National Stress Awareness Day is today, 3rd November. Please see below for a guest post by Tom Gregory, explaining two models to help understand tolerance to stress and to highlight the importance of coping strategies.
Remember that we have resources available under the Welfare and Wellbeing Tab, and you can always email us for a confidential chat with a trainee patent attorney who is also a trained Mental Health First Aider.
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National Stress Awareness Day aims to raise awareness of the effects of psychological distress in the workplace and strategies to address it.
There are many excellent articles covering the topic of stress in great detail. The Yellow Sheet article “How are you, really?” produced for Stress Awareness Month earlier this year explains what stress is, how to tackle and reduce it, and how to identify it in your peers.
Whilst the Day aims to raise awareness of stress, in managing stress it is helpful to have knowledge of techniques for measuring or monitoring (to be aware of) your own stress levels relative to your stress tolerance.
This article explains two illustrative models. The first – the “Stress Vulnerability” model – can be used to understand your tolerance to stress. The second – the “Stress Container” model – highlights the importance of helpful coping strategies.
Stress Vulnerability model
The idea behind the Stress Vulnerability model is that people become ill when the stress they face becomes more than they can cope with. Also, people’s inability to deal with stress – their “vulnerability” – varies. So, problems which one person may take in their stride might be enough to cause another person to develop mental illness.
The graph below may help to explain this more fully. The dotted line indicates a stress tolerance level, or “stress threshold”. An individual with a high level of vulnerability (i.e., a low ability to deal with stress) is more likely to develop mental health issues when high stress levels are present, as they are pushed beyond their stress threshold. In contrast, an individual with low vulnerability would need to experience a great deal of stress before their threshold is exceeded.
So, what causes the differences in people’s vulnerability? What makes one person more vulnerable than another and what can we do about it?
The following are some of the factors that affect vulnerability:
- Genetics: Evidence seems to show a strong genetic element in ability to deal with stress. This cannot be changed, but fortunately there are many other factors involved.
- Coping Style: Certain methods of coping with stress seem to be more effective than others. People who use effective coping skills seem to deal with stress better (that is, have lower vulnerability) than those who don’t.
- Thinking Style: Whilst somewhat cliché, “positive thinking” techniques can help some people to cope with stresses. In particular, an individual’s perception of themselves and the world around them seems to be a significant factor in vulnerability.
- Environment: The way a person deals with stress is often related to their environment, from the state of their home to the neighbourhood they live in.
- Social Skills: People with the ability to communicate their issues to others, in order to seek help, tend to deal with stresses better than those who struggle to speak out when faced with stress. Having a support network is also important here.
“Improving” on each of the factors above can help a person to move away from high vulnerability and toward low vulnerability, thereby increasing the person’s stress threshold. This can have significant impacts on the risk of future or further mental ill health.
In summary, it can be useful to consider your own level of vulnerability, and the level of stress you are experiencing. Prolonged stress above your tolerance threshold might lead to mental ill health. Consider what you can do to reduce your stress and to improve (i.e. reduce) your vulnerability.
Stress Container model
In the Stress Container model, a person’s vulnerability is represented by a container into which everyday stresses flow. A more vulnerable person has a smaller container, which overflows with stress with a relatively low amount of stress. A less vulnerable person has a large container which requires a considerable amount of stress to cause the container to overflow.
The size of the container depends on a lot of factors, including difficult experiences such as being bullied or abused as a child. The more of these difficult issues there are, the smaller container will be, so it will flow overflow more quickly than for someone who has a large container/low vulnerability, who is more able to cope with stress. When the container overflows, difficulties develop.
In the stress container model, helpful coping methods “open the tap” to let stress out of the container. Helpful coping methods include making time for positive experiences, getting adequate rest and asking for help from others. On the other hand, unhelpful coping methods can become additional stressors to fill the container and block the tap. Unhelpful coping methods include working excessively long hours, self-medication with drugs or alcohol and eating unhealthy foods.
It is important to remember that we all use unhelpful coping methods from time to time. Moreover, some unhelpful coping methods come about as a result of other vulnerabilities, or difficult, stressful life experiences, including trauma. They may have been helpful to the person in small doses or under different circumstances before becoming problematic, or may be the only way they know how to cope at the time. However, as with any skill in life, it is possible to develop new, healthier, coping strategies.
Summary
It can be highly beneficial to visualise the stress you are experiencing and where this fits with your tolerance or “vulnerability”. Consider what you can do to reduce your vulnerability, thereby increasing your stress threshold and increasing the size of your stress container. Employing helpful coping methods, to open the tap and allow your stress container to empty to a manageable level, can help to reduce your risk of mental ill health.
The Yellow Sheet 