Emptying your stress bucket in a covid-19 lockdown

The return of Covid-19 lockdown across Sydney means uncertainty for all of us. This can understandably lead to an increase in stress. Everyone experiences stress from time to time – we’re humans after all.  Stress can be triggered by events that are important to us or by situations that make us feel nervous, worried, or frustrated.

What’s in your Stress Bucket?

Imagine everyone carries a ‘Stress Bucket’ with them each day. This bucket holds our collective life stresses. Every time a little or big thing goes wrong – we’re stuck in traffic, we spilled our coffee, we’re late on a deadline, we’re behind on the mortgage – the bucket fills up a little more.

While stress is a normal part of life, if we’re not careful, the bucket can overflow. Managing the contents of this bucket is therefore essential for healthy wellbeing.

Managing your Stress Bucket

There are two ways to manage the overall level of your stress bucket – stopping the flow of stress and releasing stress. While we’d all love to stop stress coming into our life – we have more control over releasing stress.

Fortunately, each of our buckets has a tap that serves to release stress.

While we all have different sized buckets and different amount of stress flowing in; what matters most is how we are helping to drain stress out of the bucket.

The ‘tap’ represents our coping strategies. Using effective coping strategies means the bucket wont overflow. Stress has a compounding effect; we may be able to cope fine with a couple of bad things happening but when we are forced to manage one too many additional stressors, coping becomes difficult – think about the time you may have ‘snapped’ at someone, it’s not the incident itself, but ‘everything’ leading up to it.

Overflowing? Watch for the warning signs.

We function and cope best when stress is at manageable levels in our bucket.  

Sometimes our coping strategies fail us right when we need them – we can’t keep up with the amount of stress pouring in and we can forget or abandon our coping strategies. For example, we may skip out on social events, exercise or sleep to try to catch up on work or studies – things that we use as our stress draining ‘tap’. This can lead to a dangerously full and overflowing bucket. An overflowing bucket can have a negative impact on health and wellbeing.

We’ve got this!

The re-emergence of Covid-19 and new lockdown in our community can serve as an additional stressor in our buckets. It can also take away important stress relieving options. It’s important to know and use a range of coping strategies to look after ourselves – and others – in challenging times. Knowing what works best for you and adopting a broad range of strategies can release stress and stop our buckets overflowing.  And if you really are struggling, don’t hesitate to reach out to those around – we’re all in this together.

Written By: Kara Binstadt