Stress Cycle

Hello everyone welcome to our first day of Stress Awareness Week, a collaboration between multiple awesome sub-communities! You can find the masterpost here.

An interesting way to look at stress is through a stress cycle. Stress triggers a multitude of events in ourselves. All those events can repeat in a cycle with no break and can cause us to have no relief from our stress. Lets examine what is part of a stress cycle and how we can break it.

Although there are many types of stress cycles, let's use the one above for today. The causality, or the relationship of the cause and effect is shown at the top. First, a certain event can happen that can be the beginning of the stress. For example, lets say we lose a job. Instantly, that can cause a lot of stress. The perspective of how we look at the event can contribute to our stress. We would all, most likely, look at losing a job as a terrible thing.

Then, another event can happen that can make our stress even worse. Let's say that a family member becomes ill. That of course would add to our stress. Next, comes the response. How do we respond to this stress? In this example, a response we could have to losing a job and having a family member fall ill is sleeping less, as we would try to find another job and would worry about the family member.

Then, what emotion do we experience because of all this stress? An example in this situation could be irritability and anxiousness. Next, what is the negative consequence of all this stress? A consequence we could have as a result of all our stress is painful headaches.

Below, you can see many examples of physical and mental responses, emotions, and behavioral consequences of stress. By looking at the first image, you can see that the last step of this cycle is stress continued. As shown in this cycle, once a causality occurs, a chain of reaction follows that can increase the stress and it can repeat. However, if you look to the side, you can see a way to break this cycle, through a positive release! This does not have to be a solution to an event or problem, it can just be something that helps you better cope with stress. For example, we could break our current stress cycle by journaling as a way to convey our emotions.

-Some Questions To Answer

-What does a stress cycle look like for you? (Remember that it can look different for everyone, and doesnt have to be like the one shown above!)

-How can you break this stress cycle?

-Can you think of a way we can create a positive stress cycle?

Thank you all for joining in one of our activities for Stress Awareness Week! We hope that you have found this post interesting! Please be sure to check out the other great posts related to the event here!

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