Sue Firth 1on1

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What is Stress?

Stress is a natural part of our lives. It is a reaction within the body that happens when a part of the brain perceives a threat. A problem can arise from the natural survival reaction - the fight or flight response - because the brain cannot tell the difference between real or imagined threats or a negative or positive response. The fight or flight response produces adrenalin, designed to enable us to cope.

What happens to the body during stressful experiences?

The body's response to the call for 'readiness for action' creates symptoms of stress. An example of this is muscular tension resulting from frequent rapid input of adrenalin. The body is designed to dissipate this adrenalin physically, through the fight or flight response mode yet this option is not always possible in work or family situations. The net effect is that the over production of adrenalin is not burnt off and remains in the body promoting stress-like symptoms. Over time, the excess storage of this hormone promotes unhealthy stressful feelings, behaviours and emotions particularly when accompanied by Cortisol, our secondary stress hormone which makes us grumpy, irritable and restless.

Who is at risk of stress?

Top performing executives and professionals where the desire to over-perform is becoming increasingly common in our to-go high speed world. Individuals are working longer, and harder, not smarter, and high performance technology is producing new forms of addictive behaviours: status anxiety syndrome and blackberry/texting over-use as examples. Many top performers actually suffer chronic low self esteem and lack confidence. The pressures they feel to camouflage this is extreme.

Public eye professionals and celebrities whose lives are under micro scrutiny. The 20th century appears to be fuelled on the need for perfection and privacy invasion. No wonder many people in the public eye suffer privately from lack of confidence and poor self esteem. Anyone who is constantly at risk of being judged, criticised or caught off guard is at risk of repeated negative stress occurring.

What is the link between stress and poor self esteem?

Psychotherapists have long since recognised that significant bad stress can be experienced when someone suffers from low self esteem. It is imperative that through our work we unlock healthy esteem which is a prerequisite coping tool. This is because people with healthy self esteem tend to believe in themselves differently and feel more at ease coping with difficult situations. They feel less responsible for others' actions or behaviours. They feel less responsible for outcomes of events and they don't tend to personalise situations to their own detriment.

So, can we really change and move beyond bad stress?

The answer is YES of course, even though we often think that as adults we are set in our ways.

To change ingrained learnt behaviours that we now recognise do not support us, we have to fully acknowledge to ourselves the desire to change. With the right motivation in place - here we are talking about YOUR motivation, not what anyone else suggests you do - but what feels innately right to you to sort out. When motivated from the right place, determination and courage are by-products and change can then happen.

As you resolve to find new ways of coping with difficult issues and put into practice the baby steps along the way, it becomes easier, because of the practice, to make sweeping changes over a short period of time. As life throws the next curve ball at us, we have to continue to try hard not to react in the old way. There is a wonderful saying, if we carry on doing what we always did, we will always get what we always got."

It is much easier and faster to learn new habits than to remove the old ones and the trick is to apply a new way of thinking/reacting until it replaces the old, rather than drive you to distraction through over analysing old experiences and behaviours.

Give yourself absolute permission to move on from the past. How you dealt with issues in the past is not how you have to deal with them in your future. Believe in yourself. You have all the tools for change already.

Once you start to see results from your revised actions and behaviours, and this will start to happen quickly from our first session, your confidence and self belief will soar. It is a human trait that we have to see change in order to believe in it.

People Pleasers often find it hard to put themselves first. This doesn't have to be the case. Learning to say no means others have to take care of themselves. That is the right thing and a good thing. The more we give, the more others take. Be in control of your time, physical and personal energies and see good changes happen in those we interact with.