven't got the energy, I'm exhausted. You get up the next day, and it's rinse and repeat, so I get it, I get it, but, you know, everything suffers. You're suffering internally, your relationships are suffering. So it's about…

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The Midlife Mentors: learning to create this space for yourself, be able to find that way to push the pause button, to give you the space to consider what some of your other options are, and that's what we're going to talk to you about. Yeah, because it's just, you know, I think we are desperately seeking, peace.

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The Midlife Mentors: And calmness in… in some of the wrong places that we've been told by society that we will find them, you know, in productivity, in achievement, in status.

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The Midlife Mentors: distractions, performance, but here's the truth, that one of the things that I have learned, that I have talked about on this podcast such a lot, I still… the emotion just bubbled up in me, right? Because I was this person. I genuinely thought peace could be found.

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The Midlife Mentors: With more achieving, more… even though I wasn't aware of it, I suppose that external validation, just drive at discipline. You know, if I can just do more, and break through, and be mentally tough.

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The Midlife Mentors: you know, all these things that I was trying to cultivate around myself, I was like, that's where I'm gonna find peace and a regulated central nervous system, and it's not where it's found. It's actually found…

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The Midlife Mentors: In the ability to have an inner-rootedness, in an ability to find stillness in the noise, to pause.

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The Midlife Mentors: Before reacting to things, to really remember what matters in your life, what brings meaning, what values you have.

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The Midlife Mentors: And you know, for me, as most of you will know, and for James as well, but I'm just speaking about me here, my faith was part of that grounding.

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The Midlife Mentors: And, you know, I'm never saying that in a preachy way, it was just my experience was surrendering

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The Midlife Mentors: a lot of that was… had… came through that… that… that faith element when I was really broken,

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The Midlife Mentors: So, yeah, that's… I do really strongly believe that we're looking… society tells us as well that we're looking for it all in the wrong places, and we've just not… we're not taught this stuff. We don't… we don't know how to find it in such an external world. Noisy, noisy external world. Yeah. The other thing is, like, this is one of the cases where our psychology works against us, because we're actually set up to run on autopilot. So here, you know, the event occurs…

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The Midlife Mentors: And we just react to it, often without thinking, and someone will say, oh, I need this thing done, and straight away you're like, right, how am I going to do that thing? And your mind's already off going. So, if we can get that pause, an acronym I use is actually LEAD, so it's LOOK,

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The Midlife Mentors: Like, okay, what is actually going on here? Examine it, be curious, like, what's underlying this? What emotions am I feeling from it?

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The Midlife Mentors: then, you know, align. Is this aligned with my… with my values? Decide, consciously decide what action you're gonna take. And then the last D is debrief. It's the feedback loop. Okay, how did that go? How did that feel for me? What can I learn for next time? And it's just about creating that moment, of course. We're not just like.

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The Midlife Mentors: Yeah, someone says, can you do this for me? And you're like, right, straight away, this is how I'm going to do it. It's like, oh, that thing. How do I want to approach this? How does that align with what I want to achieve from it?

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The Midlife Mentors: what are the actions I might take? What are my options here? And then, afterwards, looking at, like, how well did that go? Did that align or not? What could I do differently or better next time? And that can just really help. So, we're gonna go through some 8…

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The Midlife Mentors: steps that are hopefully practical for you, for starting to… even, hopefully, this podcast just brings awareness, right? Because awareness is power. When you don't have the knowledge of what's really going on, when you're just…

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The Midlife Mentors: even taking the time to listen to this podcast is a sense of, okay, I'm taking a breath, I'm listening to this podcast, like, what… what is going on for me? It's probably not even a question you're asking yourself. You're so used to being dysregulated, you probably don't even have awareness because it's become so normalised. So, like, this podcast is hopefully making you think, hmm, I've got a bit more awareness, that the things that Claire and James said here

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The Midlife Mentors: I'm like, yep, yep, yep, that's me.

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The Midlife Mentors: Just like the rest of us, right? So, how do we start, practically.

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The Midlife Mentors: regulating our central nervous system again. Well, one of the things we do need to do is recognise those stress signals early, and they are different for everyone, okay? These are uniquely yours. So it's worth taking the time to think about what are the things in my life

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The Midlife Mentors: That over… you know, that frequently, On a day-to-day basis.

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The Midlife Mentors: stress me out. Like, is it this person? Is it that person? Blah, blah, blah. And actually, we're gonna help you, and actually thinking, can I reduce some of that stress? Am I able to take myself away from that person, away from that situation a little bit? Can I put some boundaries down, here? So, the first thing is recognising stress signals early and starting to do something about that.

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The Midlife Mentors: Yeah, the other one is, you know, breathe intentionally. So when we're stressed, we start to breathe more shallowly from the chest, so… I'd say, first, just be aware of your breathing, but there are different, you know, find a breathwork meditation, just doing that at points in the day. If you're particularly stressed in the moment, there's a technique called box breathing, which is… which we've covered before, which is highly effective.

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The Midlife Mentors: is, again, like, breathing in a controlled manner is shown to, like, calm your central nervous system, so it's very… Well, it'll make you think more clearly, because when you're breathing shallowly, you're not getting any oxygen to the brain. Well, you are. But, like, you're reducing the oxygen to the brain, so you're not able to think clearly, are you?

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The Midlife Mentors: And that goes in hand with, like, great recovery moments. So this is the other thing people fail to do. We just lurch from one task on our to-do list to the next. Okay, where are you celebrating the small wins? Where are you taking time out? Where are you making sure that you are doing the things you enjoy that energize you, as well as the stuff you've just got to get done?

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The Midlife Mentors: Yeah, and protect your attention and reduce digital overload, so I've actually grouped these together.

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The Midlife Mentors: everything wants your attention. It's how… how the money is made in the world. Everyone wants your attention, everyone wants you to think that you're not good enough, because, if you feel like that, then you'll constantly be striving to get something else to feel good enough, and to feel worthy enough, and to validate yourself. So, this is… this is capitalist society, right? It's like, buy this, buy that, have these material possessions, and then you'll be happy.

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The Midlife Mentors: So protect your attention from that constant noise, and

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The Midlife Mentors: That really does come in when we've talked about tech. It is everywhere, and it's infiltrating your central nervous system on a moment-by-moment, second-by-second basis. So just be aware of that, and ask yourself where you can find those pockets of time where you are digital-free.

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The Midlife Mentors: Where you… you are away from all those other things. Get out in nature, where you're away from all those things that are trying to grab your attention.

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The Midlife Mentors: Work to strengthen your emotional agility. So, this is about learning to, like, regulate your emotions. So…

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The Midlife Mentors: it's very easy to get caught up in things and let your emotions thing. Emotions are unreliable, right? We're allowed to step back, view them a bit dispassionately, and go, do I want to experience that emotion or not? Or do I want to connect this emotion with this thing? Someone might ask you to do a bit of work, you might get angry and resentful. Actually.

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The Midlife Mentors: you know, is that anger and resentment helping you? This isn't about not having boundaries, but it's like going, well, you know, maybe I could just process this much more quickly and get the work done if I didn't allow those emotions to come in. Maybe I'd be clearer in going, you know what, actually, I don't have the capacity to take that on. So just learn to have emotional agility. It's not about not having emotions, it's about recognizing it.

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The Midlife Mentors: then just going, well, is that helping me or hindering me at the moment? How do I want to choose to go with it? Yeah, because emotions don't equate to reality and truth. They're your… that's what you're experiencing, and your emotions are being triggered by what you're experiencing, but it doesn't necessarily mean that what that means for you is true. So just start, like James said, being a bit more aware of

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The Midlife Mentors: that. Is it true?

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The Midlife Mentors: Is what I… what I… this experience that I'm having from this emotion, is it making me believe this, and is that true?

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The Midlife Mentors: The other thing is reconnect to your purpose and values. We talk about this all the time. When a person knows that they're in alignment with their values, they are way more regulated. When a person is living their purpose.

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The Midlife Mentors: And they are feeling fulfilled. Not all the time, because, you know, shit happens and life gets a stack, but when you know that your life has meaning, purpose, and you are living by your values, I promise you, you will have more peace, more contentment. You will feel more regulated and grounded.

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The Midlife Mentors: Cultivate practices of stillness, or of prayer, of meditation, of reflection. Again, this is proven to help. You know, there's lots of research from schools, positive psychology, a daily gratitude practice will really help. Daily prayer, daily meditation. Just weave it into your day. A lot of times you tell yourself you don't have time for it.

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The Midlife Mentors: make time. And the best time to do it, incidentally, is the first time in the day before your head becomes clouded by everything else coming on, all that external noise. While you're still centered and internally focused, do it then. And you feel like you're doing nothing, by the way. Yes. You often feel like you're doing nothing, because we're production machines these days. We're like, I'm missing out on those 10 minutes of being productive. Again.

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The Midlife Mentors: This research shows that when you have that moment of stillness, you are more creative, more productive, you are better at problem solving, once you've had those moments of stillness. You have… and this is practice, you will notice this, I notice this so much now, that when I have those moments where I allow myself to be still, give myself permission to be still, I am more creative.

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The Midlife Mentors: more alive, more open to possibility in my life. I make better decisions, for sure. And the last one is.

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The Midlife Mentors: Build capacity, not just endurance. So, you are not just a machine. You want to build capacity and resilience to deal with life in all areas. It's not just about… remember, you're not… you're running a marathon here.

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The Midlife Mentors: It's not a sprint, it's a marathon. So learning how to plod along, rather than sprint, is really, really important. Yeah, I mean… Plodding? Yeah. Let's bring back plodding. It's about… less about your time management, more about your energy management, which I talk about all the time.

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The Midlife Mentors: So…

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The Midlife Mentors: Going back to organizations, we're seeing this a lot. If you work in an organization, this is probably resonating with you. Even if you don't, this is probably resonating with you, right? Organizations that are going to thrive aren't simply going to have better strategies, or more AI, and faster systems, they're going to have people

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The Midlife Mentors: that can stay steady amid the uncertainty that is becoming a normal part of work life, right? Amen to that! People who can think clearly under pressure, who can adapt without panicking, who lead calmly, who influence others positively.

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The Midlife Mentors: who reduce emotional contagion. You know, no one wants running around the office like a headless chicken panicking, that just, like, makes everyone panic.

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The Midlife Mentors: bring perspective, stabilize teams, and, I guess, steady the ship, right? You know, in a storm.

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The Midlife Mentors: When the masts are breaking and the timbers are creaking, you want a captain that's staying calm, and that you know is in control, that can weather that storm and bring you out safe to the other side. These people are worth their weight in gold, and this is a lot of work we're doing.

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The Midlife Mentors: doing now with organisations, with their leaders. And it is really beautiful work, and I am so… like, both of us are so excited with having these conversations, because we've always… I've always loved this work, like, stress management, resilience, I've always… so, so important. The world would be such a easier place to live in if we were all a bit more regulated in our central nervous systems, right? So, it's beautiful to see

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The Midlife Mentors: that this has come onto organisations' radars again. So, woohoo, that makes us really super happy. And, you know, just a closing thought is… to leave you with, is…

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The Midlife Mentors: you know, we are told to endure at all costs. We have been told to endure.

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The Midlife Mentors: at all costs, but there is a revolution happening, and a rebranding of all of this, because endurance alone is no longer enough in the world that we live in, in the tech, AI-driven, crazy world we live in.

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The Midlife Mentors: And so the future, we believe, belongs to those who can stay internally anchored in a very unstable world at the moment. And that, my friends, our friends, is what we're calling Resilience 2.0, the new reinvented version. So, listen, I hope you enjoyed that,

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The Midlife Mentors: yeah, it's really important to share this stuff. We'd love to hear…

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The Midlife Mentors: your thoughts and your feedback, and if you've got any stuff that's really coming up for you right now, and think, Claire and James, it would be amazing if you covered that. Why haven't you covered that? Why haven't you covered that? Send us a little cross-email and say, why haven't you not covered this topic? Let us know at team at themidlifementors.com, and we will either talk about it ourselves, and if we don't know about it, we'll get an expert in.

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The Midlife Mentors: We love experts, we love getting people in. And we've got some great ones coming up as well. Yeah, we have. We have. So, we're sending you lots and lots of love, and have a beautiful week. Bye! Bye!