Tag: Triggers

How to Manage Stress and Prevent Burnout Part 2

If you started with Part 1, you’ll already be familiar with my blue-yellow-green-yellow-red stress state system, what each state feels like to you, and have a variety of factors you can use to identify your stress state. If you’ve been tracking your state since last week, you may have already noticed some patterns in how your stress state fluctuates over the course of a day or week.

The next step is to identify what is making your stress state move away from the green zone (triggers) and what you can do to bring it back towards the green zone (relievers). Then we’ll put everything together to build a routine where you manage the stress you accumulate as it happens and keep yourself in the green zone as much as possible.

TRIGGERS

Triggers are anything we find stressful. Anything that changes our stress state in a direction away from the green zone.

Some are obvious – the ones that have already come to mind as you read this. Others you’ll have to discover by observing fluctuations in your stress state and looking for the cause.

Some are predictable and consistent – these are the easier ones to manage. Others are spontaneous or fluctuating in intensity and will take extra time, awareness, or effort to manage.

Types

There are lots of different types of triggers. The things that trigger a stress response in you is completely individual and valid. Here are some examples (but this is by no means an exhaustive list):

  • Personal
    • Health fluctuations, physiological stresses, pain
    • Security (income, house, car, work, finances)
    • Dysphoria
    • Addiction
    • Reminder of past trauma or loss
  • Interpersonal
    • Abuse, threats, violence
    • Discrimination
    • Worry or care for a loved one
    • Expectations
    • Deadlines
    • Tension in a relationship, broken trust
    • Loss
  • Societal
    • Political unrest or discrimination
    • Systemic discrimination
    • Sensationalist news cycle
    • Pandemics/natural disasters

This list is just to get you started and give you some ideas of where to look. Not all of these will be sources of stress for you and there are likely other things that are triggers for you that are not on this list. You can keep adding and removing triggers from this list as things change in your life. For now, let’s take the list you have and fill in some practical details for each one.

Effects

Some triggers have a consistent and specific effect on your stress state. For example, some triggers will always push you towards the red zone while others will always push you towards the blue zone. If you notice any triggers like this in your list, make a note of it.

Most of your triggers will have a more general effect of moving you away from the green zone in either direction. Which direction your stress state moves is not always predictable since we are complex organisms living in a complex societal system. We are not trying to create an equation or predictive model, simply look for patterns.

Intensity

Different triggers will have different magnitude of effect. Some cause a small amount of stress and might move you from green to yellow or yellow to red/blue (one step). Some cause a moderate amount of stress and could move you from green straight to red/blue or from yellow straight to black (two steps). Some may cause so much stress that you would immediately shut down or dissociate i.e. move from green straight to black (three steps).

Consider each trigger on your list and assign it a number value from 1 to 3. You can add a 0.5 value if there are some low level triggers that wouldn’t even move you a whole stress level. Or you can use whatever number system works for you (1-5, 1-10). Try to keep it as simple as possible. We want to be able to easily relate it to the fluctuations in our stress state and, as you’ll see in the next section, use the same system for our stress relievers.

Let’s take a look at those now.

RELIEVERS

Relievers are anything that decreases your stress level or shifts your stress state towards the green zone. These are not things that get rid of the cause of the stress (the trigger or stressor). They are activities that reduce the stress load on our system by helping us process or decrease the effects of the stress.

Types

As with triggers, there are lots of different types of relievers. I have grouped them into categories that I find practical.

  • Positive Interaction
    • A long hug
    • Intimate time with my partner
    • Positive social time with a small group
    • Exercising compassion by doing something nice for someone
  • Moving Your Body
    • Running or other cardiovascular exercise
    • Hiking or fast paced walking
    • Dance
    • Strength training
  • System Regulation
    • Deep breathing
    • Meditation
    • Yoga, stretching, Tai Chi, Qigong
    • Relaxation
    • Reading
  • Creative Expression
    • Creative writing
    • Art
    • Crocheting, sewing, or other fiber crafts
    • Singing or playing music
  • Productive Processing Time
    • Journaling
    • Therapy
    • Letting my mind puzzle through things, find connections, or clean up the mental clutter while doing housework, having a shower, or other mundane task
    • Doing a mundane task while staying focused on the positive effect I am having or the gratitude I have towards that aspect of my life

Some of these will occur over the natural course of your day. Some you will have to find time to engage in.

Effects

Some relievers will have a stronger effect towards relieving stress from specific sources. For example, I find exercise to be particularly helpful for acute triggers like an interpersonal interaction where I experienced discrimination and creative expression to be particularly helpful for chronic low level triggers like dysphoria, systemic discrimination, and typical daily stress.

Some relievers will have a stronger effect when you are in a specific stress state. For example, I find system regulation relievers to be more helpful when I am in the yellow to red zones and positive interactions when I am in the yellow to blue zones.

Some relievers will be effective no matter what stress state you’re in or what the trigger was. For me, this is productive processing time.

If you notice any of these specific effects, make note of them next to the relievers in your list.

Intensity

As with triggers, each reliever will have a stronger or lesser effect. Some will bring you one level closer to green, some will move you two levels closer to green. However, in my experience, triggers tend to be better at moving us away from the green zone than relievers are at restoring us to our green zone. So if you used the 1-3 scoring system for triggers, it’s likely that you’ll be using 0.5 or even 0.25 for some of your relievers. Even though it seems like an activity that relieves so little stress wouldn’t even be worth doing, it is important to have these relievers in your list. You’ll see why in a second.

Energy Cost

This is a really important aspect of relievers to consider. How much energy does it take for you to initiate or complete each relieving activity? You can use a number system again (1-3, 1-5, or 1-10) or a traffic light system (red for hard, yellow for moderate, green for easy), or any other system that makes sense to you.

The important thing is to know which activities you can do with little to no energy reserve, which ones will take a bit more energy, and which ones will take considerable energy. This shows you which ones to engage in when you’re in an extremely burnt out state (black), which ones you can manage in a moderately stressed state (red/blue) or slightly stressed state (yellow), and which ones you’ll only be able to engage in when you’re at your best (green).

For the most part, I have found that the higher the energy cost, the greater the intensity of the effect on my stress level. This means that the low cost relievers have the smallest effects. But sometimes, if that’s all I can manage, that is where I have to start. Don’t forget these effects are cumulative. Four easy stress relieving activities can bring me out of the black zone and back into blue/red. I then have enough energy to engage in slightly higher cost activities that have a stronger effect.

Now that you know all about your triggers and relievers, let’s design a practical strategy for managing your stress level and keeping you in the green zone.

PUTTING IT ALL TOGETHER

So far, you have:

  • Identified your stress states and described them using physical, mental, and emotional cues
  • Identified patterns in how your stress state fluctuates throughout the day or week
  • Identified your triggers, how they affect your stress state, and how intense that effect is
  • Identified your relievers, what types of triggers or stress states they are useful for, how intense the effect is, and how much energy they cost

Now you will learn how to use this information on a daily basis to manage your stress as you accumulate it. The goal is to develop a routine that is sustainable and helps keep you in the green zone. That way, when you encounter unexpected triggers or routine triggers are suddenly more intense, you have a buffer before you end up in the black zone and you have the energy reserve to engage in the most effective relievers.

Here is one example of a daily practice you can follow:

  1. Monitor your stress state (as discussed in Part 1)
  2. Make note of the triggers you encounter – type, effect, intensity
  3. Make note of the relievers you engage in – type, intensity
  4. Determine amount and type of unresolved stress
  5. Engage in appropriate and manageable relieving activities

You will see a pattern of typical triggers you encounter and typical relievers you engage in. If your day to day activities are sustainable and allow you to stay in the green zone, you will find you are engaging in enough relievers to match or outweigh the amount of stress generated by the triggers.

If your day to day activities are slowly leading you towards burnout (or other black zone state), you will find that your typical daily relievers are not sufficient to counteract the stress generated by your triggers. Are there triggers you can do a better job of avoiding or resolve altogether? Are there relievers that would be more effective that can replace the ones you are currently using? Are there relievers you can add to your routine that would be low cost or ones you can do while doing other things?

After a few weeks of assessing your stress state and the balance of triggers and relievers, you will figure out which relievers work easily into your schedule to most effectively balance the majority of the stress from your triggers. But at some point, you will encounter one of those spontaneous triggers, one that was suddenly at a much higher intensity, or a seemingly unending stream of small triggers that add stress faster than you can deal with it. This is when you’ll need to add something to your routine.

Determine which relievers you have the energy to engage in and of those, which would be the most effective based on the type of trigger or the stress state you are in. If you’ve been doing a good job of relieving your daily stress as it happens, you will be starting from a fairly stable place and it will not take nearly as much work to return to your green zone.

You can add extra relieving activities to your schedule a couple times a week to process any extra stress beyond your typical that you accumulate from those unpredictable triggers. If your stress is well managed on those days, these become bonus green-zone-reinforcing activities!

I hope this set of emotional processing and stress management posts has helped you! If you have questions, need clarification, or simply need a sounding board to work through some of these steps, don’t hesitate to reach out. You can send me an email or comment on a post.

If you have a different way to process big emotions or manage ongoing stress, I’d love to hear it! Please send me an email or comment below! My strategies won’t work for everyone. Maybe yours will be the strategy someone is looking for!

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How to Manage Stress and Prevent Burnout Part 1

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.

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