Grace Over Grind: Know Your Triggers to Reduce Stress & Improve Work-Life Balance

[00:00:00] Hello, I'm Sharon McCall with Whispering Fields Wellness. Today in Grace Over Grind, I'll discuss the importance of cultivating self awareness of stress triggers. This helps us to reduce stress and improve work life harmony. This episode will focus on common external triggers that you frequently encounter.

[00:00:20] In a future episode, I'll go over internal stressors that are like thoughts, feelings, and sensations. Let's go ahead and open in prayer. Lord, thank you for bringing my dear friends to listen today. Please help them find the motivation, guidance, strategies, and tactics to reduce stress and improve work life harmony.

[00:00:40] As Jesus shared in the parable of the sower, we need to address the thorns, rocks, and hardened parts of our heart. This metaphor is also applicable to addressing stress in our lives. We, the These can be worry, exhaustion, emptiness, distress, or doing too much separation. Weeds choke us. Ants are automatic negative thoughts, wound us.

[00:01:01] And negative coping behaviors cause us to stumble, and our limiting beliefs harden us. Stress keeps us focused on ourselves and not on God or serving others. As part of the journey of stress recovery, we will mature as Christians and grow closer to you. Through today's discussion, may my dear friends cultivate self awareness of what is triggering their stress and be equipped with tools to better identify their blind spots.

[00:01:24] As they learn more about themselves, may they increasingly be able to surrender their burdens to you and see through any deceitfulness. I pray all is well with every listener, healthy in body, renewed in mind, and strong in spirit. As they reduce stress and improve work life balance, may they know your will and your love.

[00:01:43] In Jesus's name, Amen. Today, I'll cover a quick overview of stress, examples of common external stress triggers, and a short practical journal exercise to identify patterns of stressors in your life. God wired us to use stress as part of our survival tools. What we call stress is simply the response to a threat It's what triggers us into fight, flight, freeze, or fawn.

[00:02:09] When facing a life or death situation, our stress response prioritizes the body's systems for survival. Once we feel safe, the stress response diminishes and we are able again to get back to regular physical function. So when we're in stress response, there's all sorts of hormonal and biochemical things that are going on inside of our bodies as a result of this threat.

[00:02:31] Stress is different for everyone. Life experience and resilience are intrinsic factors that determine our response. How you perceive and respond to a specific situation will be unique compared to others that are in the same situation. Stress can be short term, long term. It can be triggered by external or internal stressors, where external is anything outside of your body, mind, and spirit.

[00:02:54] And internal are your thoughts, feelings, sensations, anything that's coming from inside your body, mind, and spirit. And the magnitude of stress can range from minor disruption to significant threats or traumatic events. They can be helpful so that you can end up growing from these, or they can end up being very challenging and feel like they're just designed to stagnate or to wound you.

[00:03:18] And when you're experiencing multiple stressors, it diminishes your ability to cope and just wears you down faster than if there was just one area of your life that was stressing you out. Stress impacts physical and mental health. You only have so much reserve at a given moment to deal effectively with what is going on.

[00:03:36] So you may have noticed that something that you're able to go with the flow on the last time it happened, it may be what pushes you over the proverbial edge this time. It's all based upon how we are doing physically, mentally, spiritually. When you're exposed to chronic stress, it can lead to chronic disease.

[00:03:57] Like I mentioned, there's a lot going on in the body. And so when you're constantly flooding yourself with these biochemicals, it can end up having a really significant impact. And over time that does lead to multiple things that can happen physically and mentally as well as into chronic disease. Stress magnifies other risk factors for chronic disease as well.

[00:04:17] So if you've got something else that's going on in your life that's triggering, let's say you're starting to signs of elevated blood sugar and are working on pre diabetes, that in combination with stress, it just increases your likelihood of diabetes because of everything that's going on inside your body.

[00:04:34] So reacting to your stress triggers is absolutely normal. But if you don't recognize and respond to them, you may feel stress just building on itself. You're not productively being able to get it out. If you're not finding ways being able to address it up front, you need to be able to make sure that once you're in that stress cycle, that you can calm and relax and bring yourself down.

[00:04:56] So in next week's episode, I'll address developing plans to avoid, mitigate, or deal with these triggers. That episode will integrate into the prior discussions that we've had on Wellness Toolbox and Habit Building as well. Okay, let's get deeper into today's topic. External stress triggers. External means that it's something outside of your body, mind, and spirit.

[00:05:17] Here's a couple of sample categories. Safety, relationships of any type, financial, occupational, anything in your environment, anything that you bring into your body, anything that you consume, the activities that you do, or that you don't do, including sleep. These are some really big categories. And so from here, though, you can break it down into subcategories and other subcategories of subcategories based upon whatever is going in your life.

[00:05:51] This is just kind of that starting spot where you can kind of cascade it out to being able to identify where. Things are stressing you out and where there may be a pattern because there may be something that's going on across multiple different types of Relationships that are all related. So let's walk through an example.

[00:06:09] Your work relationships are the greatest source of your stress. From here, you can being able to narrow it down to situations that end up causing you the most stress at work. As you think about it, you realize that giving feedback is one of the toughest things that you have to do, and you have to do it on a regular basis as part of your role.

[00:06:32] When you narrow it down further, you're realizing that it's only people with a certain personality type or one or two people that are the hardest for you to have the courage to give timely and effective feedback to. So the more that we can dial in, it gets us closer to a strategy that can be established.

[00:06:53] So in this situation to reduce anxiety and stress from before the situation, we can come up with a couple of different tactics to include in your tiny habit plan. During the interaction, we can come up with a couple of different ways to make sure that you're staying calm through the situation. And then afterwards, as you're feeling it and you're processing to being able to help you to calm down and to get back to that zone of safety with repetition and addressing any underlying internal factors, you'll find that you are less stressed.

[00:07:29] As a quick thought exercise to capture some of your first impressions of these categories of external stressors. Feel free to pause the video to jot some notes or to think about each of these questions I'm about to ask. I encourage you to do this as needed throughout the rest of the video as we go through the exercise.

[00:07:44] So the first question, as you think about these categories of triggers, besides work, what else has you stressed?

[00:07:55] Off the top of your head, within the top one or two categories, what are examples of stressors, triggers in your life that are impacting you today?

[00:08:06] Have you dealt with some of these stressors or similar situations in the past? Capture any ideas that might help you with whatever is stressing you out this week at work. When you are totally stressed out and feeling like life is coming at you from multiple directions, it can be helpful to put it into a structured framework.

[00:08:24] This allows you to take an objective approach and to identify areas that you need for being able to dial in on or find high impact patterns so that you can relieve a lot of your stress fairly quickly. In your favorite visual journal method, you'll want to create a simple and quick daily tool.

[00:08:41] Something like what you see above this. There's a download link available in the description if you just want to download it. You can also make this into a daily repeating set of tasks in your favorite electronic tool. Whatever works for you so that you can end up creating the insights and building the self awareness.

[00:08:58] Now, I hear you. No moaning and groaning that you don't have time or energy. I designed this specifically with you in mind. This daily journal exercise takes less than 30 minutes per week to give you real insight. It's just moments a day. You can take targeted actions in your habit strategy to avoid, reduce, or deal with the stressor that you're focused on.

[00:09:20] This is very actionable, so it is a well worth it investment. So getting into the journal entry. So every day, you want to note if there was something that was stressful that occurred. So that's what that first column is. You just color it red if you've ended up having something stressful occur.

[00:09:38] Now, if you have a lot of different stressors going on, you just want to pick the area that you're focused on, maybe one category or a subcategory like we had talked about above. So let's say it's in those feedback conversations. So just focus then on the feedback discussions. Did you have stress related to that on that day?

[00:10:00] Okay. Once you've identified whether you did or did not have that stressor, you're going to end up moving into the next column. You want to capture a quick summary of the situation, including how you reacted, just basic facts, just quick jot it down a couple of things. I'm sure you'll remember it by the end of the week.

[00:10:17] It's just to kind of trigger that memory. Now in this last column, you want to note if you turn the situation over to God to help calm you back down. So if you ended up having a feedback session or had to think about a feedback session, did you take that moment to take that burden and give it to God? If you didn't do it at the time when you're still thinking about the situation, to take a moment in prayer to unburden yourself.

[00:10:45] You want to make sure that even if this was hours ago, That you're getting yourself calmed back down as you think about the situation. Anything that you can do to regain your sense of safety helps to break the stress response that's going on in your body. God will restore you if you let him. Keep in mind, I come from the perspective that God intends for us to prioritize our relationships with him.

[00:11:11] Yet your stress filled, hectic 55 plus hour work week squeezes out time for meaningful connections and drains energy away from other important areas of life. So when you take small actions like this, go with a prayer going to God, it can go a long way to restore your balance and harmony. Now, after you've collected this information for a couple of days or at the end of the week, check to see what patterns you've identified.

[00:11:37] See what you've learned about yourself. These learnings from this daily journal exercise can then be applied with your wellness toolbox and your habit strategy to reduce stress and improve work life harmony. I'm going to talk more about this next week. I just want to make sure that you've gotten some insights collected before we meet again.

[00:11:56] This journal template gives you a framework to build increased self awareness, which can lead toward a transformed life. Any questions on this exercise, email them to Sharon at whisperingfieldswellness. com. As you can see it on the screen, true transformation begins when you acknowledge your weakness and that you can't resolve this on your own, but God can, if you let him, he's got a plan for you to thrive and flourish and will guide and direct you as you grow in your Christian identity.

[00:12:28] In the next episode, I'll discuss developing a plan for stress prevention and reduction. It still builds upon the concepts introduced so far. I know this was a very high level run through on common stress triggers. Click the link to download my journal worksheets to help you cultivate stress awareness.

[00:12:45] There is so much more than just this tool that's shared today. That's included in the download and the email series that goes with it. Or if you want to work with me, click the services link below as a Christian stress recovery coach. I'm here to help you explore more of what underlies your stress and imbalance and ensure that you have the motivation and accountability to make the changes you desire in your life.

 [00:13:08] I can come alongside to support and encourage you and share a few strategies and tools to help you with mindset, lifestyle, and diet changes. See you next episode. Have a blessed day!