Knowing your stressors and how to deal with it
Before I became a coach, I was a teacher working crazy hours, doing the role of administration support, psychologist, teacher, parent to children who lacked role models. As a teacher you work nights, weekends and often sleep with the welfare of children in mind and a mass of creative ideas running around in your head. Teachers were required to report information 3 times in 3 different ways to appease the powers at be, and stress was wildly accepted as part of the job, especially where little to no health and wellbeing practices actually take place. I often wondered why I constantly felt stress until I read How to stress less : simple ways to stop worrying and take control of your future, a book by Benjamin Bonetti.
My journal entries often listed what I was stressed about and my responses to how are you from friends or family often was ‘I am stressed.’ Outside of work I had a desire to get super fit and develop a 6 pack until my personal trainer explained to me that it would require, very few treats, limiting alcohol to 1 or 2 drinks per week, working out for 5 or 6 days per week and counting calories every day. It was just not the life I wanted for myself for the sake of vanity. It just didn’t seem like I would be able to relax or really enjoy what I like in life, so I let it go. Removing the pressure to have a flat stomach ironically led me to having a flat stomach. It was the lack of cortisol that pooled around my abdomen that helped me achieve it. Still, I noticed I used the verb ‘stressed’ too often and I wanted it to change.
I’d often commented on others racing around, worrying about things incessantly or making things harder for themselves and then talking about how stressed they were but I had only achieved awareness about my levels of stress, I hadn’t yet taken it to the next level and identified I was essentially commenting on my own behaviours seen through other people. When the book stated ‘You don’t feel stress you do stress’ a switch flipped in my brain. Not only had I been commenting on other people and their stress, but I had also mimicked what they were doing as if it was some weird sort of badge of honour.
When I started to look through the lens of what actions I take that create stress I started to be able to change my relationship with it. Instead of seeing people who get insanely perfectionist at tasks and judging them for being hard on themselves and causing stress I started to realise that batching 3 months of business tasks while productive wasn’t conducive to the way I wanted to live either. It may have made me organised, but it came at the expensive of my wellbeing. I was already aware that Stressed Jules isn’t the best Jules, yet I was setting myself up for a challenge that was completely unnecessary. I believe people do this regularly then become frustrated with themselves for literally no reason. Stress is a choice.
The beauty of this is that when stress is a choice you are in complete control to be able to change how you experience it. Here are some questions I regularly ask myself now:
• How am I doing stress?
• Why do I want to experience stress? What am I seeking to gain by losing energy spent freaking out about things that don’t need to be freaked out about?
• What active choice/s can I make to change my experience?
• How can I move from stress to relaxed and accepting what is? What story do I need to stop telling myself to succeed?
• Is my choice to experience stress showing respect and love to myself and how?
When you realise that you actively choose stress, your mindset shifts. Instead of hearing people say ‘just be like water off a ducks back’ and being infuriated at how difficult that feels utilise strategies that can eliminate your stress immediately. These strategies may be taking a work, journaling, talking to a friend, boxing, listening to angry music, listening to calm music or putting a limit on the time you choose to experience success. Once you eliminate stress you can get results that you are after because your mind is open to learning, don’t self-combust by choice.
