Dr. Aditi Nerurkar shares strategies for stress relief from her new book, The 5 Resets.
Before Aditi Nerurkar, M.D., was a doctor treating stress, she was a stressed-out medical resident working 80 hours a week. Nerurkar was the typical high achiever, used to logging long hours, pushing herself to the brink, and believing she was immune to burnout. Then, during a particularly grueling 30-hour overnight call, she reached her breaking point.
“I suddenly developed heart palpitations,” she tells us. “It felt like wild horses stampeding across my chest.”
Since then, Dr. Nerurkar has spent her career studying the biological underpinnings of stress, how it rewires the brain, and how we can rein it in. Using science-backed strategies, she’s helped hundreds of patients dealing with the same debilitating stress she felt back as a young clinician, and is sharing those techniques in a new book, The 5 Resets.
“These are five small, but mighty shifts that help transform your relationship to stress and burnout and overcome it for good,” Dr. Nerurkar tells us.
We spoke to Dr. Nerurkar about what she’s called the “unprecedented rates” of stress and burnout we’re seeing now, how your relationship with your phone may be fueling it, and the one simple thing you can do daily to chill out.
Katie Couric Media: You write that we’re seeing unprecedented levels of stress and burnout. Why do you think that is?
Dr. Nerurkar: In a room of 30 people, 21 have at least one feature of burnout or stress. It’s no longer the exception, it’s the rule. There are many forces at play here — one is that our brains and bodies are not designed for this sustained level of cyclical trauma. We’ve all lived through this huge global catastrophe, but we’ve had no respite to manage and process that grief. Here in the U.S., we’ve faced a racial reckoning, several climate disasters, and now humanitarian crises — it’s been one thing after another. Your brain and body need time to rest and recover, and when you don’t have that buffer, that continued stress can lead to burnout.
Can you discuss this concept of “toxic resilience” and how it’s grinding us down?
Real resilience refers to our innate biological ability to adapt and grow in the face of life’s challenges — within our boundaries and limitations. But we’ve moved away from this definition, and resilience has come to mean something else: this toxic idea of productivity at all costs. An Energizer bunny mentality. It’s a manifestation of hustle culture and something we’ve all been taught over the past several years, and it’s damaging. There’s also a tendency for people to reject the idea that they may be dealing with burnout, because they’ve internalized this idea that “resilient” people can’t possibly buckle under stress.
What’s happening in our bodies when we’re chronically stressed or burned-out?
Under normal circumstances, we function in something called resilient mode, when we’re led by a part of the brain called the prefrontal cortex. If you put your hand on your forehead, it’s the area right beneath your palm. This area governs memory, planning, organization, strategic thinking — in common speak, it’s what allows us to “adult.” When we’re feeling stressed, our brains are governed by the amygdala, an almond-shaped structure deep in the brain whose sole purpose is survival and self-preservation. Say you’re a caveman or cavewoman and you come across a tiger — this stress response prepares your body for fight or flight, and shuts off after the threat has passed.
But now, it’s like we’re surrounded by so many metaphorical tigers: the pandemic, climate disasters, war, politics — all these things we’re hearing about on our newsfeeds constantly. When we sense all these ongoing threats, it doesn’t allow the amygdala to turn off and so it’s always operating at this low hum in the background. Over time, that’s not sustainable.
One of the things you talk about in the book is our toxic relationships with our phones. How are our devices stressing us out?
When you’re stressed, and you’ve triggered that fight-or-flight response, your brain becomes hypervigilant. Scrolling through your newsfeed is how your brain scans for danger — it’s a way to keep you safe, a primal urge. But ironically, more scrolling makes you more hypervigilant, which then feeds into your unhealthy stress. It’s a vicious cycle.
What do you recommend when it comes to cutting down on screen time?
One simple thing you can do is create a geographical boundary, by keeping your phone off your nightstand and away from your bed when you go to sleep. That’s often a game-changer for people, because most of us are using our phones right up until we go to sleep and first thing in the morning. That often keeps us from going to sleep when we’d like to, and it impacts the quality of our sleep. Our iPads and phones emit blue light, which signals the body to wake up, and when we’re scrolling, it can lead to that amygdala activation we’ve been talking about — it’s like a one-two punch. And because we’re using our phones as an alarm clock, we’re interacting with them right when we wake up.
The other thing you can do is keep it out of arm’s reach during your workday. I normally recommend 10 feet of separation. And you can also create time limits for yourself throughout the day; set a timer for 20 minutes and use that to read and scroll through the headlines. Little things like that can help you rewire your brain to decrease what science tells us is an innate urge to scroll.
In the book, you share 15 techniques to destress. Can you share one thing we can use right now?
One very easy, actionable technique is called “stop, breathe, be.” It’s a three-second exercise that’s typically done before any stressful event — I would do this as a physician back when I was seeing 30 to 40 patients a day. I’d knock on the door of the patient exam room and practice this right before turning the knob.
All you do is stop what you’re doing, pause, and be as motionless as possible. Then take a deep breath in and let it all the way out and ground your feet to the floor. Keep your mind where your feet are and tap into that mind-body connection and you’ll decrease that sense of runaway stress.
Anxiety is a what-if, future-focused emotion. With “stop, breathe, be,” you’re staying in what is. It’s an exercise that you can use repetitively, maybe right before a Zoom call or before running to pick up kids from school. It’s cost-free, time efficient, and it really works.
This interview has been edited and condensed for clarity and length.
