Stress is an inevitable part of life. It’s not inherently bad. We all need a degree of stress to help us grow and positively adapt. Your body is well equipped to cope with short term (acute) stress. The stress response known as the fight or flight system will switch on, giving you the energy and focus to deal with the current situation.
The issues happen when your body is in a constant (chronic) state of stress. Modern life has a way of keeping your body and mind so stimulated and upregulated that you maybe in a constant state of stress without realising it. Overtime this can cause mental and emotional distress and can negatively affect your health and wellbeing.
Stress can take many forms, both physical and psychological.
Below are a few examples:
- Finances
- Moving home
- Death of a loved one
- Divorce or separation
- Difficult relationships with family or colleagues
- Work pressures and deadlines
- Negative attitudes, perceptions and beliefs
- Physical and/or emotional trauma
- Poor nutrition
- Excess alcohol consumption
- Illness and inflammation
- Poor quality sleep
- Too much or too little exercise
Stress audit
What are the stressors/loads in your life?
How are these stressors affecting you?
Can any of these stressors be modified or eliminated?
Do you feel any of them are unmanageable?
What current strategies are you using to cope and how are they working for you?
What are you currently doing to rest and recharge?
Do you feel there are any benefits to your stress? If so, what are they?
Understanding the coffee cup.
A great analogy to understanding stress is to think of your body as a coffee cup. Your body and mind are the cup and all the loads and stressors you must deal with in life are the coffee.
When all the stressors and load exceed what the cup (your body and mind) can cope with, then the coffee overspills. This could look like burn out, becoming very run down, feeling flat and lacking energy, poor sleep, pain or injury, illness or struggling with your mood etc.
When I’m assessing my clients’ stress, at some point I need to ask:
Can you avoid or modify any of your life loads or stressors?
Can you build a bigger cup? This means increasing your ability to cope, manage and be resilient in the presence of stress.
Often, it’s a combination of both. For example, by saying no to tasks that are low priority, my clients can free up time to rest and recover. This might be going to the gym, going for a walk or getting an early night. By having better boundaries and investing in their health and recovery, they reduce the liquid (load) going into the cup and build a bigger cup.
Stress is a feeling of emotional strain and pressure. It’s a response to a perceived threat or challenge that involves - biological, behavioural, cognitive and emotional elements. It’s a natural human response. In the moment your body has fantastic biological processes to cope with stress. It’s in times of persistent stress that is greater than you can cope with, that you need to find ways to support your body and mind so you can manage stress effectively.
Here are 3 areas to look at:
Number One: Your behaviours
Your behaviours can be reactions to stress, or they might be contributing to your stress.
They can turn into a loop of negative reinforcements with one behaviour leading onto another unhelpful behaviour, and the loop continues.
For example, you feel stressed so skip the gym, get a takeaway and stay up late watching Netflix. You have poor sleep, and the next day you feel tired and flat causing you to struggle to cope with the day’s challenges. You then feel more stressed, and the cycle continues.
When it comes to stress responses, your behaviour can fall into two categories, helpful (adaptive) or hurtful (maladaptive) coping mechanisms:
Whether a behaviour is helpful or hurtful depends on the context.
Does the behaviour have a net positive on your health and wellbeing?
Does it align with your goals and values in life?
Will this behaviour help you cope, build resilience or support your ability to positively adapt to difficult, stress-inducing events?
Some of these helpful behaviours maybe harder in the short term but lead to better results long term.
For example, doing some exercise or having an honest chat with a friend may feel difficult in the moment, but they both have positive effects on your health and wellbeing and will support your ability to cope.
These types of behaviours can lead into a loop of positive reinforcements. One behaviour leading onto another helpful behaviour, and the loop continues.
Unhelpful and hurtful (maladaptive) coping mechanisms may provide temporary relief from stress but are unhealthy, unproductive, or may even be harmful in the long run.
This might consist of excessive alcohol, binge eating, avoiding a situation or person, staying up late to watch TV, constant scrolling on social media etc.
Many of these behaviours can feel soothing in the moment and for that reason not necessarily bad, but they’re likely unhelpful if repeated to the extent they have negative consequences on your health and wellbeing.
The good news is that there is a choice. By giving yourself a moment of time (even a few deep breaths) you give yourself an opportunity to choose the best behaviour or response.
“Between stimulus and response there is a space. In that space is our power to choose our response. In that response lies our growth and our freedom.”
Viktor E. Frankl
Being clear on and understanding your values will also help direct you.
Who do you want to be?
How would the ideal version of you respond during this time?
What are the most important areas of your life that you can engage in?
Acting in line with your values can be challenging. You need to be honest with yourself and realign or tweak your behaviour when you go off track or have a slight lapse.
Building habits and behaviours which support stress management and recovery is a proactive way to prevent burn out and help you preform to your highest level.
These behaviours could consist of:
🔴 Talking with a friend, partner or therapist
🔴 Taking time to be still, to rest and relax
🔴 Doing some exercise
🔴 Going for a walk in nature
🔴 Meditation or any form of mindfulness
🔴 Taking part in a fun activity
🔴 Getting more sleep
🔴 Asking for help
By choosing a response you are taking control. You are deciding not to be a slave to your emotions. You are cultivating emotional resilience. This takes practice but it’s probably one of the most worthwhile skills you can ever build.
Number two: Cognition
These are the thoughts you have. They might be the trigger of stress or the result of stress.
When an event happens, you will have a mental assessment (cognitive appraisal) of that situation. This appraisal is based on your own beliefs and perceptions. Many of these thoughts are influenced from your previous experiences. They may have become a conditioned thought process that happens each time you are in a certain situation. If these thoughts are always unhelpful and negative, then this maybe driving your stress.
These unhelpful thoughts maybe beliefs about yourself, others or the world. These beliefs and stories can become a fact in your mind. The world you believe in becomes the world you live in.
While you cannot control your thoughts, you can control what thoughts you pay attention to, and you can decide which thoughts are worth challenging.
“It is the mark of an educated mind to entertain a thought without accepting it.”
Aristotle
This might be looking at a situation from a different and more helpful perspective (reframing), focusing on solutions rather than the problem itself or simply questioning what beliefs are driving your stress.
For example, if I believe that every mistake I make will be judged by others and that they will think less of me, I can question this. What evidence do I have that this belief is true?
The less helpful thoughts may still be present, but over time you can learn to take them less seriously.
Stoic philosophy teaches us, it’s not events that trouble us, but the view we take of those events which troubles us.
A similar way to think, is that stress is a function of beliefs rather than circumstances.
Number Three:Emotions
We all have emotions. No emotion is good or bad. A part of good emotional health is to be able to acknowledge, feel and accept all your emotions. Your thoughts and behaviours can trigger your emotions and vice versa. It’s often our emotions which cause us the most distress. This is why many of us have become skilled at avoiding and suppressing them as much as possible.
You may have formed the unhelpful belief that to express how you’re feeling is a sign of weakness. This may mean that you start to judge yourself for even having the emotion in the first place.
When you’re experiencing stressful situations, you will experience many uncomfortable and difficult emotions.
The skill is to be able to develop helpful reactions to these emotions rather than try to avoid or suppress them.
One key part of this process is having a safe space to express how you’re feeling.
This might be after the event itself, so you have time to think and process. It’s amazing how often we get stuck on the treadmill of life without ever acknowledging the emotional toll and stress certain parts of our life takes on us.
If you don’t process stressful and difficult times, then you carry them with you.
This process of acknowledging and expressing your emotions will help reduce the impact stress takes on your body. We have more and more research that looks at the negative long-term cost to health when emotions are constantly suppressed.
It’s a paradox but by expressing that you feel stressed, it can help relieve stress.
Much like your thoughts and behaviours, you can have unhelpful (maladaptive) coping strategies with your emotions such as, being defensive, procrastination, suppression of your emotions, projection (unconsciously attributing your own feelings onto someone else), blame of yourself or others, helplessness, alcohol, food, denial, avoidance, constant rumination. These may make you feel better in short term, but they don’t have any long-term benefit.
By implementing effective coping strategies you’ll be able to build your resilience and hardiness.
Anything that supports your health and wellbeing will support your ability to cope during stressful times.
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