The Power of Reset: Arianna Huffington’s secret to de-stress and unite teams
The Power of Reset: Arianna Huffington’s secret to de-stress and unite teams

A science-backed approach to countering cumulative stress — in just 60 seconds.

A science-backed approach to countering cumulative stress — in just 60 seconds.

Arianna Huffington

Everything about the way we live and work has changed over the last year, including the ways in which we experience and overcome stress. With Thrive Global, I strive to help others develop healthy habits that support the mind-body connection. We focus on the whole human, including physical, mental and emotional health, as well as our relationship with technology and ability to build resilience.

Neuroscience shows that we can course-correct from stress in just

60 to 90 seconds⁠

— and we’ve harnessed the power of Thrive Reset to do just that.

What’s a Reset?

One of the most popular features in our Thrive app,

Reset⁠

, is a science-based, multimedia approach to curbing stress. Thrive Reset counters cumulative stress by providing an opportunity to engage, focus, and be more productive. And you can create your own personalized 60-second Resets by selecting images, quotes, and sounds that bring you calm and joy.

Stress is inevitable. But cumulative stress, which can be incredibly damaging for our physical and mental health, is avoidable. Our app comes preloaded with 60-second breathing, stretching and gratitude Resets. Here’s one of my favorites, Barely Dancing, which helps you bring a moment of movement to your day.

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But you can also create your own personalized Reset with images that bring you calm and joy — your children, pets, landscapes — as well as quotes that inspire you and music you love. And a breathing bubble guides you to deeply inhale and exhale while you’re playing your Reset, activating your parasympathetic nervous system and lowering your levels of the stress hormone cortisol.

Here’s mine. Please take a moment to stop reading and watch while following the breathing instructions:

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How do you feel?

This video is a compendium of some of my favorite moments and quotes. When I see my hometown in Greece, pictures of my kids, and quotes that move me, I find myself feeling calm and ready. I highly recommend this method to manage your own stress.

Developing deeper connections: Using Resets as a team

We believe that when we show up as our best selves, we can do great things. We’ve integrated Thrive Reset into Zoom and Microsoft Teams at Accenture, and we're integrating it into Cisco Webex, specifically to deal with the very real scourge of virtual fatigue. And we’ve recently started bringing Resets into our own team cadence. Based on an idea from Stripe called “Spin the Wheel,” we now start meetings by randomly selecting one attendee to play their personal Reset. And I’ve found this has multiple benefits:

The entire team shares a moment of pause.

Since Resets are personal, we develop deeper connections with each other. We learn a bit about each other’s families and inspirations, and see who chooses calm classical music and who chooses their favorite rock song.

Through storytelling, we’re celebrating role models that establish a more sustainable definition of productivity — without romanticizing burnout.

And while the Thrive team prefers to Reset at the start of the meeting, you can use it in the middle of a meeting to stay focused or at the end to help recenter before moving on to the next. Every team deserves 60 seconds of mindfulness, wherever you can spare them.

The Ritual of Reset: A toolkit for your team

By harnessing the Power of Reset and creating a Ritual of Reset, you put a premium on human skills like empathy, resilience, collaboration, team building and creativity — all of which are essential to a great team.

This toolkit is designed for Thrive Global customers. If you are not yet a customer, click to request a copy of this doc from one of our team members:

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Connect with Thrive Global

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Here are four simple steps to get you started:

Have everyone on your team make a personalized Reset. It’s a fun exercise, and we made a toolkit to do it: