Understand your stress footprint

Understanding your personal stress footprint is a bit like knowing what kind of foods you love and hate. It's integral to the very 'you-ness' of you. And yet few people spend time getting to know themselves, knowing what their stress triggers are, what their strategies could be to prevent them being overwhelmed and understanding how it all fits together, like a jigsaw.

In order to truly understand the real causes of stress, you first need to understand how you function, your operating system, if you like. You can then look at practical strategies to promote good mental health - to live your best life.

“You can't stop the waves, but you can learn to surf”

- Jon Kabat-Zinn, the godfather of modern Mindfulness

Firstly, what's happening in the background?

You've probably heard some of these UK stats:

• 1 in 4 people in the UK will experience a mental health problem each year
• 1 in 6 people report experiencing a common mental health problem (such as anxiety and depression) in any given week
• 595,000 workers suffering from work-related stress, depression or anxiety (new or long-standing) in 2017/18

Stress overload and mental health are inexorably linked - if you feel overwhelmed with stress, it is likely that your mental health will be affected.

GPs are trying to deal with a mental health tidal wave by offering ‘quick fixes’. It is estimated that stress-related conditions now make up the majority of GP caseloads – it’s not because they don't care about their patients, they simply don't have the resources in either time or money to find out what the real causes are behind the symptoms presented.

Things are changing, with media coverage turning towards opening the conversation on mental health which is slowly seeping into the workplace.

But simply talking about mental health is one thing - actually doing something about promoting good mental health is quite another. It's the difference between self-help and having to suffer for help!

“Without stress, there would be no life”

- Hans Seyle, the father of stress

So, what is stress?

Selye's work details how stress causes hormonal responses which can, over time, lead to long term conditions such as ulcers, high blood pressure, arthritis, allergic reactions and kidney disease. But it's not all bad - humans in particular, thrive on stress, it is key to our survival. We need it to get up in the morning, it motivates us to achieve bigger and better things, to win new clients, it pushes us forward. It's only when we take on too much or prolonged stress that it can be detrimental, weakening the immune system, causing symptoms like high blood pressure, fatigue, anxiety and depression, it can cause internal inflammation leading to heart disease, diabetes, not to mention any number of other physical and mental issues developing.

And, in our modern lives we tend to run on automatic pilot mode:

• Running on automatic without much awareness of what you're doing
• Rushing through activities without being really attentive to them
• Having a tendency not to notice physical tension or discomfort until it really grabs your attention
• Preoccupied with the future or the past
• Listening to someone with one ear, whilst thinking about something else at the same time

Your Operating System

The human brain evolved with the sole purpose of getting us through today so we live again tomorrow. It is not interested in your happiness or self-esteem or self-actualisation - it's all about survival. The freeze-flight-fight part of the brain is on constant alert to dangers, in your primitive ancestors' days that would have been wild animals or marauding tribes but in modern life it can be translated as anything that acts as a barrier to getting what you need, things like running late for a meeting, not being able to find a parking space, bad traffic, arguments, financial problems, relationship issues, etc., and it is cumulative.

That primitive part of the brain will step in if it thinks your life is in some kind of an emergency or crisis, releasing the stress hormones of cortisol and adrenaline to get you ready for action (even though action very rarely actually happens), you might notice the physical symptoms of a raised heart rate, sweaty palms, tense muscles, churning stomach.

Your operating system always relies on the primitive opt-out clauses of freeze-flight-fight, either solely or using a combination of all three. We can translate them into:

Freeze - depression

Imagine being your primitive ancestor, looking out on a world full of danger, perhaps there's a predator outside or the weather is bad. You can't go out to hunt so the best thing you can do is to hunker down, withdraw into yourself to conserve your energy and ride out the time until the situation changes - and we've translated this into the modern-day symptoms of depression. Unfortunately our modern world does not readily allow for hunkering down, for duvet days; so we battle through low periods but don't really address them

Flight - anxiety

If you were living in the wilds, you would probably be on red alert at all times, living on your wits and being anxious about every shadow, every noise around you, being ready to flee.

Fight - anger

And anger is merely a primitive way of increasing our strength, making us bigger and stronger so that we can defend ourselves against other tribes or wild animals.

The primitive brain has a negative default. If you did face a wild animal you wouldn't want to spent any time debating whether it looks hungry, whether it might be interested in eating you - you would want to take immediate action, so it is necessarily, negatively biased to preserve your life.

It's also obsessional - if you faced dangers every day, you would be wise to check and re-check your environment constantly. And it's vigilant, if there's a perception of danger around, you'd be wise to stay on red alert - if you feel stress in one part of your life, invariably you'll be stressed in other areas because that primitive brain is looking for trouble...

This part of the brain is not an intellect, it cannot come up with new ideas all by itself. It relies on past patterns of behaviour. If what you did yesterday got you through the day, then you'll be encouraged to do it again, and that's how habits are formed whether they're good ones or bad ones.

Life happens all around us, it's a series of ups and downs with a little bit of freewheeling in the middle. People cope with stress in different ways, and as mentioned before, humans do actually thrive on stress - it just depends on what it is and how much, and on your own individual stress footprint, how you deal with it.

And it’s important to understand that it is often not the actual situations we face that cause much of our stress but how we think about it, it’s the thought patterns we have rather than reality.

Anxiety is created by negatively forecasting big things like getting promotions, landing clients, personal relationships, health, etc, and the small things: will the traffic be okay on my way to work? Will that meeting go well? Will the client like my work? You might think about these things over and over again, endlessly ruminating on the negative outcomes.

All these thoughts activate exactly the same system as if they are real physical threats, so the stress response system goes on standby, it ratchets up the anxiety levels, releases cortisol and adrenaline, gets you ready for action (freeze, flight, fight). In the end the actual event is fine, the traffic is good, the client loves your work, the meeting goes well... but you've 'been through it’ numerous times in your mind with negative outcomes in comparison to the one actual good result.

And unless you've lived a life of total peace and solitude, there will be stuff in the past that you ruminate on, all those 'would haves, could haves, if onlys' we negatively introspect about.

Imagine all those thoughts going into a bucket, eventually it will fill up and overflow - that's when you feel the pinch of stress overwhelm. The more space you have in your 'stress bucket', the more capacity you have, the better able you are to cope.

Emptying the Stress Bucket

There are two ways to deal with that bucket: firstly, stop overfilling it with useless negative thoughts that do nothing except fill your bucket, they don't change reality or help you in any way.

Secondly, you empty your bucket during sleep, or specifically during the REM phase of sleep (rapid eye movement), the dreaming phase when you re-run events and your brain decides whether it needs to keep it 'live' in your bucket or whether it can push it into the long-term memory banks. Effectively, this process removes the emotional attachment making it a narrative memory.

So, it's very important to promote good sleep habits.

Change the chemical balance within...

On a physiological front, changing the hormones that are released has a profound effect on how well you cope in life. By remaining in a stressed-out position, you will be releasing cortisol which keeps those feelings of threat, negative thinking and emotional reactivity at the fore. To counterbalance the release of cortisol you can work on releasing the most important neurotransmitter we have - serotonin. When you have a constant supply of serotonin, you are happier, better able to cope and feel braver, it's your go-to hormone to keep you on an even keel and it acts as a catalyst for mentally healthy behaviour.

Just as you release cortisol when you're stressed in order to get you ready for action, as you might expect serotonin is released when you're relaxed, when you're operating from the intellectual part of the brain rather than the emotional survival part.

You can release serotonin through three simple (but not always easy) activities:

• Positive interaction with others
• Positive activity
• Positive thoughts

By being more aware of your thoughts and feelings you gain control, instead of being controlled.

Ignite your potential

You can find more articles like this at qdooz.com. QDooz is an innovative toolkit for developing the Soft Skills and Qualities needed to thrive in a changing world of work. With content curated from experienced coaches, mentors and subject matter experts, it’s the perfect tool to help you achieve your goals and face anything life throws at you.

Author: Geraldine Joaquim, QDooz