Checking in with Yourself

You wake up on a Monday morning with your memory of back to back team meetings in your calendar, and the deadline for that mission critical Project X for your company’s digitisation slowly coming into focus.  If only team members will deliver what they committed to on time for once, you would feel less anxious about deadlines. Then you will still somehow have to find the time to respond to your share of the world’s more than 267 billion emails that will be generated today. Not to mention, you are now working from home due to your country’s COVID-19 lockdown.

When your mind flits over all of these work demands, your breathing becomes shallow. You feel exhausted already just thinking about them.  A knot is developing in your stomach. Then, you remember the rest of the week, which gives no respite. The knot is now tightening, accompanied by shoulder tension. You wish it were still Sunday. In my Resilience coaching, these are some of their stress signatures my clients have shared with me.

Does this sound familiar to you? What you are experiencing are early warning signals that you are on edge. How on edge are you? It is particularly being on edge repeatedly that produces these effects. If we experience an unmanageable stress load that continues for weeks or months on end, without respite, we need to pay careful attention to this. Otherwise, we may collapse or experience burn out.

We all have unique stress signatures. They manifest in our emotions, thinking, body, behaviour, and impact on our relationships.

Quick Stress Signature Assessment

How could you monitor yourself to acknowledge your stress signature and take preventive measures?

An important principle is to look at your feelings and thoughts as if they were objects outside of you. Looking through feelings and thoughts clouds your perspective. Even worse, over time your unhelpful feelings and thoughts assume a life of their own, and you become them.

Here is a simple approach to help you determine whether you are carrying a manageable stress load, or feeling overloaded. Simply note down what you typically experience when you are stressed in all of these 5 areas. The example given here is derived from the Checking in with yourself section.

YOUR STRESS SIGNATURE:

AFFECTED ASPECTS	WARNING SIGNS
FEELING	eg. Anxious, Frustrated
THINKING	Don’t know how I will cope, but I must
BODY	Racing breathing, Knot in stomach, Shoulder tension
BEHAVIOUR	Distracted, Make unforced errors
RELATIONSHIPS	Irritable, Impatient

Restore Your Balance First

A revved-up nervous system, is a barrier to problem solving, creativity and accessing your best thinking for addressing your situation. You need to modulate this first before you can develop and implement your action plan with any degree of success.