How to Deal with Stress

To change how you react to stress, you must change how you think about stress.

For the longest time, I didn’t think I got stressed. I made it halfway through my nursing degree before I realized [ahem, admitted to myself] that I was stressed out. It then took me another 10 years to realize how to manage my stress.

And when I write it in that simple sentence, it sounds like it was super easy for me to do. I only wish this was true. Knowing and understanding are two different things.

For me to realize how to manage my stress, I first had to fully experience what it felt like when I didn’t manage my stress well. I needed to go through denial, avoidance, band aid solutions and miserableness before I could understand stress. I knew the biology of stress. I knew what caused stress. But I didn’t understand how to actually deal with stress.

Enter burnout. 

I can measure my decline into burnout on a calendar because it follows my involvement on a work project quite nicely but this was just the final straw. It took years of me not understanding how to deal with stress that led to my burnout. It  just happened that I was finally in a situation I couldn’t deny, avoid or put a bandaid solution on. And oh was I miserable (just ask my family).

It’s taken me a while, but I’ve come to realize that there’s two main things I didn’t understand. To learn how to deal with stress, you must: 

• Stress management techniques
• Completing my stress cycle

Stress Management Techniques

You’ve heard this before - manage your stress. Perfect, I thought I was doing that and obviously I wasn’t doing that well because I burnt out. What I’ve come to realize is I had a big disconnect between what my body was feeling and what my mind was thinking. If I'm being totally honest, I thought I was doing this well but I had zero awareness. I was able to tap into this mind/body connection during pregnancy but not for the rest of my non-pregnant life. 

So if you aren’t aware of how your body is feeling you will have no clue that you need to use some stress management techniques. Or if you happen to guess that you need to use a stress management technique, because you have a disconnect between your mind and body, you won’t be able to know if what you’ve done has worked.

The moral of the story: You can’t effectively use stress management techniques if you don’t practice self awareness techniques as well.

Completing my Stress Cycle

What even is a stress cycle? Your stress cycle is your body’s automatic response to a stressor, also known as the thing that causes you stress. When your stress response cycle is triggered you need to allow the cycle to finish. Just as your stress response cycle starts automatically, completing the cycle finishes automatically. There are things you can do to let your body know that it can finish it’s stress cycle and relax.

To read more about what you can do to complete your stress cycle, check out my post “Stress Free: Completing Your Stress Cycle”. 

In summary, we all experience stress and have each developed ways to deal with that stress. If you find that your usual ways of dealing with stress aren’t quite working for you anymore, to change how you react to stress, you must change how you think about stress. I go into more detail about how to do this in my blog post "Stressed Out: My Stress Blueprint".​