April is Stress Awareness Month. I don’t think anyone actually needs awareness about their stress levels. I sure didn’t. What perhaps people need is in some respects an understanding how to manage stress and how to stress better.
I love this quote, especially because this is from 1884. The notion of stress and increasingly fast-paced ever-changing world has been around for a hundred years, if not hundreds of years. From Agricultural to Industrial revolutions, and now in the midst of our technology revolution, change and the resulting stress abounds.
The issue perhaps, isn’t so much then about whether we are more stressed than ever before, but rather coming to terms with our stress and the role it plays in our lives. Stress, and specifically how stressed we are, has for some, become the new status symbol. It is not enough to actually be busy, we love to complain about how busy we are to anyone who will listen. And then there are those who will try to one-up our busy-ness with a response of “Oh you think your busy, well, I…”
I saw this at work all the time. It’s amazing to me how some people feel more important because they are triple or quadrupled booked for meetings at the same time. We almost need to project stress in order to be viewed as working as hard or harder than our peers. I was guilty of this myself, misery loves company, right? So, it was maybe a form of stress release to vent with my colleagues on how busy we were. It isn’t exactly productive and keeps your head in a negative space.
Still others, like to show off how much vacation time they have leftover at the end of the year that they haven’t used. However, as someone who has regularly looked to counter the effects of stress with some R&R, I always took my vacation days. We all need recovery in order to perform better, and vacation is a part of our stress-recovery.
And some will say they actually thrive on stress. Sometimes that pressure can provide motivation, creativity all via a little bit of an adrenaline boost. A friend of mine, a busy mother of two young kids, with a full-time job, (covering workload for an understaffed department) and a side-hustle, said” I used to love nights like this, with the kids in bed, this is when I THRIVE…”
I don’t disagree with her statement. Stress actually can be good. Or more specifically, there is more than one type of stress. Good stress includes both normal stress and growth stress. But, there is also chronic stress and acute excessive stress.
To me, normal stress is things that are manageable. For example, if I am working with colleagues from different time zones we do need to find common times to meet, and therefore someone may be meeting earlier or later to accommodate that. Another example is the 24/7 nature of email. There will always be an email coming into my mailbox. I can set the boundaries around when I will and won’t check email and when I will or won’t respond.
Growth stress is the stress that helps us grow. It is an intentional challenge and deviation from the normal stress. It is, in essence, what moves us out of our comfort zone and that is a good thing. This could be training for a marathon, or changing jobs, or becoming a parent for the first time. This type of stress is what keeps us growing and working on improving ourselves and our lives.
Where stress becomes bad is when it either becomes chronic, or something happens that is so excessively acute stress that it has a life-altering impact. My focus is really on that chronic stress. This stress is unplanned, and unintentional, and is unrelenting. This is what so many of us face day to day.
This is the stress that drains us of us engird and robs us of being our best self. This is the stress that leads us to feeling irritable, frustration and anger. This is the stress that causes inflammation in the body and therefore underlies any number of health conditions and diseases. The American Institute for Stress says 90% of all doctor visits have stress as the underlying cause.
Over time, this stress can also lead to anxiety, depression and other mental health disorders. This stress can also lead to burnout – on the job or in life. As my friend who was talking about once thriving under normal and growth stress said, “I’m just over it now”. She was experiencing chronic stress.
Chronic stress is really just normal stress that has continued without a break, without any time to recover. So, it’s not the stress that is the issue, but as I stated at the beginning, are we doing enough for ourselves to sufficiently recover from stress? To me, his is why self-care is so important and why you see so much about self-care these days.
But the other stress secret is your perception of stress affects your reaction to it! Which again is why it’s so helpful to look at the different types of stress. If you see normal stress as manageable and growth stress as good. Stress will have less of negative impact on your overall health. You can take steps to build in self-care to either combat or prevent chronic stress, to take control of chronic stress and turn it back to normal stress. That’s how you stress better.
Take action towards your own stress recovery:
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