Stress Resilience: Stress Detection & Stress Resistance
Do you feel overwhelmed by stress? Many of us do. Luckily, there are many ways to increase your resilience and strengthen your wellbeing.
We all feel stressed sometimes – it’s an unavoidable part of life. Nevertheless, many of us experience it a lot more than we would like. We can find ourselves feeling overwhelmed, exhausted or agitated. This can impact our work, our relationships, and even our health.
But there’s good news! With Mind Ease – Stress Relief App, you can strengthen your emotional resilience. Using science-backed exercises developed by mental health experts, you can monitor your stress, find quick relief from it, and enhance your long-term well-being.
In this article, you will learn about resilience, understand the difference between acute and chronic stress, and discover effective ways to cope.
What is stress resilience?
When thinking about your resilience, you might find it helpful to use the stress bucket metaphor.
The size of the bucket represents how much pressure we can naturally cope with at any one time. This will be different for each of us.
Everyone’s resilience is unique – it can depend on our genes, our upbringing, our health – even the weather on a particular day!
Regardless of the size of our “bucket”, when it overflows, we start to experience problems.
Importantly, there are two aspects of the bucket metaphor that we can often control to boost our resilience. This will prevent the bucket from overflowing, ensuring that our stress remains manageable.
Firstly, we may be able to change the amount of stress that’s flowing into the bucket. This involves identifying the biggest stressors in your life and considering practical changes that you could make to lessen their impact. This will depend on your individual circumstances.
For example, if you often find yourself stressed while stuck in traffic, maybe you could ride a bike to work instead. Sometimes, bigger steps may be required, like changing a job. This may not be easy, but your mental health is worth it!
Unfortunately, many stressors can be out of our control. Experiencing physical ailments, poverty, loneliness or racism can all be extremely difficult experiences that are difficult to change.
If reducing the inflow of stress is hard, there is a second way to make changes, and that’s by opening “the tap” of the bucket.
This represents healthy coping strategies that can release some of the stress we’re experiencing. Basically, it’s any activity that helps us rejuvenate and recover. Keep reading below to learn what strategies might be the right ones for you!
How to detect stress
Acute stress
We can think about stress as existing in two main forms. The first is the short-term, acute form. For example, imagine that you’ve overslept and missed a train to the airport. Pretty stressful right? These kinds of situations can activate our “fight-or-flight” response, an ancient biological system designed to protect us from danger.
During acute stress, adrenaline starts coursing through our bodies, causing a whole range of effects. Do any of these sound familiar?
- Heavy breathing
- Increased heart rate
- Muscle tension
- Increased sweating
- Mental alertness
- Tunnel vision
For our ancestors, these effects of adrenaline were useful, because they increased an individual’s survival chances, by helping them to fight an enemy or to run away from a predator. However, in modern society, they tend not to be as useful anymore. When we get stressed by a traffic jam, the fight or flight response won’t help us very much!
The tricky thing about acute stress is that it can arise so fast that we may not even realize it’s happening. One minute you could be unloading the dishwasher, enjoying a regular evening, and the next you might be shouting at your child, feeling tense and upset. It happens to all of us!
Luckily, there are things we can all do to help us detect rising stress levels, and intervene before it causes us problems.
The most important habit is to regularly check in with yourself. You can do this in a variety of ways – some people like to meditate, others prefer to reflect through journaling or in conversations with a loved one.
The Mind Ease App offers you a simple tool to monitor your stress whenever it’s convenient for you. By pressing the Calm Me button, you can record how you’re feeling at any moment. Once you submit your response, the app will analyze your experience and recommend the best calming exercises that will provide rapid relief.
Chronic stress
The second form that we need to be aware of is chronic stress. This can occur when we experience stress frequently or if it affects us over a prolonged period of time.
We may feel like we are running out of fuel, never having enough time to recharge. Unfortunately, this can lead to burnout, which can have a significant impact on both our physical and mental health.
Again, we can detect chronic stress by examining our daily feelings and experiences. These are some of the signs we might recognize:
- Feeling like nothing is enjoyable anymore
- Feeling low in mood or depressed
- Having less energy than before
- Struggling to find motivation, even for simple tasks
- Feeling more irritable and getting into more arguments
- Struggling to sleep or sleeping too much
All of these things can result from your mind and body feeling too tired and overworked. If this sounds like you, don’t worry – in the next section, we will learn how to find relief!
How to build stress resilience
Coping with life’s difficulties can feel overwhelming, but by taking small steps towards helpful habits, you will gradually build your strength.
Here are 6 powerful strategies to help you get started:
1. Regularly check in with yourself. As mentioned before, try to find a practice that allows you to reflect on how you’re feeling, ideally on a daily basis. You can do this with the Mind Ease app, as well as by journaling, meditating or having conversations with others.
2. Explore relaxation exercises. These are special techniques developed by mental health experts that can effectively relieve tension. You may have heard of mindfulness before, which can be a very helpful practice to calm down your mind and body. However, there are also many other techniques, which can be easier to start with – like deep breathing, progressive muscle relaxation or positive visualization. The Mind Ease App offers a rich set of relaxation techniques that you can try out.
3. Move your body. You have probably heard this one before! But physical activity is crucial in helping you combat stress, as it can release the excess tension that accumulates in your muscles. Because it can often be hard to find the motivation to exercise, it’s best to do something that you can enjoy. And even better if it’s in good company!
4. Prioritize activities that give you joy. This can include creative hobbies, spending time in nature or watching fun TV shows. Whatever makes time fly by and helps you recharge your batteries.
5. Lean on others. It’s easy to feel like everyone around us is experiencing less difficulty or handling it better than we are. But when we open up to each other, we often find that we all go through very similar struggles. This realization can be very powerful and sharing how we’re feeling can help us heal. And sometimes, a hug can be the best medicine!
6. Speak to a professional. Finding a good therapist or a psychiatrist can significantly speed up our recovery from emotional challenges. If you would like extra support, don’t hesitate to reach out to a professional in your area to help you cope with any troubles in your life.
These strategies are useful both for prevention as well as for helping you recover after stressful episodes.
It’s best to pick just a few habits to start with and set a few small goals. Step by step, things will get easier over time!
Barriers to stress resilience: Limits of stress resistance
Believe it or not, stress can also have many benefits! There is a scientific concept called the Yerkes-Dodson law, which states that humans require an optimal level of pressure in order to perform at their best. That’s why we don’t want to get rid of it completely.
image source: https://www.aucklandphysiotherapy.co.nz
As you can see in this diagram, if we don’t feel any pressure at all, we may lack the motivation we need to pursue our goals. However, at extreme levels, we may experience burnout and our ability to function may be significantly affected.
You can remember the “Goldilocks” rule of stress – you don’t want too little or too much – just the right amount!
In this article, we learned about the “stress bucket”, which can help us understand how we can increase our resilience. We also explored the biological origins of the “fight or flight” response as well as the differences between acute and chronic stress.
Hopefully you now have a few ideas regarding the things you could do to better manage your own difficulties. While you explore ways to reduce stress in your life, try to remember that some stress can be helpful. We just have to keep an eye on it!
To take control of your mental health, try the Mind Ease – Stress Relief App today.
