Managing Your Own Stress

The Low Arousal Approach to managing behaviours of concern, developed by myself and my colleagues at Studio 3, focuses on managing crisis situations by being calm, regulated, and non-threatening. This is a difficult thing to achieve when you are confronted with individuals who are often highly distressed and dysregulated. My colleagues and I work with and support individuals who can be experiencing high levels of #stress and #trauma. It is key in those situations to understand that practitioners of all kinds need to have a highly reflective understanding of their own stress and trauma. We are not perfect creatures. Stress in many ways is neither negative or positive: it is a biological reaction that has survival value.

In the following example from my book ‘The Reflective Journey: A Practitioner’s Guide to the Low Arousal Approach’ (2019), I outline a real-life experience that typifies how our own stress impacts our judgements.

‘Late one night I was awoken from my sleep by a loud banging and crashing sound in the kitchen downstairs. I experienced a heightened state of arousal and a surge of adrenaline, followed by the thought, ‘Is someone in my house?’?Instead of calling the police, I listened intently to check if I heard more sounds, my alertness most likely aided by the spike in my cortisol levels. Upon hearing no more unusual sounds, I decided to sneak downstairs to investigate myself. My mind was racing: ‘What if there are burglars in my house? What should I do? How many of them are there?’ Had I been thinking instead of catastrophising, I might have made a lot of noise and turned on all the lights in an effort to scare the intruder away. In hindsight, I was probably using System 1 (Kahneman, 2011) thinking, and therefore not really thinking sensibly at all. My cortisol levels were very high indeed. I was hyper-alert for any more sounds, but still the only thing I could hear was the washing machine on a spin cycle. Upon further investigation, it became clear that the crashing noise was made by a number of objects which had been on top of the washing machine. Sometime after switching the machine on before bed, the objects place on top of it had fallen to the ground with the movement of the drum. It took me nearly half an hour to get back to sleep as cortisol was surging through my system.’

Although I describe this example in my book, the context is important. I am an individual who often thrives on analysing complexity, and advising and supporting people in very risky situations. To do this, I need to be able to regulate my own stress and arousal. Many models of stress have been developed. One of the most widely used was developed by US researchers Richard Lazarus and Susan Folkman (1984). They defined stress as a relationship between a person and the environment which is seen by the person as taxing, exceeding their resources, or endangering their well-being. This means that when we come across a stressor or threat that we feel we cannot deal with, our body reacts with both a biological and psychological response.

First, we perceive the stressor or threat and evaluate whether we able to cope with it. If this demand exceeds our resources, a stress response is triggered. The autonomic nervous system is activated, and increased levels of the stress hormones Adrenaline and Cortisol are released. The autonomic nervous system also controls body functions such as heart rate, respiration, body temperature and fear responses. When we become stressed, this results in our pulse and blood pressure increasing, as well as our breathing changing its rhythm and volume. We begin to sweat and can become easily startled. The sympathetic nervous system takes immediate action to mobilise these systems. In contrast, the parasympathetic nervous system focuses on activities that do not require immediate action.

Our body reacts to the threat and becomes alert, and in a matter of seconds we appraise our situation and decide whether to fight, run away or to freeze, rooting ourselves to the spot. All of this occurs in a split second. These responses to stressors are a basic part of all human physiology. From an evolutionary perspective, we require systems that will warn and alert us about threats to avoid being killed in the age of sabre-toothed tigers and other fearsome predators.

Even if we believe that we are good at managing highly stressful situations, the long-term impact of constantly triggering the warning system in the body can lead to negative effects on our physical and emotional well-being. For example, the hormone cortisol is secreted after the initial threat is detected, which creates a physiological response commonly known as an ‘adrenaline rush’. Adrenaline reduces quite rapidly, but cortisol remains, maintaining our alertness which is valuable to our survival. If you are in a risky situation, you want to maintain an alert status and be vigilant that there are no more threats, even after the initial threat has passed.

As a Clinical Psychologist, I spend a great deal of time helping people to think about how they become less stressed and dysregulated when supporting highly challenging situations. It is easy for people to provide simple statements that are hard to achieve in practice. My favourite example is the phrase ‘Keep Calm.’ This is a great sentiment, but how do we do this in practice? The reality is that we are not perfect individuals, but we can develop better coping strategies which will not only have an impact on our own behaviour, but the behaviour of the people around us.

The Low Arousal Approach to managing behaviours of concern is growing in popularity. My colleagues and I at Studio 3 Training Systems try to get individuals to not only think about dealing with day-to-day crisis situations, but more importantly how working with individuals in these circumstances can help them learn to regulate their own behaviour. If you want to find out more information, in particular about our online Low Arousal Training that takes place every week, you can visit our website: www.studio3.org/low-arousal-online.

I will always encourage people to develop their own individual stress management plans. When developing your own stress management plan, it is important to concentrate on keeping physically healthy and most importantly of all, to have a range of activities or interests that help you switch off from the world around you. My personal example of waking in the night and being overwhelmed was actually triggered by a cumulative effect of stress over a period of months. I have gotten much better over the years at recognising these ‘symptoms.’ These days, if I have a rare period of not being able to sleep, I force myself to take a break and immerse myself in an activity (reading, computer games, or watching a funny movie). Whilst this does not guarantee preventing such occurrences, I want to stress to the readers that no person is impervious to the psychological effects of stress.