Let’s Talk about Stress
How well are you managing your stress levels? ?
Following on from our recent discussions about phobias, fears and anxieties not happening ’to you’ – but rather being created by the way in which we respond to events and situations in life – today we are going to talk about stress.
If it helps, imagine stress as what you experience in the moment, and anxiety as the stress you create about something in the future or the past.
Either way they are both created by the way in which you are REACTING TO events, rather than by the events themselves. (Some people love a dog, other people have a phobia of the same dog – it cannot be that the dog is genuinely terrifying, or we’d all feel terrified…).
Being frightened and running away from something GENUINELY THREATENING is a really important reaction to have, however if we are trained to be over-sensitive to perceived threats and we don’t believe we’d cope well in a certain situation, we’re going to react with stress and anxiety because we perceive the threat as genuine. This is why people with phobias react to non-threatening situations as if they were real… they ARE real to the sufferer.
If your general stress level is quite high, it stands to reason that you’re more likely to ‘go into the red’ more quickly than someone who’s general stress level is quite low.
Imagine a ’stress-o-meter’, with a dial numbered 1 to 10. 1 is completely relaxed, 10 is ‘in the red’ and very stressed. Where are you right now? ????
Most people have a level that they can get to and yet still stay relatively calm and in control…. If they can stay below this number, they’ll prevent themselves from getting really stressed or anxious. Whereas if they go above this number, they’ll get stressed very quickly AND begin to lose their perspective.
Remember the last time you had a row with someone? Remember that you said some things that – at the time – seemed absolutely truthful, real and accurate?
Remember the next day when you looked back and thought ‘omg did I really say that!?’
That’s perspective: the more stressed you get (the more your stress level nears ’10’ on the stress-o-meter) the less perspective you have, due to the amount of emotion you are generating. Above a certain level you’ll begin to generate emotion – and hence lose perspective – very quickly. We call this a blip.
Once you are in a blip, it can take quite some time to get out of it…
So recognising your various stressometer levels is REALLY helpful, as you can then do something about them.
Remember: you have two levels you need to know about: your ’normal’ level, and your ’sh**s about to hit the fan’ level.
Between now and Friday you want to work out (on a scale of 1 to 10) what your two levels are. On Friday we’ll show you how to reset your stress, and get your level back down to ’normal’.
If you’d like a copy of our actual stressometer (get the whole family to mark their levels on it and stick it on the fridge) just reply below with ‘yes please’ in the comments section.
See you on Friday for the last post in this series: ‘hitting the reset button’
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This is part of a series building up your mental health every week – so we do advise going back and reading our Thriving at Home series from the beginning.
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