Let’s talk about stress, baby.
Stress is the psychological perception of pressure and the body's response to it. It is a normal physiological reaction and the type of stress that has a negative impact on us is called distress.
What is the difference between good stress and bad stress?
Stress is almost impossible to avoid entirely and not all stress is bad as it does have its benefit. The stress response (also known as the ‘fight or flight response’) keeps us alert, motivated and we’d be pretty much useless in hospitality (as well as life) without it.
The negative type of stress is called distress. Distress is what we feel when we are overwhelmed, overly afraid, anxious, unhappy or depressed. Eustress (derived from the work euphoria) is a positive form of stress having a beneficial effect on health, motivation, performance, and emotional well-being. Humans are designed for short bursts of stress, not long-term stress. Feeling distressed over long periods of time causes chronic distress.
Common symptoms that you are chronically distressed:
Physical symptoms:
Sleep problems
Constipation/ diarrhea
Weight loss/ gain
Feeling sick/ dizzy
Sweating
Emotional symptoms:
Dread
Lonely
Worry
Uninterested in life
Sadness
Please remember: our response to stress is a normal mind and body reaction to overwhelming pressure in our internal and external world.
If you are feeling distressed, remember that your ability to cope isn’t failing you, your body is actually trying to communicate with you and tell you that you’ve hit capacity - and there’s only so much that you can physically do, think and feel. Identifying the stressors in your life is important in regard to understanding what areas of your life need reassessing and scaling back to a level that is manageable and less stressful.
If you are having difficulty deciphering if your high stress levels are down to you or job or other aspects of your life, then the simple exercise below may help you enable you to visualise your life in segments and better understand the specific areas of your life are impacting you negatively and positively.
If you’d like to create and explore your own stress wheel right now then here’s how…
1. Create your own circle and divide into the primary areas of focus in your life. You may use the example headings as shown on the image or use your own.
2. Rank your stress levels from 0 to 10. (10 being is the most stress you could possibly experience and 0 being not stressed at all).
3. Reflect on the areas of your life where your stress scores high and potentially how these specific areas impact other areas of your life which are labelled on your wheel.
4. It might be useful to also reflect on how reducing the stress in one area of your life may have a natural domino effect and help to reduce the scores in other areas of your life.
5. You might also like to think of one or two things that could help you to reduce your stress levels today and one or two things that could help in the future.
Listen to your inner voice, it’s trying to communicate with you and help you realise that something is off.
When it comes to distress, look at the signs and symptoms of how distress is impacting you and go with your gut instinct, often it’s more than a fleeting feeling. A gut feeling is an instinctive and wise voice of reason. That instinct within may be showing up as thoughts, feeling or physical symptoms (or all three) and saying “I don’t like this” or “this is too much”.
If your intuition is telling you that you need to action more than that and you need a change, then trust your judgement. This may be a process of trial and error until you find what feels a more sustainable way of life but any effort towards reducing stress levels and working on your mental health is one of the most valuable things you can spend some time focusing on.
