It seems that it is becoming ever harder to feel like yourself, that the past two years have pushed everyday stressors onto an entirely new plane. So many of us find ourselves suffering from exhaustion, feeling tearful or angry, like we just can’t seem to get on top of things.

Emma is an author and a psychologist. For years Emma has specialised in police and military, in those people who live life in the most stressful of environments. Then the pandemic hit and the whole of the world became a stressful environment. And so, I would like to share some of what I know with you, in the hope that it will help.

For example, psychological researchers have studied those who over-winter in the Antarctic, cut off from friends and family, isolated in a hostile environment. And in doing so they found that almost everyone experienced what they termed as psychological hibernation - a sense of cognitive fatigue, difficulty in regulating emotions, a withdrawal from social interactions. What is interesting is that, had these workers been based in an office, they would likely have been diagnosed with burnout.

But what is even more interesting was the conclusions drawn by the researchers - that maybe we are looking at it the wrong way, thinking that these symptoms are a sign of our brain failing to operate. They suggested instead that perhaps when we are in a highly stressful situation, these burnout symptoms are in fact a sign of adaptation, our brain’s way of coping with an ongoing stressor.

In this talk, we will look at what happens to your brain when you find yourself in an ongoing stressful situation, how our perceived failures can sometimes be our brain doing precisely what it is meant to do. We will look at how this can affect your behaviour, and what tools we can take from the cognitive and neuroscientific literature to help.

Dr Emma Kavanagh is a psychologist specialising in how people deal with the aftermath of disasters and is the author of 'How to Be Broken'.

https://emmakavanagh.com/home/

@EmmaLK

If you are looking for a taster about this webinar, have a look at this article!

https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2021/oct/24/invisible-threat-had-pushed-us-to-limits-small-wonder-our-brains-overwrought