When Stress Won't Stop
So what do you do when the uncertainty hasn’t gotten better?
You’ve been trying to manage your stress and apply the skills, but the stressors haven’t let up. In fact, they’ve increased. As a mental health organization, we have been providing skills and support on effective stress management since before the pandemic. When the pandemic was upon our part of the world, we witnessed the significant shift in the intensity and pressure of stress on individuals and organizations. It wasn’t just the shift to remote work, health concerns, social disruptions, and the reopening of historic racial and cultural tensions-- it was war, economic downturns, the Great Recession, the Great Resignation, and more. Even this list might be bringing back heavy memories for many of us. In a blog post from 2020 we wrote about Skills for When Emotions Run High. We discussed the foundational skills needed to navigate stress and how, in uncertain times like those, they needed to function differently than our normative stress management techniques. These skills remain the foundation we need, especially as many of us have yet to find respite from the onslaught of stressors and workplace shifts and changes.
If this resonates, check out these relevant Trainings for your organization: Stress Management in Uncertain Times, Navigating Persistent Uncertainty, and more.
As we reflect on the heavy weight we’ve been carrying, I hope that what comes to mind is the strength and resilience that has brought us through. —Wait, that's not what you're thinking about? Don’t worry- that makes you normal. Imagine you’ve been carrying around a heavy backpack you didn’t want to carry on a long hike all week. When you get a moment to stop, you’re rarely thinking about the calories burned and muscles gained. You’re focused on how exhausted you feel, your aching muscles, and when you have to pick up that pack again.
Navigating persistent stress takes intentionality because the problem isn’t that you aren’t doing enough-- it’s that too much is falling on top of you. We have to pause and acknowledge that we are doing things to make the situation better, and it takes effort and energy to sustain it when we don’t control when the avalanche is going to stop.
This isn’t about your competence or even your ability to manage stress; even high-performing, highly skilled people get fatigued.
For some of us, our frustration builds and grows; we feel angry at the onslaught of new pressures, and this frustration becomes another pressure we have to contend with. Or, we start to feel crushed under the weight of self-blame, assuming that we should be able to do better and live up to the additional responsibilities heaped upon us. We start to burn the candle at both ends until we burn ourselves out. Others of us shut down. The persistent stress is leading us to disconnect from our work and personal life.
To prevent the persistent stress from burning us out, we can build on our foundational stress management skills by anchoring ourselves to our whys. These skills come out of Acceptance and Commitment Therapy pioneered by Steven Hayes and provide a framework for how to build internal stability and committed action in the face of intense challenges. Acceptance and Commitment are built on the acceptance that suffering and pain are a part of life and that we all have the ability to choose to commit to our values amid those challenges. This commitment enables us to take steps towards our values no matter the situation.
This is great news for us, especially if we feel stuck and trapped by the constraints of the stress we feel.
We no longer need to find a way to get rid of stress and push it away. Instead, we shift from fighting against the stress in our lives towards accepting it. This allows stress to move to the background, enabling us to concentrate on our values and take meaningful action. For example, instead of seeing our stress as a bull that we must subdue and ride, we shift our perspective to being sailors with a destination.
Our stress is just another weather pattern we must learn to navigate through on our journey towards our goals. When we fight the weather, we will inevitably fail. When we accept it, we can shift our efforts to adjusting and empowering ourselves to continue moving towards our values as best we can. We choose to navigate towards our values through whatever comes our way. The techniques from the Acceptance and Commitment framework can be effective even in traumatizing, tense, and distressing situations. They can keep us steady and focused in good and turbulent times.
Acceptance and Commitment are dance partners and rely on one another.
Acceptance gets you unstuck; commitment gets you moving. Acceptance is acknowledging the unwanted private and social experiences which are outside our control. In overwhelming situations, the intensity of what is happening can overtake you. In stressful situations, we often fuse ourselves to our thoughts. We often believe what we think about ourselves and the situation (“This is overwhelming,” “I can’t handle this,” “Everything is going wrong.”). Instead, we can choose to accept that these are, in fact, just thoughts about yourself and the situation- they may or may not be true. Accepting is realizing that you are not your thoughts and you are not the situations around you.
One way to think about it is that you are in a relationship with the situation and in a relationship with your thoughts. Acceptance is the act of making each of those things distinct instead of cramming them all into one big stressful bucket. So instead of “this is too much,” “I can’t believe this is happening,” What the &$*%&# is going on?” Acceptance creates space and distance for everything. That might sound like, “I’m having the thought that this is too much,” “Right now these are all the things that are happening, and this is how I feel about them at this moment. I may feel differently as the situation changes.” You are distinct from your thoughts, and you are not the situation around you.
This is the skill of defusion- creating distance and space between you, the thinker, and the thoughts you are having. “I’m having a thought that this is overwhelming,” “Part of me thinks I can’t handle this,” and “At this moment it feels like everything is going wrong.” (Watch Dr. Chandy demonstrate another way of utilizing this skill of defusion.)
Acceptance is the key to psychological flexibility because these thoughts are no longer absolute truths, they are changeable and adjustable, allowing us to commit to the direction we want to move in.
Commitment is all about values-based actions. It is no longer about deflecting and avoiding pain; it’s about stepping in the direction of our values and who we want to be. Our committed actions will move us closer to like-minded people and communities that share our values, purposes, and behaviors. Our committed actions will also move us into places of tension and away from situations that are not aligned with our values.
Some of our commitments are deeply personal and rooted in our own values, but other commitments are tied to our professional and community values. They can be things we do together to create an environment that helps us deal with our shared stressors. Regardless, how we choose to respond in the face of uncertainty and stress has a contagion effect. Hopelessness, anger, frustration – it spreads.
We have the option to respond to stress, willfully or willingly. Both options have significant consequences for our professional and social communities.
Practice makes progress. There are many techniques of cognitive distancing to try. We become expert sailors through practice and patience. We test these skills by applying them to our personal experiences and adjusting them to fit our context and culture. We have included a number of skills here, but they are often best worked on in our communities and in individual and group therapy. If these resonate with you, consider reaching out to schedule a training with your team or community.
At Artesian Collaborative, we are committed to seeing you find the support you need. Reach out to connect with a therapist, find resources, or find additional referrals.
