The Aspiring Psychologist Podcast - Stressed All the Time? A Psychologist Explains What's Really Going On

Starting point is 00:00:00 Everyone experiences stress from time to time, but how do you know when your stress has become too much? Is it when you stop sleeping properly, when your weekends are spent recovering from the week that's gone before, or when you're still functioning but everything feels harder than it should be? And perhaps one of the most important questions is how much of the pressure you're actually carrying belongs to you. Today, I want to help you work out where your stress is coming from, what you can change, and when you might want to start taking that more seriously. I'm Dr. Marianne Trent, a clinical psychologist, and this is psychology actually. Before we get started, if you are watching or listening to this,

Starting point is 00:00:45 I hope it's because you're a fan of the show, a returning fan of the show. I would be so grateful if you've got a moment to just check whether you're already following or subscribing to the channel or the show wherever you're accessing this episode. It is totally free. It helps me to help grow this show, which I hope is something you already love, or something that you will learn to love very soon. Thanks for being here. Now let's take a look at stress. Hi, welcome along to psychology actually. I am Dr. Marianne Trent. It's lovely to have you here. So stress, it is a big one and it affects all of us from time to time, some of us for longer than others. I think one of the first and most important ideas is to think about where this stress,

Starting point is 00:01:34 where this pressure is coming from. And from my own experiences, both personally and clinically, it can be from a variety of different places. Often we can be our own worst enemy and it's that self-imposed pressure that might also feel very critical at times as well, that we're using to kind of spur ourselves on, but it's actually too. our detriment. There's a really, really interesting episode on this I did with Professor Paul Gilbert about compassion and the self-critic that I think you'll love. I will drop details in the show notes or in the description so you can catch up with that one at a later date. If you caught my recent blog series, which is the 2007 Diaries, which were emails that I had sent my friend

Starting point is 00:02:22 in 2007 when I was an early career. trying to get on to doctoral training. There was a lot of stress, there was a lot of pressure, and what I recognised was a lot of it was self-imposed. But as the emails unfold, I actually realised that a lot of it was kind of thinking about wanting to try and please my mum, make her happy. What I'm telling you as a 45-year-old is at some point in your life,

Starting point is 00:02:50 you've got to put that down, you've got to give up trying. You've got to really think about who it is your living, your life for and whether these kind of external metrics or what other people think of you or don't think of you is whether that matters really because we can't please people all of the time if we're setting ourselves up for that it's going to lead to hardship for you it's going to lead to potentially to burnout and to longer term impacts on your mental health and well-being. I'm aware that a lot of pressure can come from your peers as well especially if you're thinking that you've got like set ideas about times that you want to be doing things and you see

Starting point is 00:03:32 you see people around you doing those things or doing the things that you want to do. I'm not immune to that but I do try and hold in mind that old adage comparison is the thief of joy. We are different people than even people we've grown up with. We've had different experiences, we've had different factors that help us, different factors that harm us. I think even when you're looking at siblings, we are not the same people as our siblings. Even I look at my own children who are born two years and ten months apart to the same parents. And they have had very different experiences. One of my children, we moved house when he was 10 months old. And it was a very much kind of before and after phase of that. But also with me being

Starting point is 00:04:26 a second time parent, you know, the second time around, and with my dad being unwell with cancer when I was pregnant with my second child. My experience even of pregnancy and of giving birth and kind of recovering was very different both times around, especially because I already had an older child. So I think we can definitely think we should be the same as our siblings or we should be following the same trajectory. But sometimes we forget to think, do I even want what my sibling wants? Do I even find the same things appealing? And it's like, well, no. So is that a race that you're willing to run? The same with your peers. So if you're striving for the same profession, the same career, then of course it can make you feel like you are

Starting point is 00:05:11 more comparable. But I really do when I reflect on my own career. I do think that I got, for example, onto clinical training at the point when I was ready for it. But I definitely added to the stress and the pressure by, you know, making myself apply for it sooner than realistically I was going to be able to do well. If by chance I'd been given a place to train as a clinical psychologist a year, certainly two years earlier, I would have floundered because I wasn't ready. So it's really worth thinking about your own career, your own experiences, when it comes to that. stress when it comes to that pressure am I genuinely wanting this right now? Do I genuinely feel like I'm ready or maybe am I chancing my arm and if I am I doing that? Why not be more mindful? Why not be more intentional about striving for these goals when the time is genuinely right

Starting point is 00:06:10 for me? You might feel pressure from colleagues, from managers, from from people in your team. You might feel pressure because you've got children or because you want to have children or you want to find a partner or someone to settle down with in order to have children. You might find pressure because you think I should be living by myself by now. I should be renting my own place. I should be buying my own place. The shoulds, the shoulds, the shoulds, the shoulds. That's a lot. Before we even begin to take into account your own health, the health of anyone around you, whether you've got dependents that need you. It is a lot. A lot indeed. So yeah, let's just have that little bit of audit to think about where that pressure is coming from, whether it's self-imposed,

Starting point is 00:06:57 whether it's coming from somewhere else, and just have that audit to start off with. Okay, so once we've done our little check-in and our audit, we're going to look at how much of this stress, how much of this pressure is controllable right now. What can you change? What can you influence? What do you maybe need to accept right now or find a worker, round for. I think this can be a really big factor. We can be really, really awful to ourselves when actually so many of the things that make life stressful for us, we might have very little control over. But again, some of those pressures, you know, really examining those shoulds. For example, if you're living independently at the moment and you're finding a bit of a financial

Starting point is 00:07:43 struggle, thinking about where that pressure is coming from, is there a should, you know, what stops you from getting a housemate or, you know, taking a step in a different direction and renting rather than owning or moving in with another friend, moving in with family members, just to allow yourself to get back on your feet, really. And, you know, you might treat that as a fixed period of time. You're not saying I'm going to go and do that forever. But I think we can really relieve the pressure on ourselves. When we just allow ourselves to do things, you know, for a few days, for a few weeks, for a few months, we set limits around that and then we can re-examine, you know,

Starting point is 00:08:31 perhaps when the dust is settled and just check whether we're still going to make the same decisions again. And I guess we'll juice some of that shame, take some of that shame away. So, for example, if you are making a change in a job or in a living situation or even a relationship, just be like, well, I couldn't have known what I know now before when I didn't have that context, I didn't have that experience, I didn't have that understanding, but now, now I'm here, I do. And I can now make a different decision based on having all of the information available to me. Okay, and the next section is where we're going to look at

Starting point is 00:09:12 whether this stress you're experiencing is acute or chronic. And I'm going to share a little anecdote here to make you feel better about yourself. I was once in an interview for an assistant psychologist for an acute inpatient unit. You might be like, I don't know what that is. Now, if you're going to an interview, do make sure that you know what the terms mean in the job title itself, because I found myself in the very uncomfortable position of someone saying, you know, what is different about acute work to normal work? And I was found lacking. And, you know, well, acute.

Starting point is 00:10:01 It's really bad, isn't it? No, that is not what acute means. Acute means kind of sudden onset without warning, you know, out of the blue. that's kind of what acute means, whereas the opposite of that would be a chronic condition. So, for example, you might have a chronic condition in your mental health, like bipolar disorder, schizophrenia, something like that that is going to be with you, you know, same as diabetes, you know, chronic health condition. But something acute might be, you know, a sudden upset stomach, a winter vomiting bug, or, you know, even a broken arm. You know, I broke my hand recently. That was an acute injury, something that came out of the blue that we'd expect to be able to work through it.

Starting point is 00:10:50 But of course, when we're working with people for acute difficulties, they do have different needs than they would do with a chronic condition because we're needing to probably educate the person themselves a little bit about this in the way that we might not necessarily need to do with something chronic. the same is true with you and stress. If this is something that you're just kind of getting used to noticing and it's not really been around for you before, we may need to educate you a little bit about what stress is and how much of that is, you know, just going to happen and you've got to put up with it. So that's really what the focus of this video is to allow you to take a little bit of an audit and see what changes you could make. When it comes to thinking about whether it's a short-term people,

Starting point is 00:11:38 period of stress or a long-term period of stress, what we might notice is that our sleep might be impacted, our appetite, even our kind of sexual desires. If we're feeling really stressed, might be different than they usually are. You might notice it in your shoulders, that's where I notice it. And I notice it in my breathing as well. I'll be like, come on Marianne, take a breath. Just taking a moment to really check in with my own window of tolerance. And sometimes I'll do that soothing rhythm breathing cycle.

Starting point is 00:12:17 So in through the nose, hold it for a moment out through the mouth. Hold that for a moment. I might do that three times just to reset myself, to get myself firmly back comfortably, hopefully, within my window of tolerance. I notice when I've got that tension in my shoulders, I can have a tendency to wear my shoulders as earrings, but they make much better shoulders than they do earrings.

Starting point is 00:12:43 So just checking in with my body, noticing whether I'm holding any tension in my jaw, and then I guess looking at how my concentration is as well. If you feel like your thoughts are moving a million miles a minute, that can be really hard and can be an indication of stress. I want to just pay a quick check-in to your physical health, to your heart, to your blood pressure. If you feel like maybe things aren't quite so healthy for you right now and your stress levels are high, please do consider getting a blood pressure meter reading, which usually you can do by popping into a local pharmacy, and they'll do that for you for free.

Starting point is 00:13:24 And if there's any problem with your blood pressure, they'll be able to give you the next steps that you might well take, which could involve booking an appointment with your nurse practitioner at your GP surgery, if you're in the UK, or alternatively with your GP. but we do know that stress can impact on our physical health. So please make sure if you're concerned about any symptoms, that you do check those out. Okay, let's think about the costs of this

Starting point is 00:13:49 because I think we can very much delude ourselves that it's okay. Like we can keep doing this to ourselves. But when we really take a little bit of a laser focus in and look at what the costs of this stress to you are, I think it can really help put things in perspective. For me, sleep is a big one. I'm not usually willing to squeeze my sleep because it makes me more rubbish in all other areas of my life. I'm a much worse parent. I'm a much poorer quality, more irritable wife when I haven't slept.

Starting point is 00:14:23 So it's just in everybody's best interest if Marianne gets at least eight hours of sleep a night because I'm just, I can be foul without it. I do not cope well in heat. So, you know, I try and keep a fan around, especially when it's been very hot lately. If you want to get a sensible answer out with me, don't keep me hot and don't make me overtired because frankly those are not good conditions for me. So if you're constantly overtired, you know, that then becomes a chronic condition in itself. So, you know, I have to be quite bounded about myself. I put my phone to sleep at 9.40 every night, the screen goes dark, and that tries to act as a little bit of a reminder. Don't go on me. Don't go on here. You know, I'm dead to you. Similarly, I've got a reminder on my watch telling me to go to bed. You know,

Starting point is 00:15:18 at the same time, really, 940, 945. I mean, I'm fairly entrenched in my habits now. I couldn't believe it when I was on training for the first time, and my supervisor at the time told me that she went to bed about 9 o'clock. I was like, you what? I think you what? But absolutely, when I was in the thick of it with my children, being very young, and I was managing, working full-time, I used to go to bed at 8.45, and I just, I couldn't think of any way around it, but those were the factors that I could control, the things that I could change.

Starting point is 00:15:54 What I couldn't change was the fact that my child, my youngest child, is a really early riser. And, you know, before he started sleeping through, he would wake many, many times, like seven times a night. So just if I could try and get like an early chunk of sleep, so I could be asleep before midnight, you know, for a good few hours before midnight, hopefully if he wasn't waking up at that point, it would just feel like I'd put a little bit more energy tokens to. into that bank. And if you're all having this acute, stressful experience, it's whether you can kind of lean into just making some short-term changes to your sleep, which might make a big, big difference for you. It might even be that you need to make longer-term changes if you're always in sleep deficit, whether you can just be like, actually I, I care about current me, but I also care about future me. You know, I don't think I am just here for a good time.

Starting point is 00:16:52 I would hope to think that I'm here for a long time, and therefore I need to invest in my own physical health, wellness, really. That's what I'm saying. So, you know, why is it okay for you to exist on five and a half hours sleep or less sometimes? Because you want to be up scrolling or you feel like you need some time to yourself at the end of the day. For me, I needed to invest that time in sleep. And it did mean that every day could feel a little bit monotonous, especially when the children were young. It didn't feel like I'd necessarily achieved like a thing or had that kind of relaxing sense of, but for those short period of time, although I know when you've got children,

Starting point is 00:17:38 they can feel like long periods of time, I needed to spend my downtime where I wasn't immediately being needed by my kids sleeping. That's kind of how it boiled down for me. Because if we are knackered, then our physical health might well be impacted on as well. So our stress and our kind of short-term habits, whether we might be drinking, more units to cope with our stress the way we feel, that can impact on our physical health, our well-being. That steals from our sleep as well, of course, because we don't begin to start to get the benefit from sleep until we've processed any units of alcohol. And, you know, all of this stress, you know, when we're thinking about the costs, it's a joy stealer.

Starting point is 00:18:18 It's not going to make life feel very enjoyable unless, of course, you're looking at dopamine rewards. If you've got acute periods of stress followed by, you know, either a short-acting dopamine hit of reward for something that you get, that might feel like that's okay in a short term. But in longer term, we're really doing to think that life is supposed to feel enjoyable. It's not supposed to be all about stress, constant, constant, constant, because that will wear you down. That will impact on your relationships, both of your friends, with your family, maybe your intimate relationships, your partners, your children. Irritability is not fun. And what we don't

Starting point is 00:18:58 want is for you to constantly feel like you're ebbing and flowing. You're getting yourself back to feeling like you're able to go again while the time you're walking out the front door in the morning. But then by the time you come home again, you're so stressed, you're so overwhelmed, you're so depleted that you've then got to spend the whole time putting yourself back together again. I would really just encourage a little bit of reflection about whether it needs to be that way and whether there are any factors you can do so that things feel more comfortably within your stride. Things are also worth having a look at when this longer term stress might be contributing to a presentation of what we call burnout. I don't have time to cover that here, but I did a really lovely series called Burnout Bites with Dr. Claudeau.

Starting point is 00:19:43 Plumley, which is all about what burnout is and how it differs to a number of different things, including stress. There'll be details in the show notes and in the description. And the elephant in the room might be that if you are working right now, this stress might mean that actually you need to take a period of time off work so that you can address some life factors so that you can sort things out so that you can be kinder to yourself and get that breathing space to feel really well so that whatever your job is, that you feel like it's something that you are looking forward to, that you are enjoying. And the same thing with, you know, if the stress is coming from parenting or children or, you know, your friends, your family, how can you ask for help to

Starting point is 00:20:26 allow yourself some time to make some changes to help things feel more comfortable, more achievable and less like they're depleting you, more like they are enriching you. Just before we finish, I want to have a little bit of a kind of quick fire consideration. Number one, stress can come from our own personal values as well and how we feel that we're measuring up against them. So doing a little bit of a values-based exercise can be really helpful. If you'd like a full list of values, you can Google Act full list values. That will bring that up for you.

Starting point is 00:21:03 And you can have a little check-off about what you think your personal values are for your life, for your relationships, for your work, for many different life domains. Because sometimes that stress can be that conflict, that clash with our values, because it doesn't feel like we're living to our authentic self. Next is that high functioning stress is still stress. Even though you're getting all of your stuff done, it doesn't mean that that's okay. It means that you're very efficient, but it doesn't mean that that should be your norm. Thinking about our weekends and whether they are just a recovery debt.

Starting point is 00:21:39 So very much like they might be in the midweek where you feel like you're just like, oh. And then at the weekend, you just need to recharge and rest yourself so that you can physically carry on with your Monday morning tasks. It shouldn't really be that way. I do think the weekend should be a way of having a very different structure than your work week structure, but things that you enjoy, things that build you up, things that you look forward to, as well as, of course, some rest and recharge, but it shouldn't just be this constant ebb and flow. Having a little look at the borrowed expectations.

Starting point is 00:22:13 Is this actually my goal? Is it someone else's goal? Is this my timeline or someone else's timeline? Really do examine that. Stress, of course, lastly, before we finish, can narrow our perspective. Sometimes something comes into your inbox and you're like, I must do this immediately, but just taking a moment. to think, actually, I've got more pressing concerns that I need to address and whether I can

Starting point is 00:22:40 add that to my to do list and I can come back to that because I know it is important. But right now, you know, I need to have this laser focus, but it can also stress can mean that we're just, we're very blinkered. We're not seeing other perspectives. So speaking to someone that you trust, someone that you care about, someone who's on your side. And that might include a therapist, a psychologist, can really help you to kind of consider other ways through when it's feeling really challenging. And one thing I'm going to leave you with is if you could reduce your life stress in this particular domain that you're struggling with at the moment by 10%, what would that look like? What could you do? What changes could you make? I'd love to know

Starting point is 00:23:21 in the comments whether you're watching on YouTube or on Spotify, you can make comments.

The Aspiring Psychologist Podcast - Stressed All the Time? A Psychologist Explains What's Really Going On

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