The Stress Bucket
Transcript
The Stress Bucket
Hi, team Kirstin here again. For those who haven’t seen me around, I’m a social worker working with the Native timber industry to help affected workers to focus on and prioritize their mental health and wellbeing.
Today I wanna talk about how I view stress management and our ability to cope with a certain amount of stress. Think about our resilience or our ability to cope as a bucket.
We call this the stress bucket. For some of us, our bucket might be pretty big. We’re able to deal with quite a lot of stress before it gets on top of us.
For others, the bucket might be smaller. Stress comes into our bucket as a result of our everyday lives. Sometimes the stress comes thick and fast. Other times it’s more of a trickle.
For some people, the same stressor might have a bigger impact on them than others. It may fill our bucket more or less than another person experiencing the same thing. Regardless of the size of our bucket, though, if we have no way of managing the stress that comes into our bucket by turning on some metaphorical taps, eventually our buckets will get full.
A full bucket can mean crappy sleep, feeling grumpy or p****d off, having low energy and feeling unmotivated, or getting into arguments with our partner or kids. When our buckets are a more manageable level, we have the energy to do the things we enjoy and to be productive and spend the time with the people we love.
So it’s important for us to have an understanding about how big our bucket is and how much stress is in our bucket. It’s also really important for us to have ways to turn on the tap, give the stress in our bucket a way to escape.
This can look like a good night’s sleep, eating well, exercising, getting outside and doing fun things. Watching or playing sport, watching TV, or listening to music, engaging in hobbies, and spending good quality time with our friends and family.
There’s a caveat here, though. Some ways of managing our stress can feel like they empty our bucket, but in the long term can add to our bucket. The main ones here are less healthy habits like drinking, smoking, or eating crap, all the good stuff.
So be mindful of your consumption of these things as a stress management response, and try to limit these behaviors and opt for some healthier alternatives. For this week, have a think about your bucket and give the attached worksheet a go.
If you think your bucket is feeling pretty full, find some ways to prioritize doing the things you love as well as some less fun, but good for your habits to take care of your body and your mind.