Grace Over Grind: Create Action Plan to Relieve Stress & Improve Work-Life Balance

[00:00:00] Hello, I'm Sharon McCall with Whispering Fields Wellness. Today on Grace Over Grind, I'll discuss the importance of having a plan to deal with common stress triggers to reduce stress and improve work life balance. You don't want to be figuring out what to do when you're in the heat of the moment. This episode will focus on avoiding, mitigating, or dealing with these triggers.

[00:00:21] 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. Help us guard our hearts. Stress can cause us to focus on negativity, pessimism, fear, or pain instead of on you.

[00:00:41] Whenever stress and overwork become too great, may we remember our limits and turn to you. Help us be wise, as there's only so many actions we can take on our own to prevent and reduce stress in our lives. We need your help to see what the next right action is. Give us clarity on what steps you want us to take and when.

[00:01:02] 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. In Jesus name, Amen.

[00:01:18] Today, I'll cover a high level view of stress management. Four different types of action plans that you need, which are, what do you need to do in your routines to build resilience. What can you do to avoid triggers? How can you minimize stress when a trigger occurs? And how can you reduce stress after you're triggered?

[00:01:38] And then we'll do an exercise about putting together your common triggers action plan. Today's focus will continue from last week on external triggers. Remember, external is anything that's outside of your body, mind, and spirit. In a future episode, we'll discuss internal triggers and how to action plan those as they require a different approach.

[00:02:00] Stress is a part of life. We are not going to live stress free. Stress can be helpful when we are in an uncomfortable situation and grow from it. Yet when stress becomes chronic and pervasive, it has ill effects physically, mentally, relationally, and spiritually. Stress and negative coping behaviors just wear you down and drain you.

[00:02:20] In my experience, stress feeds on itself. When I got stressed about tight work deadlines, in my single minded focus and drive, I skipped breaks. And got hangry, you know, that horrible hungry and angry all at the same time. As a result, I would be irritable and overreact whenever somebody interrupted me.

[00:02:39] Which would then just add tension in the relationship the next time I had an interaction with that person. Also, I would beat myself up afterwards for not controlling my response. But of course, because I was so focused on my deadline, I didn't address that immediately. Because it would have distracted me.

[00:02:57] And so, as you can see, This kind of perpetuates itself. One thing leads to another and it just spirals on. I'm sure you've seen some of this pattern in your life. Chronic stress can lead to chronic disease. Stress magnifies other risk factors for chronic disease as well. So it's important to break the cycle before stress causes a breakdown.

[00:03:18] Whether you recognize it or not, you are managing stress right now. You are making choices in your actions to manage your stress right now. It's just that likely Since you're stressed, drained, exhausted by work, you're probably responding with more negative coping behaviors than positive ones. And this is why in the last episode I asked you to start stress journaling.

[00:03:42] With self awareness, you begin to recognize your automatic responses. Stress is hardwired in us as a survival tactic. So your reaction to stressors is where whatever you believe at that moment is most beneficial for your survival. Once a stress response is triggered, you're not responding from the thinking and emotionally intelligent parts of your brain.

[00:04:05] You're responding from the reptilian survival part of your brain. You have to be calm. Being able to think clearly, you have to be calm, being able to make sure that you have your emotional intelligence in place as you're dealing with social interaction. And this is really important, so I want to make sure that I emphasize this again.

[00:04:26] Your perception of stress is instantaneous. Your body physically responds to that stress trigger faster than a speed of thought. Once you are in a stressful response, react and perform automatic behaviors, you'll unconsciously or subconsciously get you the best outcome. This is not about thinking about it.

[00:04:47] This is the reason why you can jump out of the way of an oncoming car without even engaging or even being aware that you jumped out of the way and that car did not hit you. Right now you are doing the best that you can with your current belief system and habits. And even if you're engaging in what your conscious mind identifies as negative coping behavior, as Paul and Roman says, doing what you don't want to do.

[00:05:17] It's like when you're snapping, when you're in that stressed out, hangry mode, the words are out of your mouth before you even realize it as an offensive reaction. Remember, this is all about fight and flight. But when you say sharp things to people and to make them go away, it is your fight kicking in and being defensive at the same time.

[00:05:39] There is an underlying belief inside of experiences to determine that whatever your response is, that that will result in the best outcome over a different one. And this is all automatic. This is all at the subconscious and unconscious level. So, this is why, through journaling, we can bring this up into self awareness, and bring it into more of our conscious thought, and then start being able to build habits that allow us to change what those automatic reactions are.

[00:06:13] Stress management requires proactive and reactive strategies. When you are stressed, there are stress reduction tactics that can help you calm down and relax. These are reactive strategies. You're already stressed, and then you're looking to calm down. So some people focus mainly on this part of stress management.

[00:06:31] Meditation, prayer, yoga, stretching, movement, or other self soothing tactics. So think for a moment about some of the things that you do when stress gets to be too much. And if you need to, take a look at your journal and just take a look at what you recorded through the course of the week. Do you go for alcohol, tobacco, maybe it's difficulty falling asleep, so you grab sleep aids, stress eating, donning out with media, crashing just because you're like, done, and you don't, can't handle anything else.

[00:07:03] Are your current behaviors hurting or helping you? Are they positive or negative coping behaviors? So are these things helping you to calm down in a way that you want to support your Christian identity? Or are they just taking you further away from it and or potentially adding more stress to it that's going to end up building in a future situation.

[00:07:29] To pause the video for a moment, so quickly jot these down. Feel free to pause the video when there are other activities for the course of the rest of this video. Let's move on to proactive approaches. Proactive approaches to stress management are all about having plans in advance to prevent stress and to reduce stress responses.

[00:07:53] Knowing your stress triggers, you can take steps to avoid or reduce the likelihood of encountering a trigger. For example, let's say that your stress for the day, it all depends on how your commute is. Do you pick the longer, more relaxing drive, or do you take the stress inducing route that has a lot of congestion?

[00:08:15] That's what I mean by avoiding the trigger or reducing the likelihood of encountering it. Similarly, you can take steps and plan to mitigate or minimize your response as you experience a stress trigger. So think about some of the things that you currently do to avoid or defuse stressful situations.

[00:08:36] Some of these negative coping behaviors might be to argue, avoid, isolate, shut down, passive aggressive, burying yourself in more work. So, as you think about your current behaviors and what you put into your stress journal, what's hurting and what's helping you? What's positive and what's negative coping behaviors?

[00:09:00] So take a moment just to jot that down. In my opinion, though, the most effective approach to addressing stress is to combine changes in beliefs that are core to your identity with behavioral changes like the ones that we've just discussed. It is more than relieving the symptoms or changing the environment or making different decisions.

[00:09:25] It's about changing ourselves, in my opinion, maturing in Christian identity. Even when there is a spiritual war inside, and 

you've got the voices arguing on both sides, and when it feels like it's going on all around you, you can get to the feet of Jesus. When you can't manage, God can, and you can choose to let Him.

[00:09:49] This is why I keep bringing you back to your Christian identity. When you calm your insides, when you stop the arguing of the angel and the demon that are sitting on your shoulder, regardless of what is happening externally, you are able to reduce stress. We can change our thoughts and behaviors when we change what we believe.

[00:10:10] Let's get deeper into today's topic. Action plans to manage stress. These can be both proactive and reactive, depending on what you want to do. The first part of setting effective action plans returns to the topics of wellness toolbox and tiny habits. These are in prior episodes. So feel free to go back and review.

[00:10:31] In the first episode, you picked a Christian identity statement. What are some different routines that you can build in to your day to increase your resilience, to make it so that you've got more energy And capability to deal with whatever's thrown at you. Maybe when you went through and did the habit cloud, you're already identified some.

[00:10:53] So take a look at your notes and just jot these down. And so as habits become more automatic and ingrained, you can do them without thinking. So, This is part of how this helps with the stress response, because you want to start building these things in, rewarding them, getting them so hardwired that your reptilian, your survival brain will do those behaviors.

[00:11:14] So, as an example, what is your current meeting prep routine? In the minutes before you call in or head into a new meeting, what are you doing to help yourself start off with a calm, emotionally neutral, and focused mindset? You don't want to carry anything into the meeting from whatever you just experienced.

[00:11:33] So if you're stressed about something else, you don't want to end up bringing it into this meeting, nor do you want to end up bringing in worries about something that's in the future, that's later in the day, your upcoming interactions or outcomes that you want from this, from this meeting. So do you need to create a small buffer of time with a few behaviors like prayer or getting organized or mentally and emotionally shifting gears to be in the present?

[00:11:57] Because If you allow it to snowball or you're taking and layering stress onto itself, it's just going to make your day that much harder. So does it make sense for you to create this small little space and custom design a handful of these behaviors being able to help you? And soon they'll become automatic once you go through and you repeat that habit plan enough times.

[00:12:21] So that's the first part. The second part of setting an effective action plan to reduce stress is to see if you can avoid a stress trigger. So this has to be done positively. You know that you can't always avoid that one person in the office that frustrates you all the time because you got to work with the guy the bottom line.

[00:12:43] So if you think about that example that we did earlier about which way do you want to commute for your traffic, there's a choice there. You can change your environment and to being able to make the decision to have the one that avoids the most. Likely stress trigger. So, for environmental and consumption types of stress triggers, trying to avoid the trigger is very effective.

[00:13:08] If you don't want to eat the donuts that the admin puts out every Friday, and the temptation to stress eat is high, stay out of the area until they're gone, or ask if they could switch to something healthier. If having your work bag or work phone in the living room reminds you of everything still to be done at work and guilts you into working instead of spending the evening with loved ones, just leave it in the trunk of a car or on a charger somewhere.

[00:13:31] You want to change the environment and the behaviors that you do so that you are less likely to have the trigger engaged. That's what we mean by avoidance. So going back for a moment though, it's that person in the office that frustrates you. So I know you can't really avoid them, but there may be another way that you can end up eliminating the trigger.

[00:13:54] So from your journal work, are you uncovering a little bit more of the why this person frustrates you? Maybe there's something you can do to resolve the situation. So it's not stressful to interact with the person anymore. So let me share a little bit of a story about a similar situation that I had. And it took a little bit of inner archeology to figure this one out.

[00:14:16] There was this one guy that irrationally, he just got on my nerves. I just wanted to run away. Every time I talked to him, he never did anything to me. He was a nice guy, a little socially awkward. That was it. And because I didn't get along with him, he kept trying harder and harder to fix the relationship.

[00:14:34] So, I knew I had to deal with this and figure a way to being able to get this work. I finally identified that there was someone from my childhood who would use head and shoulder shampoo, was a touchy talker, and would regularly corner me on the bus, so I felt trapped every time I was in a conversation with a person.

[00:14:52] I had overlaid a memory of this person from childhood onto this guy at work because of using the same shampoo and body language. Once I broke the emotional connection to the memory, I was able to have less stressful interactions with co workers because I didn't, in my childhood part of my brain, keep thinking that this was that same guy from childhood.

[00:15:13] This was a different person. I'm at a very different stage in my life and able to handle it. And so we were able to repair our relationship. This is another way that you can end up avoiding a stress trigger because you get to the root of the issue and it's done, it's broken. Now let's move on to the third part.

[00:15:29] Okay. How do you proactively plan to reduce stress when you encounter a trigger? You want to identify when you can reasonably predict a trigger, or if there's ways to detect it before a stressor occurs. As an example of the latter, maybe whenever you're hungry, you're angry, anxious, lonely, or tired, just think about it.

[00:15:51] everything, no matter what, becomes more stressful. So your early detection may be when, and part of your action plan is that when you're feeling one of these, that you just take a break and you address the issue so that you have better resilience for anything else that comes up. So that's the way to being able to, to have a plan when, for what to do when you have that detection of a potential stress trigger.

[00:16:20] Now going back to your stress journal, you may have noted a few patterns that can allow you to start predicting people, places, activities, or things that stress you out. You'll want to develop a plan of what you will do to build resilience beforehand or to escape from that stressful situation. For example, the coworker that keeps asking for favors escapes by saying maybe or no.

[00:16:47] It's absolutely appropriate to some of these requests so that you don't overcommit yourself with more work and get stressed out about it. The fourth part of your action plan is to reduce stress. After the trigger occurred, you'll want it in your toolbox. A handful of simple and easy, calming and relaxing exercises.

[00:17:07] The sooner that you can get yourself calmed down, the less impact stress has on you. If you tend to comfort yourself with alcohol or food, you'll want these to be hard to access and have alternatives that are easy to reach. I recommend prayer, focusing on your Christian identity before you choose anything else.

[00:17:26] Four different parts of the action plan are 1. What do you need to do in your routine to build resilience? 2. What can you do to avoid triggers? 3. How can you minimize stress when a trigger occurs or to be able to detect that stress Sooner and being able to take action and for how can you reduce stress after you've been triggered?

[00:17:55] But those are the four points that we ended up covering today. All of these parts of your action plan can be addressed through tiny habits. Besides addressing the triggers, you can also adapt any negative coping behaviors that you identify in your patterns to positive one. You see how all of these things are coming together.

[00:18:16] You use your Christian identity to being able to keep you on the right track. Know what are positive coping behaviors. What it is that you want to do. What is going to end up benefiting you to reduce stress and improve your work life harmony. Habits. These are the action plans that you put into place to make the improvements in your life.

[00:18:36] You plant these little seeds and you let them grow and to transform you. And through these action plans, through this self awareness, you're going to end up continuing to add and to identify more things for you to be able to improve upon to have that transformation. Let's go through a short exercise pulling all of this information together.

[00:18:58] By now you should have a lot of notes and observations from what you put in the journal to some of the questions that were asked today. So let's walk through an exercise using your daily stress journal with the weekly review on cultivating positive growth. This is available for download from the link in the description.

[00:19:17] Once you have a few days of entries in Finding Weeds, you want to find patterns. Just pick one, any pattern that you see. There are a few questions on the worksheet to help you explore this further and see where you can make changes. You want to capture learnings in your journal. You want to look at the situation, your perception, thoughts, feelings, sensations, reactions, and impacts on others.

[00:19:42] For each of these, you want to assess each element to see where you can and want to grow. So when I say each element, I mean your perceptions, your thoughts, your feelings, your sensations, reactions, and the impact on others. And keep coming back to your Christian identity. Use the exercise that we did the first week, Christ like behavior compared to a bad day, an okay day, and a good day, if needed, to help you get some ideas and more perspective.

[00:20:11] As you identify the area of growth that will help you reduce stress and improve work life harmony, you want to put that into the habit creation activity from two weeks ago. What habit cloud do you want to build? As you mind map each of the potential behaviors to build that habit or routine, keep in mind the four different parts of your stress prevention and reduction action plan.

[00:20:33] So this is a combination of proactive and reactive strategies. Thank you. Then you want to go through the rest of the steps to design and implement your habit. Anything that you don't turn in through a new habit to implement for the next week, you want to keep on a log for when you're ready to add more.

[00:20:52] And don't overwhelm yourself! You already have so little time and energy because of how stressed out you are. It took years to get to today, and you're not going to solve it overnight. Unless God grants you the ability to stay calm in the face of any stressor. You never know what miracle he can end up giving you.

[00:21:10] This is the basic weekly process that underpins stress recovery. Between these episodes, the habit building guide, the journal templates, and the supporting emails that you get for the download, you will have enough to start DIYing your stress recovery. All the links you need are in the description below.

[00:21:29] I want you to break free of chronic stress and to have greater work life harmony. I believe that through these simple, short exercises, you can make the changes you desire. Any questions on the exercise, email them to Sharon@whisperingfieldswellness.com.

True transformation begins when you acknowledge that through your self will and efforts, you have not been able to resolve your stress or your tendency to prioritize work over everything else in your life, but God can, if you let him.

[00:22:07] God's got a plan for you to thrive and flourish and will guide and direct you as you grow in your Christian identity. If you grab this and keep looking on this on the self will, it's going to just continue in the same circles that you have it because you've been working on this already for a while. So in the next few episodes, we'll explore more topics in the wellness toolbox, go further into habit building and cover personal stress triggers.

[00:22:36] I know this was a high level run through on action planning based on stress journaling. So click the link to download my journal worksheets to help you cultivate greater awareness. There's more than just the tools shared today in the download. Or, if you want to work with me, Because you've been trying this DIY approach for a little while and you see the benefit is it and you want to go deeper, click the services link below.

[00:23:01] When you work with me, I will take you into behavioral analysis and coaching deeper into addressing your stress and tendency to overwork. We'll be able to fine tune your approach to habit building. 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.

[00:23:24] 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 in the next episode! Have a blessed day!