Feeling stressed can be hard on your business and your personal well-being. How you handle stress will determine the long-term effects on your physical and mental health. If you ignore stress over a long period of time, then you’ll be heading for burnout.

In the three lessons in this module, you’ll become more aware of your current level of stress and learn ways to deal with it and move towards a balanced lifestyle.

Lesson 1: How Do You Know You’re Stressed?

Recognize Your Stress Symptoms

When you’re running your own business, it can feel like you live inside a pressure cooker. Part of that feeling is stimulating and motivating, as you get satisfaction and fulfillment from achieving your goals under challenging circumstances. However, the other side of that feeling is stress and overwhelm. It’s important to keep challenges on the motivating side of the equation and not allow them to accumulate to the point when they have a detrimental effect on your health.

Everyone has different mechanisms for handling pressure as we all experience stress in different ways. This makes self-awareness on this topic vital, since only you can know when you’re approaching overload. If you continue to take on one pressure after another, you’ll eventually reach a breaking point.

Stress is accumulative. In the stress diagram below, you can see five stages of stress and the physical and mental symptoms that build up at each stage.

You probably recognize some of these symptoms from your own experience with stress.

Apart from the external sources of pressure we looked at in the first module, we can stress ourselves out with our internal thought processes and beliefs. For example, if you were brought up to be a perfectionist, then nothing is ever good enough for you, either in your own work output or that of others around you.

You can see how stressful this mindset would be. Perfection is impossible, so you will constantly be berating yourself (and others) for poor performance. You’re in a no win situation and you’ll continue to pile on the stress.

Consider the consequences of not managing your stress and working constantly under pressure while feeling overwhelmed and out of control. What are the costs to you and your business?

• Your physical and mental health may be at risk
• You may not function as well as you could
• You may make mistakes which could have repercussions on the service you deliver to your customers
• Your overall performance may deteriorate as you lose your ability to concentrate and understand complex issues
• Your clients and the business may suffer as a result

Whether you have pressure at work or at home, it’s important to develop mechanisms to help you stay in control.  As human beings, when we feel out of control, we generally experience stress. But when we believe we have some control over our lives, we automatically feel more secure and less threatened. 

Take Back Control of Your Life

It’s impossible to remove all stressful situations from your life. You can’t change the trigger of pressure, but you can change your reaction to it. To do this, you need to proactively learn new habits to be resilient and positive in all situations. That way when you face stressful situations in the future, you’ll know how to stay calm.

You may already have methods that work for you to deal with stress. It could be meditation, or exercise, or something else entirely. If you’re feeling overwhelmed now, chances are you aren’t practicing your stress reduction methods regularly enough. They need to be a regular part of your life to be effective. We’ll come back to this in a later module.

One thing you can do right now is to train yourself in ways to recognize your own early signs of stress. Whatever your reaction to stress is, either mental or physical or both, there will be warning signs that appear before you reach the point of extreme stress. These are different for everyone, so it’s important to get in tune with your own stress responses. 

Calibration Exercise

The next activity is an important one which will help you monitor your stress levels throughout the day. Once you’re used to giving yourself a stress rating, you can take proactive steps to reduce your stress.

Referring back to the stress diagram above, as you go through your day identify at what stage you are between 1 and 5. Zero doesn’t exist as the very fact of waking up needs some eu-stress to make it happen.

• Stage 1 – You are getting up and starting to get ready for your day (eu-stress)
• Stage 2 – Zone of control when you’re able to use techniques to reduce your stress level. This is the best time to take action. If you let yourself get into stage 3 and above, you’ll have less and less control over your state. Once you get to stage 4 or 5, it’ll be extremely difficult to eliminate your stress and may require medical attention.

Choose a day of the week to start your calibration. Constantly check in with yourself throughout the day: Are you breathing fast? Are you breathing from the top of the chest? Do you have a headache? Are your hands moist? Are you speaking faster than usual?

You may need to consciously do this exercise for several days to get a good sense of your own body and its reaction to external pressures. Once you’re aware of your responses, you’ll need to make less of a conscious effort as you’ll automatically be alerted to a change in your behavior or your body.

To be sure you’ve developed your awareness, keep a stress diary for the next seven days. Choose two regular times (e.g. 10am and 4pm) to calibrate your stress and write down your stage of stress: