Musings | Who Are You Under Stress?
“Know Thyself”
Knowing ourselves - what we need and how we react to situations can be immeasurably helpful, especially when responding and managing stressful situations. Today we explore ways to understand who we become when we are stressed and how we can stay calm in the face of stress.
Who Am I Under Stress?
You may find this test helps identify how stressed you are feeling. It may provide you with a grounding point regarding how you are doing and the stress you may (or may not) be experiencing. It is a validated and quick 10-question test, and your answers will be specific to your life and context.
Another way to determine how you respond to stress and who you become you feel stressed is to take a few moments to think about it. Vix Anderton recommends grabbing pen and paper (or even a note-taking app on a device) and making two lists, one of the things that create stress for you and another of the feelings or behaviors you notice in yourself when you are experiencing or faced with stress. There are no rules to this exercise; just think about situations where you have felt stressed and recall what that looked like and how it felt. Make a note of what you remember about those circumstances - maybe you reached for a sweet snack, maybe your shoulders got tight, perhaps you were short with those around you; once you have identified your stressors and your “tells,” notice which responses are helpful and those that are not. Remember, we all have less-than-helpful or healthy things we do when we feel under pressure. This reflection can help us understand why we feel stressed and realize who we become when we feel stressed. Once those elements are understood, we can decide who we want to be when we are faced with duress and work toward achieving those outcomes, rather than being caught in repeating patterns of our stress response.
How to Stay Calm Under Stress
Daniel Levitin is a neuroscientist who speaks and writes about how neuroscience can be incorporated into everyday life. He explains that our brains release cortisol when we are stressed. Cortisol serves a specific purpose - it fuels our fight or flight response when we need to react quickly to ensure survival. However, too much cortisol in our system day-to-day can be toxic and causes our thinking to be clouded, impeding our ability to be logical and rational (learn more about cortisol here). This happens to all of us, but we can get ahead of it by taking what he calls a pre-mortem approach to stress. We are likely familiar with post-mortem approaches, looking backward at an event to figure out what went wrong and what we learned. A pre-mortem approach involves looking forward and anticipating what could go wrong and creating a rational and logical plan we can follow when our brains are clouded with cortisol. Examples include: hiding a key in a safe place at your house so if you get locked out, you can still get into your home, designating a specific area in your house to put things that are easily lost (keys, glasses, phones, etc.), so you can find them when you need them, or taking a photo of your license, passport and credit card and emailing it to yourself so that photo is safely saved in the cloud or your google drive and is accessible in the event these pieces of ID or tools get lost.
We all experience stress, and we have more of it than we ever could have imagined 24 months ago. Anticipating pinch points can help us prepare strategies to reduce stress when challenging things happen. When we are aware of our triggers and how we respond to stress in our day, we can lean into the things that have proven to help us cope well. For more information, check out the resources and article sources below.