From Stress Management to Stress Awareness
With April being Stress Awareness month, it felt like a good opportunity to focus on why understanding stress is so important and how if we don’t take action, we can really pay the price. If we don’t notice when our body and mind are trying to tell us to slow down, or we ignore when they do, they find a way to make us.
One of the challenges when it comes to noticing when our stress is building to unmanageable levels,especially when it comes to work, is the constant messages we receive from the world around us that we need to do more, push through, make the most of every opportunity and constantly strive to achieve. We are bombarded with messages that we need to find ways to be more efficient and manage our time better and yes, this may apply for some and there are some really useful tips out there, but I am seeing more and more people that are just doing too much and actually are becoming overloaded and burning out. I hear people use the saying “diamonds are made under pressure” to justify the amount of stress they are under and that this is necessary to achieve great things but what if you could still achieve great things without driving yourself to the edge of exhaustion?!
Are you managing your stress?
We all experience stress to varying levels and we all have different skills to manage this. You probably know some stress is good but too much for too long can cause problems. Stress can come from work, home life, relationships, never ending to do lists, a difficult boss, taking on other’s problems and just simply not having enough hours in the day to get everything done. There can be a lot of resources out there focussed on stress management and prioritising self-care but maybe the true problem is we are too good at managing stress, or at least we think we are. As a society we have acclimatised to an increased level of stress, we take on more and more, we push through until we have nothing left. Have you ever had the experience of going on that long-awaited break and only then realising just how much stress and pressure you were under?! This is not a sustainable stress management strategy, but we have probably all done it at one time or another.
We put ourselves through a lot without even realising the full impact it is having on us until we step out of it and when we do finally realise and maybe ask for help, we are likely to be very close to burnout. I think that the emphasis needs to be more on building our skills of self-awareness. If we get better at noticing the build up and take action rather than pushing through we can be more effective at preventing burnout.
How stressed are you really?
So perhaps you’ve got some good stress management skills, but do you know how stressed you really are? Before you start making a list of self-care strategies, which can in themself become a stress if you are not ticking them off, check in with yourself and ask yourself a few key questions:
If a loved one felt how I do right now, what would I say to them?
Has my sleep, appetite, exercise habits changed?
Am I working later, skipping breaks and struggling to focus?
Do I enjoy my job?
Create some space
When we are stressed, the fight-flight response is activated. The stress response is designed for short term physical threat, it gives us energy to help us to escape from danger. In order to survive quick action was needed and this means our higher cognitive skills are shut off – we don’t make great decisions when we are incredibly stressed. This can really trip us up in our modern day world, he feel like we are ‘fire-fighting’ and have no time to think.
What you need is to find ways to slow down and create space. Find ways to take the pressure off, can you take a short break, speak to someone? When we are in this mode everything feels like a priority. Step back, take a breath and think about what you would advise someone else. Stress management might miss the point, we might just be so overloaded that no amount of stress management is going to help, it’s a sign something needs to change. It might be a toxic working environment, a difficult boss, an impossible workload or it might be life outside work has become more stressful. What ever the reason no amount of meditation and time management is going to fix that. Take a few moments and ask yourself:
When do I feel at my best and why?
What small change can I make today to help me get closer to that?
With how I am feeling right now, does that small step feel achievable? If not, make it
smaller.
Written by Steph