International Stress Awareness Week Day Two: Exploring your Stress

International Stress Awareness Week Day 2: Exploring your Stress If you feel that stress might be an issue for you, it’s sometimes helpful to look into it in more detail.

However, it’s also important to be mindful that focusing too much on minor stress symptoms, particularly if you are a worrier, can make things worse.

Sometimes it’s better to just ‘watchfully wait’ as most stress symptoms get better over time naturally, and as we’ve said, stress is unavoidable.

However, it you do want to explore things a little more, here are some thoughts on how to do that.

Knowing what triggers your stress means you can take active steps to manage it. Stress, as a result of a big life event, can be an obvious cause. Stress can also occur as a result of lots of little events that can feel overwhelming, and it can be hard to pick what is causing your stress, or if it’s all of it!

Once you start to feel stressed it can be hard to then manage any additional or unexpected event that comes your way. Learning to identify your stress triggers is really important and can help you then know how to deal with your stress.

Stress triggers can come in from three main areas: Routine stress because of high workloads or responsibilities at home. Those things in daily life that cause stress Disruptive Stress is stress that comes because of life changes. This can be due to a new job, just started school or a big life change.

Traumatic Stress as a result of a significant event such as being in an accident, abuse or loss of a loved one.

Try following your feelings back to their origins to identify what might be causing your stress. For example, you might feel sick to your stomach when you think about a particular task at work.

The Red Cross has an activity to help you identify patterns in your stress by connecting where each stressor is in your body, how you respond to this and by looking at what makes you feel better when you’re stressed. By doing this activity each week for a few weeks, then every other week for a few months. It may help you learn what your stress triggers are. By being able to work out what is making you feel a certain way you can then start to manage your stress by addressing the triggers.

This type of activity is great to have to fall back on as you go through other stressful times.

Sometimes the cause of stress can repeat, like routine stress from work can go through peaks and troughs, or there could be a disruptive time of stress. In these situations, your stress is in the face of something new and it can be hard to identify.

If you think exploring your stress in in more derail might be helpful, you can try completing this worksheet on Stress Exploration. By describing your biggest stressors, and rating them on a scale, you may also help identify what is causing you a lot of stress or only a little. This makes it easier when tackling the causes of your stress. The second page in the Stress Exploration worksheet asks you to describe the things you do or have in your life to counteract stress. Give it a go. Tomorrow we’ll go through how to cope with stress.