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[THREAD] I want to talk a little bit about stressors. They are everywhere in our environment and contribute a lot to our anxiety/depression. Living in an environment without any stressors is not realistic. Living with too many of them is also bad.
A stressor can be a task or something that is outside of our control. For example, sitting in too much traffic is a stressor, work, school can be stressors even if we love them. Family can be a stressor. The pandemic and its consequences is a stressor.
The more stressors we have, the more likely it is to affect our mental health. Therefore, it is important to recognize where all stressors are coming from. Let’s take a moment and write down all the stressors in our life that we can think about. Chances are we have quite a few.
After we have identified what all our environmental stressors are, let’s see if there are some we can reduce or completely eliminate. For example, if our work is a huge stressor because we don’t like our supervisor, let’s look on the side for another job until we can leave.
However, for the most part, most of our stressors are outside our control, which is why it is important to cope with them as best we can and to balance it out on the other side with a lot of self care and relaxing. The more stressors we have, the more self-care we need.
It is basically like a scale where we need the same weight on both sides. Furthermore, we also need to externalize as much as possible. For example, if traffic was really bad and you encountered many bad drivers, call a friend or family member right after and just complain.
We all know people who externalize right away. If someone cuts them off, they yell and talk to themselves about how bad drivers are. What these people are doing well is externalizing a big stressor right away. The sooner during or after the stressor we talk about it, the better.
The reason why all of this is so important is because for most people, our depression/anxiety doesn’t come from one source. It is that cumulative impact of stressors that we repress. Overtime, our mind can’t keep repressing all of that and gets exhausted and it comes out worse.
Taking time to identify and manage them is well worth it in terms of knowing where most of our stress is coming from and increase our self-care and externalizing as our stressors increase. Even things like keeping up with bills and keeping track of our bank account counts.
