Based on how it looks to me, anyway.
But after 13+ years of taking grenades in the trenches at my banking job, then finding a way to turn down my stress to an all-time low, I’d like to think I’ve got a good read on what works and what doesn’t.
After all, I'm more Buddha of Banking than I am Wolf of Wall Street. And I wouldn't have it any other way.
Without further ado, here are the 5 stages of de-stressing at work:
1. Get stressed
At the risk of pointing out the sky is blue, there’s no need to de-stress yourself if you haven’t started to stress yourself out in the first place.
If you’re one of the lucky
few who’s been wired for calm from the get-go and stressful events are like water off a duck’s back, you’re already golden. Keep doing whatever you’re doing.
Otherwise know that stressing yourself out is par for the course and hop straight to Stage 2:
2. Get more stressed
This stage is optional.
But in my experience, once stress shows up, the instinct is to build our defences to manage and overcome that stress.
When that doesn’t work, it’s more of the same.
i.e. putting on an extra layer of armour, building those defences stronger & tighter, then digging even deeper until you’re boxed in with no room to push any harder.
Of course, the more stress-tolerant you become, the more stress you can take on. That's the sneaky trap when it comes to stress. But if you don't see this happening, you can end up taking on more & more stress indefinitely.
It was
just the 13 years for me.
Either way, Stage 2 is by far the stickiest stage and lots of doing what you’ve done before, trotting out the same old party lines like “I guess this is helping me do more work” or “well, I need SOME stress in my life” while your patience wears thinner by the day and your energy levels nosedive.
Until maybe you twig that getting better at managing stress will always be a recipe for more stress, not less. And at that point you decide to try a new approach.
Which takes us to Stage 3:
3. Explore the nature of stress
This means asking questions like:
What is stress? Where does it come from? Does it help? What role
does it play? How much say do we have in how stressed we are?
As you might’ve gathered, this is a radically different approach to Stage 2.
It’s not about managing your stress any more. It’s about understanding
stress.
Not even your stress.
Just stress.
When you're wrestling with
your stress, you're the main character in a horror movie. But when you're exploring stress in general, you become the scientist studying the monster. And what I’ve seen is that the more we put that monster under the microscope, the more we stop feeding it and the more it shrinks back into the shadows.
Hence Stage 4:
4. Get calmer
You'll begin to notice that the old sources of stress are no big deal any more.
That might lead
to you getting suspicious about the situations which ARE still a source of stress until they start to lose their bite too.
And on it goes, like a snowball of calm.
Until we end up at the final stage:
5. Pretend to be stressed
Not all the time of course.
Not even most of the time or some of the
time.
But if you make it to stage 4, there will absolutely be times when you look and feel so laidback that it starts to make your colleagues feel uncomfortable.
Your lack of stress might even make your colleagues
feel more stressed!
I remember being in a high stakes meeting at work a while ago when my spidey senses told me that an air of nonchalance was NOT what the doctor called for. So I tensed my shoulders, furrowed my brow and let out a sigh in a performance that Ryan Gosling himself would’ve been proud of.
You might think I’m yanking your chain.
But it’s no different to acting surprised when you hear big news you’ve already known for 3 weeks. It’s just good manners to act stressed sometimes.
So there we have it. The 5 stages of de-stressing at work.
If you’d like 1 on 1 support with turning the dial down on your own stress, look no further than here:
https://waitinglist.followingfulfilment.com
To fulfilment,
Tom