While some amount of stress is normal, too much stress can overwhelm us and prolonged stress can lead to health problems.
Imagine you have a bucket. This bucket represents your capacity to cope with the ups and downs that you face in everyday life. Now imagine that each stressful event you face is poured into your bucket like water. Before too long the bucket is full, and you can’t hold anymore and the bucket overflows.
It’s important to learn to manage stress so that your bucket doesn’t become too full to manage. But how?
- Try not to take on too much at once
- Resolve personal conflicts
- Make time to do what you enjoy
- Strike a work/life balance
- Exercise
- Stay connected
- Try some relaxation techniques
Each coping strategy you have becomes a little tap in the bottom of your bucket, and using these strategies will help you let out some of that water. This will help to keep the water in your bucket at a manageable amount.
Have a think about what is filling up your stress bucket; try to identify things that don’t help and come up with solutions or strategies that do help.
For example:
| Stressful thing/situation | Unhelpful actions | Helpful actions
|
| Worrying about the Coronavirus | Spending lots of time focusing on fake news. | Only checking one reliable source of news (e.g. BBC news) once a day. |
*Developed from an idea by Brabban and Turkington (2002)