Is Your Stress Normal or a Warning Sign? Recognising the Path to Burnout

You may be wondering whether you're stressed and at what point stress becomes a problem.

This is the million dollar question.  We could put two people in the same stressful situation and yet one might experience stress whilst the other was perfectly o.k.  So how do we know if we're o.k?

Signs to look out for

Constant worrying, irritability, anger or withdrawal are all signs that we are stressed.  The question is whether it's a bad day or a bad life.  

What is stress?

Put simply, stress is our fear response in action.  It stokes up the body in preparation for fight, flight or freeze.  We can feel angry, ready for action or simply shut down. 

Why are some people more prone?

Our fear response needs to mobilise multiple areas of the body very quickly and this is largely done by releasing hormones.   Whilst the fear response system is in action, the executive part of our brain begins to analyse the circumstances to work out if we really are under threat, so it can calm everything down when there's a false alarm.  The challenges are:

1) it's a quick assessment so if the current situation looks similar to an historic problem, the brain confirms that stress is the correct response;

2) if our past emotional experiences have been met with negative or hostile behaviour, the executive brain will be wired towards negativity, making us more prone to react to perceived threats;

3) The brain's wiring behaves like a muscle so each time we react to perceived stress negatively we're strengthening this neural pathway making us more prone to react this way in the future. 

When is stress a problem?

As the fear response is literally designed to keep us alive, getting stressed is absolutely normal.  It becomes problematic when:

1) Our wiring is oversensitive and hypes up a situation blowing it out of proportion;

2) Something in our environment, is continually triggering our stress response so it never gets a chance to reset;

3) Our mind is in overdrive worrying, visualising problems that also keep the threat response on high alert. 

The body's balance

When we're stressed the body works continually to return us to a normal resting point.  It's energetically expensive as the body is managing the stress response and working to reset itself, simultaneously.  We're designed for short bursts of this action, but prolonged over time, or repeated too often and we find ourselves absolutely worn out. 

Intercepting stress

The nervous system is fundamental to how we manage stress and we can balance this by making the in breath and out breath the same length.  Breathing in to a count of three or four and breathing out to a similar count.   This brings the rest and digest system on line, causing the body to simply calm down and interrupt the patterns of stress.  

April is Stress Awareness month, so I'll be providing more insight on the topic this month.  If you are wanting to address a stress related problem, then Mind21 is a comprehensive 21 day course that tackles stress at a number of levels.  It begins with guidances that helps the body to settle down, whilst the daily practices begin redirecting the brain's neural pathways to interrupt an excessive stress response. The quick and simple guide to stress, takes about an hour to digest and provides practices and tools to settle the nervous system.