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Almost 70 million! That’s the number of UK doctor’s appointments in 2019 for stress-related illnesses, reported by Statista; it’s jaw-dropping. Now consider that the UK population as a whole is 68.2 million people. It’s equivalent to every single person in the entire country having at least one trip to their GP.
Cracking the code to stress
As April is Stress Awareness Month, we’re continuing with the stress theme and building on the learnings in our last blog ‘Do you know your stress?‘.
Here, we’re going to look at how stress has changed from caveman times to modern times. We’ll then look at how to understand stress intensity, how to track your stress and what to track, and what happens when the body gets stuck in the stress state.
How stress has changed from Caveman to Modern Man
Throughout each day you spend some time in the stress state and some in the maintenance state. When you’re healthy and fit, you move effortlessly between these two states as needed.
When you respond to a challenge or a situation (imagine a caveman facing a sudden threat like a tiger) all your resources are mobilised and directed at the immediate threat. This is the stress state. Once the caveman would have dealt with the threat, either by successfully running away from it or by knocking the tiger out, then the caveman would have rested and recuperated to replenish the resources used. This is the maintenance state. Once replenished, he’d be back on form. This can be visualised like this.
You may not be facing tigers on every street corner in today’s reality, yet although the threats may have changed, the physical response is the same. To your body, a threat is a threat, and the chemicals of the stress state respond right on cue. For many of us, the threats now are more likely to be deadlines, money worries, and professional and personal relationships. Indeed, a survey found that four out of five people reported work as the main source of stress, followed by money worries. Whilst during caveman days, these spikes would happen every now and again, fast forward to today and they can feel pretty constant.
From when the alarm jolts you into your day till you fall asleep, the day can feel like an obstacle course of challenges and threats. This means that your body is having to switch much more frequently from stress to maintenance state and back again. This in itself is energy-intensive which then adds an additional burden on your body, meaning the graph looks more like this.
Why stress can be both helpful and harmful
Stress is not categorically helpful or harmful. Our approach is that it’s more helpful to be curious than critical. By getting curious and learning about stress and its different aspects, you can utilise the power of your stress state in the most helpful way.
The three stages of stress are a helpful guide to understanding how and when your stress state goes from helpful to harmful.
Acute stress
The body’s natural defence system includes going into a state of stress when feeling under threat. Once the threat has been dealt with or avoided, the body returns to a state that is more focused on maintenance and the general running of the body’s functions and systems. Acute means that it is a short-term experience for the body.
Chronic stress
This is when the body’s natural defence system is frequently, and over a period of time, in a state of stress. As a result, there is a reduced focus on maintenance and the general running of the body’s functions and systems. This is physically costly as not only is the stress state energy intensive for the body to do, but important maintenance gets neglected. Over time this affects not only your ability to perform but also your quality of life and your physical, mental, and social health.
Allostatic stress
Also referred to as ‘allostatic overload’ or ‘maladaptive’ stress response. Allostatic stress is when the body gets ‘stuck’ in the state of stress, and becomes the baseline state, instead of the maintenance state being the baseline. Even when action is taken to shift to the maintenance state, it only has a temporary effect and the body quickly returns to the baseline of allostatic stress. At this point the physical, mental, and social health impact is limiting your ability to function and you’re dealing with at least some level of illness.
How to score stress intensity
Do you have a sense of the intensity of your stress? Do you know how to score just how stressed you are?
It can be helpful to track your stress indicators and score them in terms of intensity. It’s a bit like taking your utilities meter readings or taking your car for the annual test (in the UK this is called MOT). Without knowing where you are at now, it’s hard to gauge whether you need to take action and make any changes.
So let’s start with the key tool you’ll be using to score the intensity of your stress. You’ll be using a scale of 1-10, with 0 being barely noticeable and 10 being panic attack or severe physical impact. The scale brings two things together: how intense the stress feels and how long it takes you to calm down from it.
If you read our last blog ‘Do you know your stress?‘, you may remember that the stress hormones can give us an energy boost that can be helpful. Athletes and performers often use this effectively so this isn’t so much about never experiencing stress. Rather, it’s about knowing to what intensity you’re at and how quickly you can calm down after and shift back to a maintenance state. This is often referred to as recovery time or bounce back time. Here’s the scale.
How to track your stress
Tracking your stress, like tracking anything, means making notes. There is always a cost/benefit analysis to tracking anything. If you take too few notes, you won’t have enough information to make an informed assessment. If you take lots of notes, you’re likely to get bogged down with too much information and it will have cost you more time and effort than the benefit of the information will give you.
This is why we recommend keeping track for 5 days, give or take two. That means no fewer than 3 days and no more than 7 days.
What to track
Now you know how to score your stress and how to track it, let’s look at what it is that you’re going to track. Do you know your stress indicators? We outlined a few indicators to look out for in our last blog ‘Do you know your stress?‘.
Here’s a refresher to give you some things to look out for.
- Physical indicators include: increased heart rate, sweating, tunnel vision, headaches, sleep issues, increased/decreased appetite.
- Mental indicators include: initial alertness which then drops into struggling to think. Losing sense of humour, struggling to make decisions. Feeling bad about yourself.
- Social indicators include: avoiding or clinging onto people, being impatient, being inappropriate, oversharing, saying yes even though you don’t want to.
Stress-score tracker
We recommend tracking three indicators in each of your three health dimensions: physical, mental, and social. Don’t worry if you forget for a day or two, in fact we’ve included that in our example here of how it might look. We’re calling this person Charlie.
In this example the overall score for 5 days is 29 with various clues about the indicators in the three dimensions. With an average daily score across the period of nearly 6 (29 points divided by 5 days) this places Charlie is at amber using the stress intensity scale.
Using Charlie’s score as an example, being consistently in amber throughout this period suggests that they may be suffering from chronic stress. This is a concern as if this goes on or the average score increases, they risk going into allostatic stress because of the harmful effects of chronic stress.
N.B. If you have been working with a doctor or other healthcare professionals for stress-related symptoms, and they have advised you to track differently, please follow their advice.
We’ve added the stress score tracker here for you to download with the stress intensity scale.
What now?
It’s quite possible that you’re reading this and thinking that it would be a great idea to identify some stress indicators and do your own tracking, but then there’s just never enough time, or it’s just another thing to add to your overwhelm. So, you don’t actually do anything. This adds to your anxieties about health and the impact of stress on you, your family, and your work. For you, our advice is twofold.
What’s your ‘Why bother’?
This is our second favourite question after ‘Is it helpful’. If you’ve not got a strong enough reason to prioritise this, chances are you won’t. If you can’t do this for yourself, then do this for someone you love (be specific). Remember the flight attendant’s instructions: put the oxygen mask on yourself first before assisting others. Read our blog Self care = caring for others if you need more support with this. It includes a link to an excellent 10-minute video about how quickly your ability to function drops when your oxygen drops.
Find yourself an accountability ally
When you team up with someone, your chances of following through increase greatly. They can check in to make sure you’re doing the tracking and when you struggle they will remind you why you are bothering to do this. Notice we say ‘when’ not ‘if’ because we assume you’ll struggle. It’s to be expected. And if they are getting curious about their own stress, you can also help them keep track. Together, you can tackle what you might struggle to do on your own.
Remember feelings are information and it’s more helpful to be curious than critical. When you’ve got up-to-date information about what’s going on for you, it’s much easier to make helpful choices and changes that benefit you, your health and your loved ones. Go gently yourself as you gather your information and go well.
We’d love to hear how you get on and what you discover.
Connect with us on Facebook and Instagram. Sign up for the Helpful newsletter to get helpful tips and tools straight to your inbox. If you’d like to connect with me directly, find me on LinkedIn.
Go gently, hold steady, stay the course.
All the best, Thor
PLEASE NOTE THAT THOR A RAIN IS NOT A MEDICAL DOCTOR. THE HELPFUL CLINIC IS NOT A MEDICAL CLINIC AND THIS IS NOT MEDICAL ADVICE. FOR MORE INFORMATION CLICK HERE
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