Yes, I’m Aware of My Stress…Now What?

It’s National Stress Awareness Month! But let’s be real, who’s not already keenly aware of stress? Like, hello, we hear stress talked about (and danced about, looking at you TikTok!) and supposed solutions for it all over social media and the news, it seems. We scroll through videos of people telling us to take bubble baths and take deep breaths, and maybe we roll our eyes and think “Yeah sure, if only it was that easy.” 

Stress is more complex than just recognizing we’re overwhelmed and jumping into a warm bath to feel better. Maybe you feel like you’ve heard all there is to hear about stress and coping with it. Even still, let’s take just a little bit of time to talk about it and see if there’s anything you might be overlooking as potentially stress-related and maybe give you some coping skills you haven’t tried yet!

Especially as adults, opportunities for stress to creep in seem… quite abundant, to say the least, especially with everything happening in the world these past few years. From life transitions such as graduating college and beginning a career to deciding where to live and making major relationship decisions, people’s experiences in adulthood can sometimes be marked by instability and uncertainty. If that brings up some anxiety for you just reading that sentence, you’re not alone!

Or, if you’re in a less-stressful or more stable season, first of all, YAY, and second of all this blog post can still apply to you because chances are, you still experience some stress or have at SOME point in your life, or you at least have friends or family who are stressed and this info can help you be there for them. 

While stress itself might feel inevitable, managing it is something we can control and work on to lessen the effects it has on our lives and our bodies. 

Step 1: What is stress and how does it play out in your life? 

Stress is commonly defined as the feeling of being overwhelmed or unable to cope with mental or emotional pressure, and is generally understood as both a physiological (aka in your body) and psychological (aka in your mind) reaction. In other words, it’s usually a reaction filled with mostly negative emotions when you don’t have the right coping skills developed to handle what’s going on around you. Let’s make a quick note here that we don’t want that to sound shame-y. Most of the time we feel overwhelmed because we simply haven’t been taught how to cope and/or we haven’t been given space to learn how to cope with stress in a supportive environment that gives us corrective feedback. 

So, now that we’re on the same page about what stress is, let’s dive in and start off by listing some common symptoms of stress to see what stands out to you and might be appearing in your life. Reading through a list of common symptoms of stress might sound, well, stressful. That makes sense. But, one of the first things we have to figure out before working on coping skills and handling the stress itself is figuring out what in the world stress and anxiety even look like in our own lives! It can look different for everyone, but here are some indicators of stress to look out for that can be common across the board. 

• Emotional eating 

• Excessive sweating (not while exercising) 

• Trouble falling or staying asleep (if “I don’t know, I just didn’t sleep well” or “I don’t know why I woke up at 2am” is common for you to say… maybe we should look into that!)

• Digestive issues (indigestion, IBS, ulcers, etc.) 

• Burnout, anxiety, and/or depression

• Neglecting self-care (not just the bubble bath kind, but also the self-care like paying bills!)

• Lack of close relationships 

• Sedentary lifestyle with little to no exercise 

• Using smoking, drinking, or other substances to deal with stress 

• Tension headaches 

• Being easily irritated

• Feeling fatigued by the middle of the day 

What a FUN list to read (not)! If you’re feeling stressed just reading that list, take a minute to regulate your nervous system. Take a deep breath, remind yourself you’re not alone in this, and keep reading to find out ways to reduce these symptoms. While it might be hard to realize these symptoms can be related to stress and aren’t parts of life that you have to keep dealing with, accepting that can be an extremely helpful step in your health journey.

Okay, now that we have a better idea of how stress appears in our bodies both mentally and physically, we can tackle the next step of building skills to cope with and manage the stress. 

Step 2: Coping with stress

Now, this might be a surprise to you, but trying to push through and ignore those symptoms we talked about earlier isn’t on that list of healthy coping skills. In fact, we’d call that an UNhealthy coping skill. So often we can feel tempted to push through and try to minimize our reactions to stress. That’s not super healthy and it can look like anything from straight up avoiding the problem to over-working/using other distractions, all the way to convincing yourself the problems don’t even exist and your symptoms are normal. There are a few coping skills that can be okay in the short term and harmful in the long term. These are things such as avoidance, which can be helpful when we use it for 20 minutes or so if we’re feeling emotionally flooded and need time to regulate, but it’s harmful when we avoid the problem for weeks or months without dealing with it. Here’s a list of healthy coping skills to get you started, but the sky is the limit!

• Exercise

• Ask for help

• Work on time management

• Positive self-talk

• Meditation or prayer

• Making a to-do-list

• Establishing healthy boundaries

• Use progressive muscle relaxation

• Watch a funny video (note that we didn’t say binge-watch!)

• Get a good night of sleep or take a short nap

• Go outside and take a walk, hike, run, or even just sit out in the sun for a minute!

In our culture of hustling and restlessness, it can be easy to fall into the trap of confusing things that are common for things that are normal without even realizing you’re doing so. So yes, it might be common for people in our culture to wake up at 2am unable to go back to sleep and it might even be common to overwork to the point of burnout and beyond. But, just because it’s common doesn’t mean it’s normal or healthy and it especially doesn’t mean it has to stay that way. Maybe you find yourself surrounded by people who are overworking themselves and are stressed out. You might fall into that category too. Chances are, most of them feel the weight of that overworking and want to change something but don’t even know where to start. 

Be the first one in your friend group, your family, your workplace, or wherever you find yourself in this season to change the culture one person at a time. Find someone to join you on this journey! Choose one or two healthy coping mechanisms to implement to help reduce some of those stress symptoms we talked about earlier. Do that for a week or so, then once you have that one down move on to another!

Remember, you don’t have to live with these difficult symptoms anymore, and we’re here to help. 

Author: Kristen Hearn, MA, Prelicensed Therapist