Grace Over Grind: Plan Ahead to Relieve Stress & Improve Work-Life Harmony

(0:01 - 1:36)

Have you noticed that some days you're more sensitive to stressors than others? Something that wouldn't bother you one day, suddenly it stresses you out. Your sensitivity changes based on the reserves that you have and how resilient you are. I call this grit.

There's subtle changes that can signal that you may need to guard yourself more or to build up your reserves. Also, stressors are cumulative compared to your stress tolerance capacity. If you have a lot of small stressful things, minor irritations impacting you, it reduces your capability to handle more.

You're more vulnerable to being pushed over the edge. I'm sure you've had plenty of situations where you're handling everything thrown at you and carrying all of your burdens. There's just a lot going on and you're doing perfectly fine with it.

Then something happens or a situation pops up that you normally can deal with and it just sets you off. It's the proverbial straw that broke the camel's back, that one more tiny burden that is just too much to bear. Your stress response ticks up that next level with that straw, that extra burden that fell on you, and you either come out fighting with unusual sharpness in your tone, impatience, or more easily angered, or you take off in flight to isolate physically or mentally or procrastinate, or freeze where you just give up, or you fawn by taking whatever that person brings just to make the situation end.

(1:37 - 2:27)

It reminds me of 1 Corinthians 10, 12-3. So if you think you are standing firm, be careful that you don't fall. No testing has overtaken you except what is common to mankind.

And God is faithful. He will not let you be tested beyond what you can bear. But when you are tested, he will also provide a way out so you can endure it.

So today, let's go over some of the early warning signs that indicate that we are being tested to the limits of our endurance so they can be built into your stress management plan so that you have a way out and an ability to endure it before you come to your knees or start crawling on your belly and continue to carry your burdens. So let's start with prayer. Lord, thank you for bringing my dear friends to listen today.

(2:28 - 3:08)

Many of us are carrying heavy burdens of stress. We challenge and test ourselves to the limit and carry a lot of responsibility. Personal history has shown that we can take on a lot and withstand a lot more.

Yet as we believe that we are standing firm, we need to be careful that we do not fall. Relationship and health crises occur when we consistently go past our limits and keep trudging forward with our load, even if we have fallen to our knees or crawling on our bellies. And I'm sure some of you recognize those moments.

We keep pushing onwards on self-will alone without turning to you, God, for support and strength. We have limits and you don't. Help us recognize them.

(3:08 - 17:15)

In our willfulness, we need your help to avoid taking on too much. Help us see the way out so we can avoid being tested beyond what we can bear. Help us learn to lean on you for strength rather than try and do it all alone.

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.

In case if we haven't met before, I'm Cher McCall with Whispering Fields Wellness. I'm a stress recovery coach, which means that I help people like you that are struggling with chronic stress, mainly from work, and help them to reduce their stress and to find greater work-life balance so that they're able to thrive and flourish as God intends. In today's episode of Grace Over Grind, we're going to end up covering three different topics and go through an exercise.

The first topic is common low-reserve situations so that you start recognizing when you don't necessarily have the energy and things can become more stressful than normal. Then we're going to get into early warning signs that's an indication of when you're taking on too much work or stress. Then we'll go into signs of breakdown, which means that you've gone past those early warning signs, you've continued to overwork, you've continued to stress, and it's starting to have the next level symptoms in your life.

This is before you get to a full-blown health crisis or relationship crisis. Then we're going to pull this all together and get into an exercise on preventing the crisis because when you recognize these signs you can make the necessary changes in your life so that you don't have that health crisis or relationship crisis. Hopefully you haven't experienced those yet, but if you are you understand what a learning experience those are and how it really motivates you to want to make significant changes in your life.

But for those of you that haven't, we really want you to avoid that learning experience. So our first topic today is to recognize common low reserve situations. Really it just means that you've got depleted energy and you really can't take on as much as you normally would.

So the most common situations are recognized by the acronym HALT, H-A-L-T, and that's hunger, anger, anxiousness, loneliness, and tired. So if you're feeling any of these four it means that if you have a stressful situation or encounter a stress trigger you're more likely to have a higher level stress response than you normally would. So things that wouldn't normally bother you can end up being a significant stress trigger.

So how well do you recognize these now? I take a look at myself when I was in some of my peak workaholic episodes. Because my schedule was quadruple booked at some points in time, always double and sometimes triple booked, I would defer breaks. It would be just absolutely non-stop.

There'd be times when I would end up needing to go take a bio break and I would hold it hold it hold it hold it hold it to the point that I didn't need to anymore. But by the time I actually went and did the bio break I could physically tell how unhealthy that had been because my body was starting to get dehydrated and to recycle things. If you've ever been to that point you can kind of tell because it's very different than a normal time when you go take a bio break to the bathroom.

So you may not be recognizing these very easily right now because once I trained my body to ignore these signs of hunger or needing to go take a bio break and go to the restroom it became much easier and easier to ignore them and then I wasn't getting these clues of when I needed to pause and take a break and take care of things. So as you take a look at your stress journal if you've been doing that exercise how well would you say that you've been pausing and taking care of yourself in these situations? Are you seeing in a lot of your notes and descriptions that you're hungry all the time or you're on edge and irritable? What are these patterns that you're seeing in there? So the classic one that a lot of people recognize is hangry. So since that Snickers Bar commercial a lot of people recognize it.

So when you're hungry and angry at the same time because you're in such a low blood sugar and just anything will set you off. You'll explode even if somebody just comes to talk to you and interrupts a focused activity. So think about how this is showing up in your life.

So have you been taking care of yourself or are you just kind of plowing through and just dealing with whatever the repercussions of that is? So as you think about these situations these are fully avoidable. If you get enough sleep, if you interact with enough people, if you're monitoring your mental and emotional cues, if you're feeding yourself, taking the right breaks, taking care of your body, you can pretty much avoid getting into those four states for a good part of the time. So what tiny habits can you set up to minimize the likelihood of halt being one of your co-triggers? We'll talk about it a little bit more in the next episode.

So do jot down a couple of things to make a list of. We're going to talk more about how do we maintain higher levels of reserves? How do we build our grit so that we can more positively respond to the stressors that occur in our life? Since work is a very stressful environment and we're not going to be able to avoid all of the challenges that come towards us. Moving along into early warning signs.

These are those signals that you get that you're working too much, you've got too much stress. Whatever the signal is that you're getting in your being that you're just doing too much. These could be physical, mental, spiritual, holy spirit yelling at you.

These can be unrelated to your stress reaction. They're the subtle signs that you need to take further action. They're often hard to detect and often overlooked.

These are those times when you're feeling not quite right, that you recognize, okay, I'm always stressed, but this is just that little bit more, or I work a lot, but this is just that extra bit where you feel that you're on that edge. You may even realize that this is how you felt just before you had an even harder time in the past. This was the lead up to some dramatic situation that ended up occurring because you were so depleted or so tapped out.

As you look at your life and what you've been learning through stress journaling, how can you tell when you're starting to dance close to the edge? I think about this is the different categories of consumption patterns, behaviors, thoughts, feelings, sensations, the same kind of things that we've talked about before. What changes do you see that tells you that you're kind of starting to hit that limit? So is it that you're starting to consume more alcohol, sleep aids? Are you grabbing more comfort food than normal? Maybe going to excessive levels compared to where you normally use them? Or in behavior, again, some of these things in my past that I've used to help me identify between sane and insane levels of work was emails at four in the morning or 11 p.m. at night, getting less than four hours of sleep, more than one time per week, chronic lateness because I could never get everything done to stay on time to the plan that I'd committed for. So you'll see these things in your behaviors as well.

Identifying when are you really pushing that edge of too much? When it comes to thoughts, these could be things where you notice, okay, my normal negativity bias, it's now becoming where I'm beating myself up. I'm going for the adrenalization where I beat myself up so much that I get like an adrenaline spike so I can keep going. It can show up as forgetfulness or such a heavy case of brain fog.

You just can't think clearly. For feelings, it could be uncaring, moodiness, irritability that's out of character for you. Maybe those are two earliest signs.

Maybe it's closer to arguments, outbursts. I don't know what your life is so it kind of depends on where you are on that spectrum and what those signs are for you that have meaning. In the category of sensations, these early warning signs could be the inability to experience pleasure, physical discomfort, pain.

So kind of go through these different categories and list out what signs you get that you're taking on too much work or feeling too much stress. As you list these out, it helps you to build greater self-awareness of them. And like I said, some of these you may not have a high sense of awareness of at this point in time.

So if you need to, compare them against what is it like when I'm not stressed or overworked? Do you remember that? Do you remember a time when you were on vacation and finally all of the physical discomfort and all of the stress and the thoughts of work melted away and you were just having a grand time with your loved ones? Remember that moment? You want to compare that moment to, okay, what is too much? When you start having that difficult time and you start feeling out of balance, that's what these early warning signs are about. Another way to think about it to get to these early warning signs is to use a framework like we used back on the Christian Identity Statement, where you're comparing who am I, what am I like on a Christ-like day, good day, okay day, bad day, worst day, that type of categorization and giving you the full spectrum. You can go through on each of those and identify where that ties in.

So for example, as we take a look at the feelings I was just talking about, maybe an okay day, moodiness and irritability are okay, they happen, but on a bad day you're getting into outbursts unexpectedly, you're getting into arguments, then on a worst day you're just pissed off to no end and there's not a chance that you're going to smile. So think about those gradations in each of those categories for different common behaviors that you have and that can help you identify those early warning signs. We'll come back to these in the exercise today to put those in, figure out then how do we use that to help us reduce stress and to improve work-life balance and so that you can regain harmony as you're moving into the space before it continues to progress, where you stumble and fall and lead to your health getting worse, your relationships getting more difficult because of all of the stress and work that you're taking on.

Getting into the last concept that I'm going to talk about today, this is called signs of breakdown. Now these are go one step beyond that early warning sign. So if we look about that spectrum of a Christ-like day, a good day, an okay day, a bad day, a worse day, these means that you're having more worse days than bad days.

So it's not that your life has gone into full meltdown and crisis, you're not having a health crisis or been diagnosed with some stress-related disease because of how chronically stressed you've been or that your relationship is ending and someone's walking out on you because you work too much, you don't give enough time for them. This is those signs that you're starting to get really close to it. If you haven't been there, you may not really recognize it.

If you've been there or gotten really close, you probably have an understanding of what I mean. There is a continuum from I am having a fabulous day and not very stressed out to somewhat stressed out, to a little bit more stressed out, to a little bit more stressed out, to like I'm starting not to being able to handle it. I'm having even more difficulty being able to handle it all and keep it all together versus crash, okay.

So this is where we're talking about where you're over in this spectrum here of having difficulty, a lot of difficulties dealing with it, more worse days than bad days. So this means that you've been working on it and despite your best efforts, you've gotten to the point where just feeling worse and worse or the workload has gotten sky high. There's still time to take action before the crisis occurs.

So so many times people often feel that when they're having the most difficult time that there is very little you can do to help yourself. You think, oh my goodness, I've gone too far. I'm off the edge of this cliff. I can't do anything. But you're not off the edge of the cliff. You're not there yet.

(17:15 - 23:20)

You can still grab hold of that ledge and be able to pull yourself forward and up from it. So when you have prior planning, when you're in a pretty good space, you have that plan. You know exactly what you're going to do.

It's not like you're just grasping at that that tree that's hanging on the edge and expecting to pull it up for dear life. You've put down that ladder of what you're going to be able to have multiple spots to grab on to as you're coming up to that edge and starting to fall over so that you can climb yourself back up and to get to feeling better and have less stress and to get back to a manageable workload so that you have work-life balance. But it takes some forethought because if you do get to that point, you're not gonna have the mental capabilities, the energy, the time to strategically figure your way out of it.

So it's best to do it now before you get to that spot. But even when you are super stressed out and you have a ton of work, there are things that you can do and that's what we want to make sure that through today's exercise you're starting to think about. So getting back to that same kind of question.

So how do you know when you're on that edge? When you're like your foot's starting to come off the edge, you're starting to fall and you need something to grab on to so you don't fall over that proverbial edge and go into a full-blown crisis. So what are those signs in your life? You want to do the same type of thing with your consumption patterns, your behaviors, your thoughts, your feelings, your sensations. Identify what those are.

Use the same approach that you did last time. And again, just take it on that ongoing continuum if you think about it. So using again as an example, let's go with a physical sensation this time.

So if you've got physical discomfort for you, is an early warning sign. Maybe now that next level is that you've got a headache requiring aspirin. If you're anything like I was at the peak of some of my stress and workaholic tendencies, early warning signs is I can get through a couple of days with a headache and popping aspirin and self-medicate.

But it became the much more significant when I was more than 48 hours and it was still going on. And it was getting worse and it wasn't getting better. If it was 48 hours it was getting better, I'd be like, okay, yay, I'm on the other side of it and I am getting myself improved.

But there are that before the breakdown sign you want to be kind of firm on it. So depending on where you are in your life and what's going on, you may have different definitions of between early warning sign and signs of breakdown of what that really means for you and how you can detect it. Moving along, we're going to do the exercise today.

It's all about preventing the crisis. These are your risk management plans, your mitigations to ensure that it's very clear of what you want to do. So think about it like if you don't deal with risk management at work, think of it as like your family emergency plan.

It's in the event of a fire, how are you guys getting out of the house? Where are you all meeting? How are you communicating? If there's a, we lived in a tsunami zone for a while when we were in Southern California. We'd had to have our plan of where are we going to meet if the tsunami comes through and we are coming from different directions. Or when we lived in South Florida, okay, hurricane preparedness, we're going to have all of this ready.

So in case if we lose power on the other side of the hurricane, what we're going to do. So that's what I mean by building these plans so that you have already identified in your stress management plan, what are you going to do when you have these early warning signs occurring in your life and these signs that a breakdown is imminent. You want to prevent the crisis.

You want to do what you can to make it so that things don't get worse. So you're not taking on even more work so that you're not taking on more stress and you're not damaging the relationships that you have around you or continuing to break down your health through this process. So as I mentioned before, you really want to establish these when you're in a good space and you're able to make clear decisions.

So as you go through and you get more and more stressed out because of how stress impacts your cognitive and your emotional responses, it's really hard to kind of figure your way out of it when you're there. So at least if you know that this is something that you're struggling with, let's get some good plans in place on paper so that you can use them. So we're going to start with the early warning signs.

So these are early warning signs. You want to identify when you have so many and you can pick maybe when I have three of these things happening in my life, when I have five of these things happening in my life, whatever your deal is or if they show up at all. I don't know where you are in your stress recovery so pick what makes sense to you.

Then I must do this or avoid this. This is the musts. You want to go through and populate based upon your wellness toolbox ideas, your tiny habits ideologue, your regular routine.

Sometimes you know you've been sacrificing some of those things in your regular routine so you can do that a little bit more. So maybe there's things that you don't sacrifice when you're seeing your early warning signs. So what are those must do's or avoids? So take a moment if you need to pause the video so you can jot those down.

(23:23 - 24:20)

Then we're going to move into your could do's. So what are some things you want to think about doing? So maybe there's particularly a lot of the things we talked about in the wellness toolbox episodes. It's go out with friends, something you don't normally do as part of your regular routine but you know really helps you relax.

It helps you disconnect so that you can de-stress and recharge and unwind. So you want to have a handful of those things just so that they're readily available for you. So that's the early warning sign action plan.

Pretty simple right? Then we get into the signs of breakdown. This is really all must do's or avoids. You're going to give yourself fewer choices because when it's early warning signs, you've got plenty of runway still of how much more stress you can handle, how much more work you can take before like things start really falling apart.

(24:21 - 25:17)

So but now that you're at this next step, you're having more worse days than bad days, you give yourself fewer choices. This is got to be really clear about what you must do or avoid. It's got to be very directive with very clear instructions so that you prevent yourself from falling off of that cliff without some kind of safety net, without some way of getting back up on the other edge.

That's what this phase of action planning is all about. So again if you need to take a moment and pause the video to jot down your ideas. As you go through these exercises there is no right or wrong.

You are unique. Only you and God knows what's going on in your life and your body in terms of what feels right, how much can you take, how much can you endure before you need to take God's way out that he's offering you. And it's going to change as you're on this journey.

(25:17 - 29:58)

Some of the things that you're feeling and experience right now you can handle at really high levels. But once you get to a point where you're better managing your stress and it's a lot less, you can change some of these things and catch it even sooner. So you're not seeing such big swings in your stress levels.

This is all based upon your personal stress resilience and tolerance. And you recognize because some days you don't have the same tolerance that you do on other days because you're hungry, you're angry, you're anxious, you're lonely, you're tired. There may be some adjustments even in those and from that view.

And as you put these you want to really focus on hope. You don't want to focus on self-blame, shame, guilt, any of these things that you do to berate yourself. It will just make the stress worse.

You want to focus on hope and feeling better. And sometimes as you're putting these plans together it's sometimes useful just to ask your loved ones, hey when am I getting to be a little bit of a bear? When do you think it's getting to be that I'm working too much or I'm stressing too much? What are some of those things? Because if you trained yourself to kind of ignore all of these signs from your physical, mental, spiritual being and from Holy Spirit you might need to talk to somebody so you get some increased self-awareness and begin to work on those. And just the fact that you're asking them I'm sure it will help promote some relationship peace because you are asking them for their assistance so that you can get better, so that you can do your part to regain that peace and calm so you can thrive and flourish.

So now that you've got your plans together how can you become more sensitive to those signs that you wrote down? How can you use them to help you to stay more balanced? So give some thought to that one. If you're enjoying journaling or have been able to add prayer to your routine it may be as simple as a couple of behavioral checks is part of your daily self-evaluation or prayer that you're just checking in with yourself to make sure you're not falling into it. Maybe it's a weekly thing not a daily thing.

So whatever's right for you but you need to start increasing your awareness that these signs and these signals that are coming on and you want to keep these action plans of what happens when these signs show up in my life of what you're going to do. You want to keep them in your stress journal somewhere easily accessible so you can come back to them. You don't want random pieces of paper that go get lost because when you're totally stressed out you're not going to remember where you put them.

I guarantee it. So put them somewhere where you're going to use them where they're regularly can be found. If you're not journaling maybe they go in your bible just so that you have ready and easy access without any thinking of where these plans are.

And one of the other things after you've used them for a little bit so today may be too early, ask yourself when are you well enough? When do you get back to okay days and good days so that you don't need to take these extra measures that you just identified? It's an indication of when you can revert back to your regular routines or when you need to make some changes and revert back to those. So as you work with these action plans and these and start recognizing these signs more you can use these in different ways as you manage your stress as you're at different points in the curve of how stressed out you are. I know I ran through these exercises pretty quickly so if you have any questions please email me sharon@whisperingfieldswellness.com. Next week I'll focus more on building physical resilience to stress as part of your stress management.

So it's all about building your grit. How do you increase your reserves and your tolerance and resilience? For in summary this is all about getting in back in tune and in rhythm with how God designed us and it gives us a lot of simple ways to restore energy and to improve that stress tolerance and they work perfectly with tiny habits. I hope this video has given you plenty of ideas for your stress management plan as you are do-it-yourselfing your stress recovery journey.

Click the link to download my worksheet on building tiny habits. You can effectively make change in your life with seconds a day. You can get started on this in five minutes or less.

It is that simple, I promise. If you've been working with this worksheet for a while and watching the videos, if you want to work with me so you can put these stress recovery tools together better and go deeper, 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, to ensure that you have the motivation and accountability to make the changes that you desire in your life.

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.