By | David Klaasen | Helping You Create Clarity, Inspire Your People & Drive Performance | Retain your best people | Changing Management Mindsets and Behaviour | Practical Behaviour Analytics
Stress can be a good thing but when we have too much, things get can quickly get messy. It can lead to poor decisions, damaged relationships and over the longer term creates ill-health. A useful way to avoid stress is to use and grow your stress bucket.
Last year I qualified as a Mental Health First Aider and I learned a lot of very interesting things about mental well-being and mental ill-health. During the course we were introduced to a very useful metaphor for managing stress. It’s a deceptively simple concept that helps the brain to understand how we can quickly become overloaded by a number of things that we could probably easily cope with if we only had one of them at a time.
So, consider this. We all have a Stress Bucket, and it is important to note that everyone’s bucket is a different size. The size of your stress bucket will depend on your current and previous experiences and the level in your bucket will also depend on how many stressful situations you have to deal with at any given time.
How full is your Stress Bucket?
Under normal circumstances, your stress bucket is probably about two-thirds full. However, life occurs, stuff happens and your stress bucket begins to fill up more and more. For example, having a child or getting married or moving house or starting a new job, losing a job, or heaven forbid a global pandemic. All of these things can create lots of additional stress that fill up our stress bucket. And then things get really sensitive.
