From Dragos Banu, M.D.
Jason and I reconnected this year with the intention to revive the SMART program. The impact on ourselves has been so positive, and we wanted to give back and to make ourselves available to our peers and colleagues to provide them with the principles and skills of stress management and resiliency training.
Personally, I was dealing with a very busy professional life and had a lot on my plate personally. My daughter had passed away about a year prior due to a perinatal stroke, and I was dealing with a tremendous amount of grief and sadness. I had submerged myself into work and being busy administratively and with patients felt like an escape. I was surviving, and just getting by. Things could not get worse than they already were.
After the completion of Dr. Sood’s SMART course, which took about six months, we cultivated some of the core principles and started applying it in our lives and teaching it to others. With time, the application of these core principles in our daily personal and professional lives helped us to feel better, be more productive and happier.
The reality is that 80 percent of us feel stressed at work, 60 percent feel discriminated, 40 percent feel lonely and 20 percent feel depressed. Today we are not surprised to see greed, anger, envy, ego, and hatred. Transient sensory pleasures are replacing the emotional joys of deep connections. We are shrinking two key brain areas, the prefrontal cortex and the hippocampus, at the same time growing our stress center, the amygdala. These changes affect important abilities like attention, judgment, decision making, memory, patience, compassion, self-control, values integration and more. These brain changes are making us irrational, unhappy, error-prone, unprofessional, impatient, disengaged, unhealthy and addicted. These changes predispose us to a shift from complex higher order deep thinking to reflexive instinctive animalistic thinking and living, locking us in a state of burnout and high stress.
The SMART program starts with brain micro-workouts that are three minutes long. Each micro-workout offers you a combination of relaxation, uplifting emotions and motivation. The first such moment takes place right when you wake up in the morning, by focusing on gratitude. Another involves mindful presence, by focuses your attention on a novelty in the world or on a person who deserves your attention but is not presently getting it. We also focus on kindness, to self and others, and resilience thinking, which is choosing thoughts that help us become stronger, kinder and happier.
Like a GPS on the dashboard that keeps us from getting lost, lost, a set of guiding principles helps the mind align its journey through the day and quickly recover if it takes an undesired exit. And then the drive, even on unfamiliar roads, becomes relaxed.