Stop the Spiral; Deconstructing Stress.
By: Dr Tom
Tags: Feeling Stuck, Stress Management, Wellbeing, Stress And Anxiety, Stress

As I walk through my writing process, I also insert what I am writing about. This particular article is a summary of the need for which I am trying to present a solution.

If you’re reading this, like millions of others around the world, you are feeling a bit overwhelmed by everything that is going on in your life either personally, professionally, or both. This suckling feeling of stress or anxiety that feels like a growing albatross can be made up of many little annoyances coupled with major life changes as well as everything in between.

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It is not uncommon that your home stress is either causing additional stress at work or vice versa. As the pandemic has taught us, the intersection of home and work life is often a jumble of blurred psychological and behavioral lines. Inevitably, you have gotten to this state of a stressful feeling where you can’t figure out where your work stress ends, and your personal stress begins.

That feeling of clumping all stressors together I’ll refer to as the “ball of stress.” It doesn’t matter if it’s a hardball, a softball, a big ball, or a deflating ball — you need relief and you need some weight lifted from your shoulders. However, the idea of dealing with this amalgamation of stressors is simply overwhelming.

The book that I’m in the midst of finishing and publishing will walk you through a step-by-step process on how to unravel that ‘ball of stress’ and mitigate those stressors systematically. What is important to know upfront about stress and job strain is that there is a myriad of route causes of this anxiety-ridden experience. Equally, there are numerous outcomes of experiencing stress and job strain; including anxiety, cognitive impairment, social withdrawal, productivity, and effects on your overall physical and mental wellbeing.

As with any abrupt change and with ongoing insecurity and instability, most humans feel imbalanced and unsure of taking care of one’s personal life’s physiological primary needs (food, water) and safety secondary needs (physical and emotional security, shelter, etc.). The idea of taking care of Maslow’s higher-order needs (e.g. love, esteem, and self-actualization) or the Neuroscience Institute’s findings of the importance of fairness and bias might seem perilous. Moreover, the rapidly changing work norms leave us in a constant state of flux requiring us to be adaptable and resilient, whether we feel it or not, leaving us feeling our jobs are currently unstable.

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Balancing our home lives, relationships at home, interactions at work, and our work responsibilities become untenable. This chaos contradicts part of our human nature’s need to develop norms and routines to feel a sense of control to make us feel secure. This jumbled mire of upending norms with no semblance of routine makes us feel disjointed to our core.

Do not feel abnormal. Our need to ‘fix-it’ (home-life and work-life) goes back thousands of years. This ‘fix-it’ mindset presents today as we search for solutions to make our families, selves, and work-life fulfill our physiological and safety needs. This sense of altruism has been evolving in humans since were hunters and foragers.

This altruistic need to ‘fix-it’ has been informed through our need to be a mediator of our physical and emotional environment to mitigate dangers and dangerous behavior. Consequently, in this altruistic search, we take actions that don’t pay-off the way we intended which increases our frustration and often leads to developing negative behaviors and physiological responses.

In summary, the stress and anxiety we feel personally and professionally presents as a ‘ball of stress.’ This ball is an amalgamation of the instability we feel, the insecurity about our futures, our habits and norms being out of sync, feeling unsafe in our environment (even if it’s virtual), and we are not caring for our personal wellbeing. Insecurity, threats to safety, changes to norms, and the fear this creates are common reasons for stress responses.

With our ‘ball of stress’ defined as to where it generally comes from, please know there are solutions and steps you can take to alleviate these stressors. Additionally, there is a system you can use to determine if you need outside help or if you can take actions to relieve the stressors yourself.

The next article will begin to break out the effects of organizational stress.