Stress can derail coping abilities and contribute to emotional explosions unless you employ tools to cool down.

August 12, 2023

By Heidi Godman, Executive Editor, Harvard Health Letter

Breathe. Count to 10. Take a walk. These strategies have long been advised to help you pause and rethink your reaction when you're seeing red and an inch away from exploding. Under normal circumstances — maybe a little stress at home or at work — those strategies can be useful. But you may find they're less effective in the pressure cooker we've been living in during recent years. What can you do to avoid reaching your boiling point?

For insight, I turned to psychologist Stuart Ablon, founder and director of Think:Kids in the department of psychiatry at Harvard-affiliated Massachusetts General Hospital. Ablon is an expert at defusing explosive behavior among kids and teens with severe developmental delays in problem solving, flexibility, and tolerance to frustration — the skills that keep us from melting down.

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Dr. J. Stuart Ablon and Dr. Seth Bernstein

The workplace is a complex interpersonal environment where conflict inevitably occurs. When handled poorly, conflict undermines relationships, team performance, and morale. It keeps managers and staff alike up at night, dreading the start of a new day at work. When handled well, working though conflict can build trust and create a positive work environment where people work effectively together.

It is essential for the managers to establish an expectation among themselves and with their staff that conflict will be handled in a consistent manner.

Learn how to manage conflict by using the Collaborative Problem Solving approach in the workplace in the article "Collaborative Problem Solving: An Effective Approach For Managing Conflict In The Workplace" on Mediate.com.

Dr. J. Stuart Ablon

You may have heard the phrase “executive functioning skills.” It is becoming more and more common language for parents and educators alike and even in the workplace. So what exactly are executive functioning (EF) skills? They are a family of interrelated skills in areas like managing our emotions, controlling our behavior, focusing and shifting our attention, holding multiple pieces of information in our mind at one time, and thinking flexibly. Specific examples include controlling our impulses, staying calm in the midst of frustration, handling changes, initiating and sticking with an activity or task, shifting from one task to another, filtering out distractions, multi-tasking, and even perspective-taking (Wang et al, 2018).

Neuropsychologists have long recognized that EF skills are critical to reasoning, planning, problem-solving, and managing life’s demands in general. Given how crucial these life skills are, it is not surprising that good EF skills are associated with things like better achievement, health, economic stability, and relationship success in addition to preventing substance use and incarceration, and with general quality of life (Diamond & Ling, 2016).

Let’s discuss the good news first: EF skills can be improved. Like any other skill, EF skills improve with practice, and the research shows the more practice, the better. Also, like many other skills, if you don’t keep practicing, you likely will lose the skills you may have gained. In other words, when it comes to EF skills, it is “use it or lose it.” Research has also shown that it is important to make sure the practice is challenging to keep skills sharp (Diamond & Ling, 2016). The complexity and novelty of training help. And relying on external rewards to motivate someone to practice actually decreases EF performance.

So what’s the bad news? EF skills don’t transfer or generalize that easily from the situations in which they are practiced to other situations. In other words, if you practice EF skills in artificial circumstances, don’t expect them to look better in the real world.

But back to some good news: If you take what we know about how best to build EF skills into account, approaches like Collaborative Problem Solving (CPS) are tailor-made for the job (Ablon, 2019). CPS improves EF by helping people practice EF skills through natural attempts at problem-solving in their own lives (Pollastri et al, 2013). Parents, teachers, mentors, managers, and supervisors can use the three ingredients of the CPS process to tackle any problem that comes up during the day. Baked into the CPS problem-solving process is the opportunity to practice dozens of EF skills. Each situation provides a new opportunity to practice those skills without needing to translate them into the “real world” because they are already being practiced in the real world using real problems.

Like it or not, real life also throws us plenty of opportunities to try our hand at solving complex problems, so the practice never gets old or stops and doesn’t require taking extra time out of the day to practice. We also know dosing is important for any form of skill-building, since skill-building is code for changing the brain, and changing the brain requires repetition without hammering away too much, or neural networks become “refractory” and stop responding (Perry & Ablon, 2019). Using naturally occurring problems as the practice field for building skills supplies new opportunities spaced out throughout the day/week.

Finally, when using CPS, we teach people to resist using motivators to solve problems. On the contrary, we help people see that when someone is struggling to handle a situation well, it is most likely an issue of skill, not will. And incentives don’t teach skills. But problem-solving practice does—especially EF skills.

Previous research has shown that CPS builds neurocognitive or thinking skills, especially EF skills, but we again put this idea to the empirical test in a study with our partner, Youth Villages, led by Dr. Lu Wang and Dr. Alisha Pollastri of our research team.

Learn about the Thinking Skills we all use in our free, online, 1-hour course. The course includes an assessment to help you understand which skills are a strength for you, and which ones may be more difficult.
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We studied whether delivering in-home CPS improved EF skills over time by looking at youth, caregiver, and staff reports and administering objective, tablet-based neuropsychological tests. CPS was associated with building youth’s overall EF skills, specifically flexible thinking, attention, and working memory skills. We also wanted to explore what factors might predict these changes and learned that the more caretakers embraced the philosophy of CPS (remember it’s about skill, not will), the more skill growth happened, resulting in better behavior. These findings provide empirical validation of the theory of change behind the CPS approach: behavior is determined by skill, not will. When we shift our thinking to realize this and focus on practicing problem-solving instead of relying on incentives, EF skills improve, resulting in behavior changes.

References:

Diamond, A., & Ling, D. S. (2016). Conclusions about interventions, programs, and approaches for improving executive functions that appear justified and those that, despite much hype, do not. Developmental Cognitive Neuroscience, 18, 34–48.

Wang L, Pollastri AR, Vuijk PJ, Hill EN, Lee BA, Samkavitz A, Braaten EB, Ablon JS, Doyle, AE. (2018) Reliability and validity of the Thinking Skills Inventory, a screening tool for cross-diagnostic skill deficits underlying youth behavioral challenges. Journal of Psychopathology and Behavioral Assessment, 41:1, 144-159.

Ablon JS. (2019) What Is Collaborative Problem Solving and Why Use the Approach?. In: Pollastri A., Ablon J., Hone M. (eds) Collaborative Problem Solving. Current Clinical Psychiatry. Springer, Cham

Pollastri, AR, Epstein, LD, Heath, GH, & Ablon, JS. The Collaborative Problem Solving approach: Outcomes across settings. Harvard Review of Psychiatry, 2013, 21(4), 188-199.

Perry BD, Ablon JS. (2019) CPS as a Neurodevelopmentally Sensitive and Trauma-Informed Approach. In: Pollastri A., Ablon J., Hone M. (eds) Collaborative Problem Solving. Current Clinical Psychiatry. Springer, Cham

This article originally appeared on PsychologyToday.com.

Dr. J. Stuart Ablon

Everyone has had that person at work whose behavior frustrates you. It might be your colleague, your boss, a report of yours, or even your CEO. Difficult behavior in the workplace strains team dynamics, damages workplace morale and culture, and leads to enormous losses in productivity. If the behavior doesn’t cross the line into something that can be reported to HR, is there anything besides grin and bear it?

Thanks to the latest in neuropsychological research, the answer is yes! But the key is understanding why some colleagues behave in a challenging way in the first place. Contrary to conventional wisdom, they aren’t behaving that way because they are simply not trying hard enough to get along with their team members or because they like the attention their behavior brings them. They aren’t difficult because they want to be. They lack the skill, not the will to behave better. What skills? Skills like flexibility, frustration tolerance, and problem-solving. Some of these employees can be incredibly talented in other ways, contributing unique gifts to their work, but their behavior can also threaten team dynamics so it must be addressed.

Collaborative Problem Solving is an approach that operationalizes these key findings from brain science to address some of the most challenging behavior in some of the most challenging settings. The method has been battle-tested. It works. The lessons learned from helping people in places like correctional facilities and psychiatric facilities apply just about anywhere we struggle to manage someone’s behavior. You can put them to use right away in your workplace.

The approach starts with a simple mindset which helps us maintain some empathy and patience for our colleagues who can be pretty challenging to work alongside at times. Begin by assuming that underneath their difficult behavior your colleague probably has reasonable concerns, but they lack the skills to express and pursue those concerns more reasonably. Next use the following proven problem-solving roadmap that not only reduces challenging behavior and solves problems but will also help your colleague (and maybe even yourself!) build the skills they may struggle with. The roadmap has three simple steps:

1. EMPATHIZE: Bring up the issue in as non-threatening and reassuring a way as possible. Then work hard to understand your colleague’s concern or perspective about any specific problem you are trying to solve. You might need to do some detective work. Ask questions and take guesses to try to gather information from them. Remind yourself that while you may not like their behavior, they probably have reasonable concerns leading them to behave that way. And also remember that empathizing does not mean agreeing or disagreeing. It simply means understanding. If they are suspicious, simply explain what you are trying to do. Only once you understand their point of view, do you proceed to the second step.
2. SHARE YOUR CONCERN: Next, let your colleague know what your concern or perspective is about the specific issue without using blaming language. You can give those some thought before the conversation so you are already prepared when you get to this point. Then, only once you have clarified both sets of concerns, should you move to the third and final step.
3. BRAINSTORM: Invite your colleague to brainstorm possible solutions to the problem, but make sure they are solutions that address both your colleague’s and your concerns. Try giving them the first chance to generate a solution. This will increase investment and buy-in. You can throw your ideas out also. But whoever suggests an idea make sure you collaborate to test out the potential solutions to ensure that they address both parties’ concerns and are actionable. Once you arrive at what seems like a good solution, make a plan to enact it and check back in with each other to see how it panned out. Keep in mind that most plans require a little tweaking before a durable solution is found.

If this process sounds too simple to really work, the data don’t lie. Not only will you arrive at durable solutions to problems with colleagues, but both you and your colleague will have practiced a host of critical skills in the process. Skills like communication, perspective-taking, staying calm in the midst of frustration, empathy, flexibility, creativity, and collaboration.

One of the keys to dealing effectively with challenging behavior is not contributing to it. When someone behaves poorly, it frustrates us and our responses often tend to make matters worse. That’s because dysregulation, as we psychologists call it, is contagious. When we get dysregulated, we don’t have access to the smart part of our brains. We operate from much lower down in the brain, meaning that we often then have two people without access to good, rational problem-solving skills. So how do we stay calm in the midst of challenging behavior? First, remember skill, not will so you don’t take the behavior personally or retaliate. Then, practice the three steps above. The first step will help calm your colleague and ensure that s/he will be more likely to listen to your point of view in the second step. Finally, collaborating to find a mutually satisfactory solution in the third step gives both parties some measure of control which is also calming.

Just be prepared that if you practice this new mindset and three-step process to address issues with a difficult colleague, you may be asked to do it again. After all, the skills to solve problems collaboratively are in high demand in every workplace.

Ablon, JS. Changeable: How Collaborative Problem Solving Changes Lives at Home, at School, and at Work. New York: Penguin Random House; 2018.