Taking Stock of Our Stress and Our Resources : the Formula to Health and Wellness

By Rami Nijjar

 Why am I feeling this way?  Why can’t I get things done? Why am I tired, irritable, unavailable to connect?  Why do I keep on getting angry at my partner? Why am I getting into thought loops that play over things that happened in the past, or fret about the unknowns of the future?

 If some of these thoughts and feelings seem familiar it is because they are part of the experience of being human.  When our stress levels rise past a certain point we think, feel, and behave in ways that are hard to understand – even to ourselves. So often, we can be confused by our feelings and behaviour, not knowing why we are doing what we are doing or why we feel so out of control.  This can lead to unhealthy ways of viewing ourselves – telling ourselves that we are bad, disordered, broken. 

 What we often fail to recognize is that on any given day we are living through a range of stressors that impact our functioning. These stressors could be as seemingly harmless as deciding what to eat for breakfast, to moderate stressors such as work deadlines or negotiating household tasks, to fairly heavy stuff like processing a break-up, past trauma or coping with marginalization. We can forget that we are only human, with resources that are at once vast and limited, and that life stress is real and often uncontrollable.  Often, we are coping with more stress than we can handle without realizing it. 

 Think of it this way: stress is cumulative (meaning little things add up over time), insidious (meaning we are often not aware of how much we are coping with at any given moment), and it comes from all different angles (work, family, the state of the world) and before we know it we are overwhelmed and have no idea why.

 To help us better cope with the ups and downs of life it is useful to take a closer look at stress and its effect on us.  Stress can be both objective and subjective.  Meaning that there are some events that are stressful to any human anywhere and other stressors that we, largely unknowingly, create that complicate our lives. 

 Objective Stress:

Hoping to better understand objective stressors, psychiatrists Hoyne and Miller reviewed thousands of patient files to obtain some kind of measure of how much stress we can take before it impacts our health.  They reviewed patient records to see what types of events patients had endured in the years leading up to illness. Using this information, they created a rating system of the impact of different stressors on our bodies and minds.  They found that there are a range of events that contributed to our health and wellbeing in a significant way, that some events impact us more than others (the top stressors being death of a spouse, divorce, detention in jail, separation from marital partner, death of a close family member, personal illness or injury, marriage - and other stressors on the list including sexual difficulties, changing jobs, financial struggles, changes in residence or school, changing a personal habit, etc, etc.), and that the more stressors we experience the more likely we are to be having a hard time physically and mentally. Objective stressors are examples of life conditions that we endure that, often but not always, we have limited control over.

Subjective stress is a bit more complicated.  We create stress for ourselves by being hard on ourselves or blaming ourselves when things go wrong. This usually comes from an honest place – often we learn to be hard on ourselves in order to protect ourselves from uncontrollably stressful environments or to escape the criticism of others (to read more about that check out our other <blog post>). Essentially, as humans we don’t like to feel out of control; feeling out of control is scary and leaves us feeling vulnerable.  Therefore, when life throws us uncontrollable stress (which it so often does) in the form of job loss, interpersonal issues, global pandemics, etc., we seek out ways to gain control by trying to find something or usually someone to blame. We either internalize and start to get really hard on ourselves, or externalize and see the flaws in others, or we enact a mix of the two.  Both of these are ways to avoid feeling vulnerable, and paradoxically, when we avoid feeling vulnerable we increase our subjective stress and increase unhealthy thoughts and behaviours. 

 It is very important to note that some of us will be more susceptible to stressors – not because we are more sensitive, but because our baseline stress levels are naturally higher.  This can be because of chronic stressors, such as marginalization, childhood trauma (or any interpersonal trauma where there was an abuse of power), or social isolation. Thinking of our reactions and behaviours in terms of stress and resources helps us approach one another, and ourselves, with more compassion. You can think of stress and resources as two bars on a graph – our stressors are made up of daily hassles, past and current experiences and hardships, while our resources are the things that make us feel calm, supported, and confident (i.e. self care, healthy relationships). Ideally, our stress column is lower than our resources, giving us enough emotional, mental, and physical bandwidth to be happy and healthy. However, this is not always the case, often we go through periods in which our stress exceeds our resources and we end up becoming the worst versions of ourselves.

The good news is that, although we can’t control the stressors we experience, we can control the amount of self care we engage in (i.e. how we resource ourselves) and the ways in which we interpret and respond to our stress.

 Some ways we can resource ourselves (and this is by no means an exhaustive list) =

-   Social support – being around people who are kind and understanding with us, even through our challenging times

-   Developing a routine – including eating and sleeping at the same time everyday

-   Eat nourishing food and take your vitamins

-   Moving your body – be it gentle stretching or a vigorous walk, movement is a great stress reliever – be careful not to make it a stressful activity by tying it to body surveillance or weight loss goals – movement for the sake of movement is good self care for the body and mind

-   Hugs and kisses, or petting an animal – soothing touch does wonders for the nervous system

-   Self massage –  if there are no animals or people around then giving yourself soothing touch can be a wonderful stress reliever

-   Sing a song

-   Get creative

-   Take a bath or sip some hot tea

- Laugh!

-   Practice self compassion – self compassion can make a world of difference in bringing down our subjective stress. To learn self compassion skills, check out our Mindful Self Compassion workshop

-   Engage in therapy

 Finding your own self care practices is an individual journey.  If you are still struggling, contact us for help with stress reduction.