In an ideal world, stressors would be concrete and transient – easy to identify and able to be processed to the point of relief. But in the real world, there are a lot of stressors that are nebulous and persistent. It’s hard to relieve your stress when you can’t identify or get rid of the source.
But that doesn’t mean you should ignore it. The stress is still there whether you acknowledge it or not. It is still affecting your hormones, behaviour, emotions, and brain function. It builds up and builds up until you are forced to remove yourself from contact with the stressor via sickness, burnout, addiction, or breakdown. While stress is not always the cause of these states, in my experience, unmanaged stress will inevitably lead to these states or something similar.
I have struggled with burnout for a number of years. During this time I have developed and refined a strategy for monitoring my level of stress and taking daily action to relieve as much of it as I can to prevent it from building up and causing burnout. In this post I’ll talk you through the monitoring component. In Part 2, we’ll work through the managing process.
You may be able to process and resolve some of the areas of emotional stress in your life. I have a different system for this which I talk about in two posts: How to Work Through Areas of Emotional Stress Part 1 and Part 2. The more areas of stress you resolve, the less stress you have to manage on an ongoing basis. And being good at managing your stress will help you stay as happy and content as you can while you’re working on cleaning up as much of your emotional chaos as possible. Both processing and managing stress are important. You can start with either one. The important thing is to put in consistent effort until it becomes automatic.
STRESS ZONES
The first step towards managing your stress is to identify what your different stress states feel like to you. I colour coded my stress states as follows:
Green: good, happy, relaxed, calm, confident, optimal, not stressed at all.
Red: anxious, irritable, angry, chaotic, antsy, hyper, spazzy, fight or flight.
Blue: tired, heavy, sad, numb, scared, avoidant, fatigued, freeze or flight.
These three states (what I think of as neutral – green, high – red, and low – blue) are the easiest to identify. But you don’t want to wait until you are all the way in the red or blue zones to recognize a shift in your stress level. So I include yellow zones – one between green and red, and one between green and blue. I also added a black zone beyond red and blue to indicate that spending too much time in either of those states will lead to burnout or sickness (or whatever your system shutdown mode is).
I laid out my page from top to bottom as follows: black, red, yellow, green, yellow, blue, black.
Now you are going to add as much detail for how those states feel like to you as you can. We are going to use three different indicators: physical, mental, and emotional. For each of these, start with whatever colour is easiest for you to fill in (typically green, red, and blue). Move on to the harder ones (typically the yellow zones). If you’re not sure what to put in the yellow zones, write down a gentler version of what you have in the red or blue zone. For example, if you put angry in red, maybe put frustrated in yellow, or if you put fatigued in blue, put tired in yellow. Don’t worry about filling in black – your system will tell you when you’ve hit that level whether you know what it feels like or not.
Let’s go through each of these indicators separately.
Physical
How does your body feel when you’re in that state?
How much energy do you have? Do you tend to sleep more or less than your average?
Do you have increased muscle tension or heaviness and fatigue? Does your body feel hot, cold, tingly, or numb? Where in your body do you feel these sensations?
Does your appetite change? Do you feel nauseous, queasy, or hungry?
Do you feel dizzy or lightheaded? Do you get headaches, body aches, or other types of pain?
How does your breathing feel? Is it faster or slower, deeper or shallower? Do you breathe more with your chest and shoulders or your belly?
How does your heartrate feel? Is it faster, slower, or erratic?
Mental
What thoughts go through your head when you’re in that state?
What words do you use when describing a situation such as going to work or attending a family gathering when you’re in that state?
What words do you use when describing yourself when you’re in that state?
How is your ability to concentrate? Are you able to shut out external distractions? Are you able to ignore distracting thoughts and emotions?
Are your senses heightened or dulled? Are you hypersensitive to any particular stimuli?
How easy is it to learn something new? Are you able to remember things just as easily as when you are in the green zone?
How would you describe the inside of your mind? Is it chaotic, filled with static, fritzing, dark, foggy, cloudy, bright, open, constricted, porous, etc?
Emotional
What emotions do you feel most often when in this state? To make this nice and easy, refer to an emotions wheel such as this one.
Don’t be afraid to write down conflicting emotions for the same colour. Each state isn’t always triggered in the same way so we can definitely experience a range of emotions.
You may find describing one of the indicators (physical, mental, or emotional) to be significantly easier than the others. We all experience stress differently and pay attention to different stress responses. I still recommend you try to write down something for each indicator in each stress state. Sometimes when we’re calm we can most easily identify one aspect but when we’re actually in this state it’s a different aspect that is most obvious.
MONITORING YOUR STRESS STATE
Once you have a list of physical, mental, and emotional descriptors for the five stress zones, you can start using it to monitor your stress level. You can’t manage something you aren’t aware of. Set an alert on your phone to go off at regular intervals or pick a few times a day to do a quick check in. Try to pick a few times a day when you are in different environments – when you wake up, when you’re at work, when you’re with family, before bed.
You can quickly answer the above physical and mental questions and pick out three emotions on the wheel and then see which state your responses line up with or you can refer to your descriptions of the zones and do a physical, mental, and emotional check in to see where you land. Whichever way gets the most honest and accurate response without taking so much time that you won’t stick with this practice.
The goal is to get familiar with your own stress states and symptoms so that you don’t have to consciously do the check in. You will notice when your muscle tension, energy level, or breathing pattern changes. You will hear a repetitive thought in your head and know that you’ve shifted to a different zone. You’ll realize your reactions to people around you are different, indicating a new emotional state.
I recommend documenting your stress state. If you’re monitoring it, why not track it as well? You can use a pocket calendar with coloured stickers (make sure you differentiate the two yellow zones somehow), an app in your phone, a journal, or even a series of sticky notes if that’s what’s handy.
You can track your stress for a few days, a week, or longer. It’s up to you. This information will show you any consistent patterns in how your stress changes throughout your day and throughout a week. These patterns will be very helpful when we work through the second step in this process: managing stress.
RELATED POSTS
RESOURCES
Processing…
Success! You're on the list.
Whoops! There was an error and we couldn't process your subscription. Please reload the page and try again.
