Anakin Skywalker is out, Peep Show is back! This week at StressControl was focused on being able to control our actions and understand how the things we'd covered in previous weeks (effects on our body and controlling our mind) link together.
Before we started, we re-did the wellbeing questionnaire from week one. I think I'd slightly improved more scores but only by one point each. Interestingly I still scored higher for low mood than for stress/anxiety so there's something to think about in that!
We had the trusty Theory - Coffee - Practice triumvirate to guide us through the session. I scribbled quite a lot down this time, rather than solely relying on the printed materials as my reference for afterwards.
Theory
As with last week, the most simplistic thing to understand is that if stress can affect our actions, then being able to exercise control over our actions gives us an element of control over stress. This is true for our thoughts and for the physical effects of stress too.Firstly, some of the common ways we act when we're stressed. I suspect these are familiar to many of us at some point, but note this is by no means an exhaustive list:
- Argue
- Bite your mails
- Withdraw
- Anger outbursts
- Cry
- Take longer to do [certain] things
- Go quiet
The bold ones are certainly some that I identify with, although I'm not sure whether being a serial nail biter since I was about nine years old means I've got 30 years of stress to control... It also serves as a reminder that while we feel the physical and mental manifestations of stress ourselves, there can often be consequences for those closest to us.
One of the other key things we talked about was the idea of Avoidance and the short vs long-term trade offs that can have for us. It's fairly logical and sensible once you hear it, but I definitely needed it spelling out to be conscious of it.
It goes like this:
If there's a particular situation or task that you know will cause you anxiety, your natural reaction is to avoid it. In the short term that's great because it's reduced your anxiety. The issue is that in the long term, it'll undermine your self-confidence and mean dealing with the stress or anxiety is increasingly hard.
The first part of that might be pretty obvious, but avoidance is telling ourselves we can't cope with a situation and so we withdraw and identify threats we wouldn't otherwise have considered.
Going back to session one and the key principle of facing our fears we see the opposite. Facing up to something rather than avoiding it is likely to be worse for our anxiety in the short-term, but it's building up our confidence to deal with stress in the long-term, which will have a positive impact on both self-confidence and self-esteem.
Practice
"So how do we do that?!" I hear you cry? It's grounded in the idea of 'testing reality' and then engaging our rational/conscious voice (from session three) to do some problem solving.
Reality testing is really asking ourselves to consider two outcomes:
- What's the consequence if the thing we're worried about happens?
- What's the consequence if something else happens?
Remember the Big 5 Challenges? We can use those to help answer the first question by being more conscious of our rational voice instead of our stress voice.
So then we problem solve:
- What problem do we want to solve?
- Figure out something that's well defined that would make us feel less stressed or anxious
- What will happen when I face my fear?
- Use the skills from controlling our thoughts to make our rational voice the dominant one
- Brainstorm
- What are the different courses of action I could take here?
- Choose the best option(s)
- Simple pros and cons of our options, and some honesty about whether we think these will bring us immediate success/change or whether we may need to refine them
- Work out a plan
- When will we take these actions? Will it be more than one our our options? Do we need to use some other skills/techniques (such as relaxation, breathing?)
- Put it into action
- Do what we've decided to do
- Review
- Did it go how we expected? Will we do this again? Do we need a more gradual approach? Do we need to try something different?
When you read most (if not all) of this, it seems to be fairly common sense, and I think that's really important. It's not a set of complex behaviours or tools that anyone needs to learn, but it's about being able to take a step back, try and disentangle ourselves from the immediacy of our situation and approach things differently.
There are some helpful handouts in the workbook to go through some situations in detail. As I said last week, I think the difficulty for me lies in isolating some of these things in the first place. But it's also not designed to be a quick fix, and most of the work will come after the course finishes.
I feel like I've started to put some of this into practice, particularly around my weekly train travel, but I also know that last week I jumped straight to a set of stress-induced thoughts and behaviours in a different situation, so I've still got work to do.
Session Five is looking at panic and improving sleep. I only really experience panic in very specific situations so hopefully that'll be some easily translated learning. I do a lot already to try and improve my sleep, so hopefully there'll be some things I can finesse there too.
If you made it this far, thanks and I hope it was of some use.
Diabetes UK are running a hugely important campaign about improving the provision of and access to a variety of emotional support services. People with diabetes are twice as likely to suffer from burnout or difficulties with their own mental health compared to those without the condition. Some estimates suggest that one in ten people with diabetes are clinically depressed. You can read more about the vital It's Missing campaign by following the link. My story is just my story. If you need to talk to someone about how diabetes is making you feel, you can ring the Diabetes UK Helpline on 0345 123 2399 or you can ring Samaritans 24 hours a day on 116 123
No comments:
Post a Comment