CBP S2E6: Stress: Responding vs Reacting, and Ways to Manage It

Stress is a pervasive, unavoidable part of life. For better or worse, it happens, and it’s a good idea for us to get better at managing it. The more resilient we can be in response to negative events, the more we can respond to rather than react to them, the less stress we will let into our lives. Join me as I talk about stress, some causes, how our reactions can actually compound the stress we feel, and some ways to manage stress.

Referenced in this episode:

• Give Yourself the Gift of “I Will Handle It”
• CBP S1E9: Whatever Happens, I Will Handle It
• Stress and Personality | Psych Central: https://psychcentral.com/lib/stress-and-personality/
• Respond vs. React | Mindful Minutes: https://mindfulminutes.com/respond-vs-react-how-to-keep-your-cool-in-times-of-stress/
• 10 Ways To Change the Way You Deal With Stress | Lifehack.org: https://www.lifehack.org/articles/communication/10-ways-change-the-way-you-deal-with-stress.html
• Causes of Stress | WebMD: https://www.webmd.com/balance/guide/causes-of-stress#1

Other Links:

• Contact Us with feedback, a question, or an idea
• View the video for this podcast

Transcript

Hey everybody, it’s Dianne Whitford and this is your weekly Coffee Break podcast. I hope everyone’s year is going great so far. Mine has been… I took the last couple of weeks at the end of December, beginning of January off and this was my first week back to work. And it was, you know, a little stressful and it got me thinking about stress and how we manage stress and things that stress us out and, and why those things stress us out. And I’ve also been thinking a lot about resilience, which is our blog theme right now. And resilience is really about how we process negative events, things that happen. Stress is many times caused by negative events. So how we process those events can either help us manage and alleviate our stress or it can make it worse. If we can build up our resilience, then we’ll feel less stressed because we’ve learned ways to process those feelings and emotions that come out of stressful situations and we can respond in ways that don’t elevate that stress, that instead help us mitigate and avoid it.

Stress comes from so many different situations. All kinds of situations at work, with your family, with your friends, life in general, loss, grief, all those kinds of things. Even day to day stress, like having to wait in a long line or traffic. All kinds of stuff like that can add stress to our lives. Stress can be a motivator so you feel pressured or you feel like you want to excel and that can help lead to good things at work. You know, maybe you get a promotion that you may not have gotten or you are able to succeed in an area that you weren’t doing so well in before. So stress isn’t always negative, but if you have stress over a long period of time, if it keeps building and keeps building, then now you’ve got a negative impact on your health, both physical and mental.

It’s in human nature I think to respond in certain ways to when things are unexpected or surprising or frustrating. And so I don’t think that there’s a way to avoid stress completely. I know that when I search on Pinterest or something like that, I have all kinds of results that say live a stress free life and and all these things and I’m not sure that that’s really possible unless you completely remove yourself from society. And if, if you’re able to live a completely stress free life, then I would love to know your secret because I just, I don’t think that given all the things that are happening in everyone’s lives today, that it’s possible to be completely stress-free. So since we most likely can’t avoid it completely, we need to figure out ways in which we can respond to stress in a way that is constructive rather than in ways that make it worse.

I came across an article that I thought was really interesting and it was in Psych Central and it’s called Stress and Personalities and it talks a lot about how each of our individual personalities can affect how we react to stress. So some people are a little more easygoing, maybe they have a personality that maybe doesn’t get hung up on a lot of things that would, would make another person react more negatively or get more emotional. One thing that I thought was pretty cool, is that the article talked about somebody that can respond to stress by saying, “I can handle this” or “I will handle this” is going to have a lot easier time dealing with the stress than somebody who has a stressful event happen and the first thing they’re thinking is, “this is awful. It’s terrible. I can’t deal with this.” A while back I did a podcast and a blog about responding to a stressful situation or responding to anxiety by saying, “I can handle this” or “I will handle this”.

And that I really think it helps with with anxiety, but, but really anxiety is a result of stress, right? We have an event happen. It causes us stress. We feel anxiety and if we can respond to those situations by reminding ourselves that we can handle it, that gives us a better chance of managing that stress that we’re feeling. And hopefully the effects of that stress in a way that’s more constructive than it is negative. When we say things to ourselves like, “I can’t handle this. This is so terrible. Everything is so awful”. We are being self-defeating. We are undermining our own ability to respond to stressful situations in a way that’s constructive. Some of this is due to reacting to situations as opposed to responding to them. So reaction is like an automatic response, right? Something happens. It’s a trigger. We immediately respond. Many times it’s instinctual, it’s thoughtless.

It’s not a measured, thoughtful response. When you take a minute, breathe, and then figure out how you want to react to that situation or respond to that situation, that becomes a more thoughtful response. So one of the things that I tend to do, and I don’t know about you guys, but I tend to react. I’m a pretty reactive person. I’m very emotional, get passionate about things. And a lot of times that trips me up because a stressful situation or something will happen and I immediately react. And instead of taking a minute and thinking about it and responding in a way that is more thoughtful, I cause a lot of stress for myself because I’m getting emotional. I’m letting myself be ruled by my emotions. When a stressful event occurs, your first reaction is probably one that’s related to kind of fight or flight, right? And so that first reaction is probably not the right one, and an automatic reaction like that is usually not constructive.

So if we can focus, if I can focus on responding instead of reacting, I can improve the way that I’m responding to upsetting situations and I can lower my stress level because I won’t be feeding it by those automatic reactions. So responding to a situation means taking a second, taking a breath, thinking about and assessing how you’re feeling about whatever’s happening right now, deciding on what the appropriate response is, and then taking action. Then saying what you’re trying to say or taking an action in response to that trigger. This is in contrast to reacting, which is like being on autopilot. You’re not thinking, you’re not taking a second, you’re just automatic response. When we respond like that instead of react, we’re mitigating the stress we feel from this situation and all the added stress that comes out when we kind of let ourselves get into that spiral of stress.

It can also be the difference between repairing a relationship, maintaining a relationship or improving a relationship and breaking it or damaging it. Our automatic responses can break or damage relationships, whereas if we take a second, think about what the right response is, we can salvage or repair those relationships. Responding versus reacting can also make the difference between leaving a good emotional wake and a bad emotional wake behind you. There’s a lot more I could probably say on responding versus reacting. There is a really great article I found, I’ll link in the description. It’s on a site called Mindful Minutes and it’s all about response versus reaction. The ways that we react to stress can also add more stress to our lives. In my life, when I get stressed out about something, like for example, say the dishwasher breaks, then I’m stressed out about the fact that the dishwasher breaks and then I start worrying about all the other things that could happen as a result of this bad thing.

So I start to think, what if water starts leaking into the floor? And then, Oh my gosh, what if the landlord is gonna freak out about the water leak? And Oh my gosh, this is going to cost so much money and all these things and I start to get into this spiral of stress. And so I’m reacting to the dishwasher breaking and then I’m worrying about all these other things. And then I’m reacting to those things. And before you know it, I’m just this big ball of stress. And I can’t help but believe that if when something bad like that happens, if I just took a breath and thought, okay, I can deal with this, I can handle this. There could be some additional things that happen, but we’re going to handle it and we’re going to deal with it. That all of that stress and that additional things that I’m kind of laying on myself would go away or at least be a little bit easier to deal with.

So what I’m really trying to do now is respond to situations instead of reacting to them so that I can minimize that stress that I’m feeling in my life. And so I did a lot of research into, you know, what are things that cause us stress. You know, we talked a little bit about that and what are some ways that we can mitigate the stress that we find in our lives. Ways that we can adjust our responses to things so that we are experiencing less stress. And I wanted to share some of that with you today. So I talked a little bit about this already. The first thing is is that in order to respond as opposed to react, we have to take that second. We have to take that time to pause, take a breath and figure out what the right response is. Sometimes that pause may last awhile.

So I don’t know if you guys have experienced this. A lot of times I’ll have an immediate response to something. I’ll, I’ll feel very reactive or very emotional about it. But if I give myself an hour a day, a week before I respond, that initial strong emotional response tones down a little bit and I’m able to respond in a way that is a lot more constructive than if I would have fired off an email or opened my big mouth right at the moment that that thing was triggering me. So maybe practice that. A good thing to practice is taking that breath, taking that day, that week, that hour, whatever it is that you need in order to let your emotions calm down a little bit after having that, that stressful trigger happen.

The next is to moderate what you’re saying to yourself. So we’ve talked a lot about self compassion and and really being kind to yourself and how self-talk is a big deal. And it is. When you tell yourself something like, “I can’t deal with this. This is awful. This is terrible. This is so awful. I can’t deal with this”. Your brain is going to believe you. You are going to believe what you tell yourself. So when you say stuff like that, you’re being completely self-defeating. You’re almost guaranteeing that you can’t deal with it. You’re guaranteeing that you can’t handle it because that is what you’re telling yourself. If instead you say, “this is…really sucks but I’m going to handle it, I’m going to deal with it”, then you’re telling yourself supporting things and you’re making it more likely that you’ll be able to handle the situation. Not stress-free necessarily, but with a lot less stress than if you were adding on all that “This is terrible. This is awful. I can’t do it”. You’re, you’re reinforcing the idea that you CAN do it.

One of the things that causes stress is change. Things happen. They are different than what we expected. They didn’t turn out the way we expected them to. All of this stuff and that causes stress. So if you can change your perspective on change and just remind yourself, even when things aren’t being stressful that everything changes. Everything changes, nothing stays the same forever. Things don’t always come out as planned. And that’s okay that when something doesn’t come out as planned, when, when stuff changes, even though it’s uncomfortable, it was expected, you know that things never gonna stay the same. And so when they don’t turn out the way you expected, it’s a little easier if you knew that was going to happen than if you just struggle with the idea of things never staying the same.

Another thing that we can do to manage stress is to not ignore the cause of it. So I think a lot of times we think, well, if I just did, you know, someone cut me off in traffic and I’m going to ignore that, you know, and I’m just going to not pay attention to it. But then what happens is we get home and now we’re irritated and now we take out that aggression and that irritation on the people around us at home. And so you don’t want to ignore what’s happening. Maybe when someone cuts you off in traffic, you can ignore the fact that they cut you off, but it’s still going to come out later. So we have to understand what it is that’s causing us that stress and address it. Even if he can’t address it in that moment, you have to address it because if you don’t, it’s going to continue to eat at you and it’s going to continue to kind of dig away at you on the inside and so ignoring it does not solve it.

If you have a chronic issue at work, something’s happening all the time at work and it’s continually stressing you out, ignoring it or just trying to soldier through it is not going to solve it. It’s not going to go away on its own. It’s going to continue to happen until you do something different to address it.

Another thing, we talked about this a lot, is asking for help. There’s no shame in acknowledging that you don’t know how to deal with this situation. You’re not dealing with stress effectively, whatever it is, and ask for help. Go talk to your doctor, go talk to a therapist. It doesn’t mean you’re going to have to go get on medication necessarily, but there are ways that therapists and other people can teach you about how to respond to situations in ways that are not going to add to your stress that are going to in fact reduce the amount of stress you feel, and there is no shame in asking for help. We all need a little help at some times. We all need help sometimes and there’s no shame in asking for help when you need it.

And last, practice some self care, you know, maybe you’re having an extra stressful day, try taking some time, doing something that doesn’t require a lot of thought. It doesn’t require a lot of skill. It’s not something you feel competitive about. It’s just something that lets you breathe for a little while. Whether that’s art, doing something creative, taking a bubble bath, getting a pedicure, doing, going for a walk, doing a workout, something that, that you don’t feel anxious about that helps you feel better and do that thing to just kind of release some of the stress that you’re having right now. Exercise is a good one. As long as you’re not, it’s not something that makes you feel stressed out doing it.

If you can go for a walk or something like that, something easy. Those endorphins that come into your body will help release a lot of that stress. When your muscles are working, the stress that builds up in your muscles, the tension that builds up in your muscles will slowly be let out. So exercise is a great way. Art is another thing, especially if it’s something you can kind of do without thinking about it too much. It lets your brain just kind of relax and all of that…a lot of that stress that you’re feeling, will just kind of go away. I mean, not go away like it doesn’t disappear, but it will help that that build up of stress go out. If you’re doing things like that on a regular basis, a way to outlet and to kind of let off some of that stress, then over time you’re going to feel a little bit less stressed because you have that regular outlet.
Don’t forget, it’s really important. If there’s one thing I want you to take away from today, it is don’t forget that you are just as worthy of being taken care of as anybody else that you’re trying to take care of. So take care of yourself. Pay attention when your body’s trying to tell you things like, I’m stressed out, all your muscles are tight, you’ve got constant headaches, all these things are happening. It’s your body trying to tell you something is wrong and you have to take care of it. You have to pay attention and you have to take care of it. You are just as worthy as the next person to being taken care of.

So that is what I have for today. I hope you found this helpful or useful. If you think of anything additional you’d like to give me some additional things to talk about or think about, I would love to hear it. You can send it to me at dianne@coffeegritandinspiration.com. You can also go to the blog at www.coffeegritandinspiration.com/contact. There’s a little contact menu item, lots of different ways you can get in contact, and if you haven’t subscribed to the newsletter yet, I would encourage you to do that. You can do it at www.coffeegritandinspiration.com/subscription. I hope you guys had a wonderful week, I hope you have a wonderful week coming up, and I’ll talk to you soon. Bye now!