Stress isn't always bad - here's why
In a world that’s in the middle of facing a global pandemic – stress is running at an ultimate high.
But the good news is, there’s no need to stress about stress. Although framed negatively and described as something many of us try to get rid of, stress is incredibly beneficial and vital to functioning optimally as a human being.
For example, when you are exercising, metabolic stress causes adaptations to your muscles and cells which allows us to become stronger, fitter, and healthier. Outside of the gym, stress can make us incredibly efficient in our job or perhaps drive us to want to go above and beyond for the people around us. Stress cues action, often through recognising we care about something. This may be us caring about doing the right thing or about how our work is seen by others. This results in us aiming to complete a task to our best standard and often having a positive impact on the environment around us.
When we acknowledge not only what’s making us stressed, but why that is stressful for us, we are given a chance to reflect and potentially reframe how we are perceiving the stress and can work to prioritise what is deeply important to us and align our actions accordingly.
So rather than being frustrated with it, we need to work to understand our stress and ensure it is something we learn to work with.
Inability to manage our stress and understand it’s drivers is often what causes it to become problematic and cause functional impact. Pushing through stress and not knowing what you are working for or towards often leads to more serious forms of stress and other mental health such as anxiety and depression. Through building awareness, self-compassion and understanding your triggers and management strategie, you can tackle it before you are left overwhelmed and burnt out.
Firstly, you should understand the difference between acute and chronic stress. When there is an acute stress presenting e.g., a stressful day at work, versus a chronic stress occurring e.g., a loved one being sick – you will likely need to implement different strategies to manage these states psychologically and physically.
It’s important to remember, some strategies will work for you and others will not, and this may even change between each situation you experience. The best practice is to give yourself the time to learn about your responses and why it is presenting e.g., “what is it about this task or event that I deeply care about?” Being able to identify why you are stressed and what is the driving cause, will help to identify what is the best way for you to manage it. See these examples below:
Ideas for managing acute stress:
Distraction – Exercise, hanging out with a friend, baking, watch TV, gaming, reading, art and gardening (key focus here is distraction is not the same as avoidance!)
Grounding – Using your body and senses to connect back to self, 5-1 senses exercise, cold shower, hot bath, mindful eating your favourite meal or having a warm meal/drink, yoga, meditation, breathwork
Emotional release – Cry, watch a funny or sad movie, boxing, dance around the house
Self-care – skincare routine, prepare a nice meal, go for a long walk, buy yourself your favourite food or some flowers, go to your favourite place.
Thought challenge – Write down the negative thoughts coming up around the situation then list the reasons this may not be true or an alternative thought. Perhaps write down the negative self-perceptions coming up and write down the times you have not been this person. Imagine a friend explaining your situation to you as if it was their own, how would you respond?
Access higher self – help someone, smile to strangers, do a random act of kindness
How to manage chronic stress:
Seek support – speaking with a professional, a friend or family
Shift amounts of input/output – Take the time to find where the input of stress is coming from and if there is an equal amount of output also. If we are having a period of increased input and demand, doing what we can to balance this and increase the amount of emotional output we can incorporate also throughout the week.
Meet values personally – If you value connection with others, create connection for self. Through grounding, going to your favourite place, journaling. If you value having flexibility, increase your flexibility outside of the stress. Free up your time outside of work as much as possible to do choose what you need to do around work on the day
Increase frequency of acute management skills – increase the stuff mentioned above to provide more pockets of release and avoid an accumulation of stress without any relief.
There are several other strategies that we can implement on an individual level to manage the triggers of stress we all experience. We will be diving into these more specifically in our upcoming workshop as well as providing further support on identifying the triggers and drivers of our stress. Look out for upcoming information and if you are interested in more individual one on one support, contact Emma at emma@scienceoffitness.com.au
