Ever wonder how much of your stress is actually yours or whether you've quietly picked up someone else's expectations along the way? In this episode of Psychology, Actually, Dr Marianne Trent explores where stress really comes from, the difference between acute and chronic stress, and the hidden costs of ignoring it, from sleep and relationships to burnout. She shares practical ways to audit your own pressure points, spot the "shoulds" driving your decisions, and figure out what's genuinely within your control.

#StressManagement #PsychologyActually #MentalHealthPodcast

Highlights

• 00:00 Introduction
• 01:10 Where is your stress really coming from?
• 03:40 Peer pressure and the comparison trap
• 06:15 Are you ready, or just chancing it?
• 08:20 The "shoulds" that add up
• 10:05 Auditing what you can actually control
• 12:30 Acute vs chronic stress
• 15:50 Noticing stress in your body and mind
• 17:40 A quick physical health check-in
• 19:15 The real cost of ignoring stress: sleep
• 23:00 The real cost of ignoring stress: relationships and joy
• 25:50 Burnout and taking time off
• 27:45 Quick-fire reflections
• 30:20 Closing thoughts

🎧 Listen to this episode What is the difference between stress and burnout? https://player.captivate.fm/episode/a1592990-4561-48b4-b115-6809a77a2c84/ or watch on YouTube: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=uXjnKewNstM

Links:

🫶 To join my podcast membership to get early access to episodes and support the show head to: https://the-aspiring-psychologist.captivate.fm/support or to the Apple Podcasts App: https://podcasts.apple.com/gb/podcast/the-aspiring-psychologist-podcast/id1605628278 or to YouTube: https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCOwjrIP_jatiqlAivJE2mgQ/join

📚 To check out The Clinical Psychologist Collective Book: https://amzn.to/3jOplx0

📖 To check out The Aspiring Psychologist Collective Book: https://amzn.to/3CP2N97

💡 To check out or join the aspiring psychologist membership for just £30 per month head to: https://www.aspiring-psychologist.co.uk/membership

🖥️ Check out my short courses for aspiring psychologists and mental health professionals here: https://www.aspiring-psychologist.co.uk/online-courses

Ask Marianne your most pressing psychology career question and she will send you a FREE bespoke reply! Grab your free psychology success guide here and fill in the most pressing concern box: https://www.aspiring-psychologist.co.uk (scroll to the bottom of the page)

✍️ Get your FREE Supervision Shaping Tool now: https://www.aspiring-psychologist.co.uk/free-resources

📱Connect socially with Marianne and check out ways to work with her, including the Aspiring Psychologist Book, Clinical Psychologist book and The Aspiring Psychologist Membership on her Link tree: https://linktr.ee/drmariannetrent

💬 To join my free Facebook group and discuss your thoughts on this episode and more: https://www.facebook.com/groups/aspiringpsychologistcommunity

Like, Comment, Subscribe & get involved:

If you enjoy the podcast, please do subscribe and rate and review episodes.

Hashtags:

⚠️ Disclaimer

This content is for informational and educational purposes only. It does not constitute medical, psychological, or professional advice. Any actions taken based on this content are at your own risk.

© Dr Marianne Trent

Everyone experiences stress from time to time, but how do you know when your stress has become too much? Is it when you stop sleeping properly, when your weekends are spent recovering from the week that's gone before, or when you're still functioning, but everything feels harder than it should be? And perhaps one of the most important questions is how much of the pressure you are actually carrying belongs to you. Today, I want to help you work out where your stress is coming from, what you can change, and when you might want to start taking that more seriously. I'm Dr. Marianne Trent, a clinical psychologist, and this is Psychology Actiony.

Before we get started, if you are watching or listening to this, I hope it's because you're a fan of the show, a returning fan of the show. I would be so grateful if you've got a moment to just check whether you are already following or subscribing to the channel or the show wherever you are accessing this episode. It is totally free. It helps me to help grow this show, which I hope is something you already love or something that you will learn to love very soon. Thanks for being here. Now let's take a look at stress. Hi, welcome along to Psychology Actually. I am Dr. Marianne Trent. It's lovely to have you here. So stress, it is a big one and it affects all of us from time to time, some of us for longer than others. I think one of the first and most important ideas is to think about where this stress, where this pressure is coming from.

And from my own experiences, both personally and clinically, it can be from a variety of different places. Often we can be our own worst enemy and it's that self-imposed pressure that might also feel very critical at times as well that we're using to kind of spur ourselves on, but it's actually to our detriment. There's a really, really interesting episode on this I did with Professor Paul Gilbert about compassion and the self-critic that I think you'll love. I will drop details in the show notes or in the description so you can catch up with that one at a later date. If you caught my recent blog series, which is the 2007 diaries, which were emails that I had sent my friend in 2007 when I was an early career psychologist trying to get onto doctoral training, there was a lot of stress, there was a lot of pressure, and what I recognised was a lot of it was self-imposed.

But as the emails unfold, I actually realised that a lot of it was kind of thinking about wanting to try and please my mom, make her happy. What I'm telling you as a 45-year-old is at some point in your life, you've got to put that down.You've got to give up trying. You've got to really think about who it is you're living your life for and whether these kind of external metrics or what other people think of you or don't think of you is whether that matters really, because we can't please people all of the time. And if we're setting ourselves up for that, it's going to lead to hardship for you. It's going to lead to potentially to burnout and to longer term impacts on your mental health and wellbeing. I'm aware that a lot of pressure can come from your peers as well, especially if you're thinking that you've got set ideas about times that you want to be doing things and you see people around you doing those things or doing the things that you want to do.

I'm not immune to that, but I do try and hold in mind that old adage, comparison is the thief of joy.

We are different people than even people we've grown up with. We had different experiences. We've had different factors that help us, different factors that harm us. I think even when you're looking at siblings, we are not the same people as our siblings. Even I look at my own children who are born two years and 10 months apart to the same parents and they have had very different experiences. One of my children, we moved house when he was 10 months old and there was a very much kind of before and after phase of that. But also with me being a second time parent the second time around and with my dad being unwell with cancer when I was pregnant with my second child, my experience even of pregnancy and of giving birth and recovering was very different both times around, especially because I already had an older child.

So I think we can definitely think we should be the same as our siblings or we should be following the same trajectory. But sometimes we forget to think, do I even want what my sibling wants? Do I even find the same things appealing? And it's like, well, no. So is that a race that you are willing to run? The same with your peers. So if you're striving for the same profession, the same career, then of course it can make you feel like you are more comparable. But I really do, when I reflect on my own career, I do think that I got, for example, onto clinical training at the point when I was ready for it, but I definitely added to the stress and the pressure by making myself apply for it sooner than realistically I was going to be able to do well. If by chance I'd been given a place to train as a clinical psychologist a year, certainly two years earlier, I would've floundered because I wasn't ready.

So it's really worth thinking about your own career, your own experiences when it comes to that stress, when it comes to that pressure. Am I genuinely wanting this right now? Do I genuinely feel like I'm ready? Or maybe am I chancing my arm? And if I am, why am I doing that? Why not be more mindful? Why not be more intentional about striving for these goals when the time is genuinely right for me? You might feel pressure from colleagues, from managers, from people in your team. You might feel pressure because you've got children or because you want to have children or you want to find a partner or someone to settle down with in order to have children. You might find pressure because you think I should be living by myself by now. I should be renting my own place. I should be buying my own place.

The shoulds, the shoulds, the shoulds, the shoulds. That's a lot before we even begin to take into account your own health, the health of anyone around you, whether you've got dependents that need you. It is a lot, a lot indeed. So yeah, let's just have that little bit of audit to think about where that pressure is coming from, whether it's self-imposed, whether it's coming from somewhere else, and just have that audit to start off with. Okay, so once we've done our little check-in and our audit, we're going to look at how much of this stress, how much of this pressure is controllable right now. What can you change? What can you influence? What do you maybe need to accept right now or find a workaround for? I think this can be a really big factor. We can be really, really awful to ourselves when actually so many of the things that make life stressful for us, we might have very little control over.

But again, some of those pressures, really examining those shoulds. For example, if you're living independently at the moment and you're finding it a bit of a financial struggle, thinking about where that pressure is coming from, is there a should? What stops you from getting a housemate or taking a step in a different direction and renting rather than owning or moving in with another friend, moving in with family members, just to allow yourself to get back on your feet really. And you might treat that as a fixed period of time. You're not saying I'm going to go and do that forever, but I think we can really relieve the pressure on ourselves. When we just allow ourselves to do things for a few days, for a few weeks, for a few months, we set limits around that and then we can reexamine perhaps when the dust is settled and just check whether we're still going to make the same decisions again.

And I guess reduce some of that shame, take some of that shame away. So for example, if you are making a change in a job or in a living situation or even a relationship, just be like, "Well, I couldn't have known what I know now, before when I didn't have that context. I didn't have that experience. I didn't have that understanding, but now I'm here, I do, and I can now make a different decision based on having all of the information available to me." Okay. And the next section is where we're going to look at whether this stress you're experiencing is acute or chronic. And I'm going to share a little anecdote here to make you feel better about yourself. I was once in an interview for an assistant psychologist for an acute inpatient unit. You might be like, "I don't know what that is." Now, if you're going to an interview, do make sure that you know what the terms mean in the job title itself because I found myself in the very uncomfortable position of someone saying, "What is different about acute work to normal work?" And I was found lacking and well, acute, it's really bad, isn't it?

No, that is not what acute means. Acute means kind of sudden onset without warning, out of the blue. That's kind of what acute means. Whereas the opposite of that would be a chronic condition. So for example, you might have a chronic condition in your mental health like bipolar disorder, schizophrenia, something like that, that is going to be with you. Same as diabetes, chronic health condition. Something acute might be a sudden upset stomach, a winter vomiting bug or even a broken arm. I broke my hand recently, that was an acute injury, something that came out of the blue that we'd expect to be able to work through it. But of course, when we're working with people for acute difficulties, they do have different needs than they would do with a chronic condition because we're needing to probably educate the person themselves a little bit about this in the way that we might not necessarily need to do with something chronic.

The same is true with you and stress. If this is something that you're just getting used to noticing and it's not really been around for you before, we may need to educate you a little bit about what stress is and how much of that is just going to happen and you've got to put up with it. So that's really what the focus of this video is to allow you to take a little bit of an audit and see what changes you could make. When it comes to thinking about whether it's a short-term period of stress or a long-term period of stress, what we might notice is that our sleep might be impacted, our appetite, even our kind of sexual desires, if we're feeling really stressed, might be different than they usually are. You might notice it in your shoulders. That's where I notice it. And I notice it in my breathing as well.

I'll be like, "Come on, Marianne, take a breath." Just taking a moment to really check in with my own window of tolerance. And sometimes I'll do that soothing rhythm breathing cycle. So in through the nose, hold it for a moment out through the mouth, hold that for a moment. I might do that three times just to reset myself to get myself firmly back comfortably, hopefully, within my window of tolerance. I notice when I've got that tension in my shoulders, I can have a tendency to wear my shoulders as earrings, but they make much better shoulders than they do earrings. So just checking in with my body, noticing whether I'm holding any tension in my jaw, and then I guess looking at how my concentration is as well. If you feel like your thoughts are moving a million miles a minute, that can be really hard and can be an indication of stress.

I want to just pay a quick check in to your physical health, to your heart, to your blood pressure. If you feel like maybe things aren't quite so healthy for you right now and your stress levels are high, please do consider getting a blood pressure metre reading, which usually you can do by popping into a local pharmacy and they'll do that for you for free. And if there's any problem with your blood pressure, they'll be able to give you the next steps that you might well take, which could involve booking an appointment with your nurse practitioner at your GP surgery if you're in the UK or alternatively with your GP. But we do know that stress can impact on our physical health, so please make sure if you're concerned about any symptoms that you do check those out. Okay, let's think about the costs of this because I think we can very much delude ourselves that it's okay.

We can keep doing this to ourselves, but when we really take a little bit of a laser focus in and look at what the costs of this stress to you are, I think it can really help put things in perspective. For me, sleep is a big one. I'm not usually willing to squeeze my sleep because it makes me more rubbish in all other areas of my life. I'm a much worse parent. I'm a much poorer quality, more irritable wife when I haven't slept. So it's just in everybody's best interest if Marianne gets at least eight hours of sleep a night because I can be foul without it. I do not cope well in heat, so I try and keep a fan around, especially when it's been very hot lately. If you want to get a sensible answer out of me, don't keep me hot and don't make me overtired because frankly, those are not good conditions for me.

So if you're constantly overtired, that then becomes a chronic condition in itself. So I have to be quite bounded about myself. I put my phone to sleep at 9:40 every night. The screen goes dark and that tries to act as a little bit of a reminder, "Don't go on me. Don't go on here. I'm dead to you." Similarly, I've got reminder on my watch telling me to go to bed at the same time, really, 9:40, 9:45. I mean, I'm fairly entrenched in my habits now. I couldn't believe it when I was on training for the first time and my supervisor at the time told me that she went to bed about nine o'clock. I was like, "You are? I think you are." But absolutely, when I was in the thick of it with my children being very young and I was managing working full time, I used to go to bed at 8:45 and I couldn't think of any way around it, but those were the factors that I could control, the things that I could change.

What I couldn't change was the fact that my child, my youngest child is a really early riser and before he started sleeping through, he would wake many, many times, like seven times a night. So just if I could try and get an early chunk of sleep so I could be asleep before midnight, for a good few hours before midnight, hopefully if he wasn't waking up at that point, it would just feel like I'd put a little bit more energy, tokens, deposits into that bank. And if you are having this acute stressful experience, it's whether you can kind of lean into just making some short-term changes to your sleep, which might make a big, big difference for you. Might even be that you need to make longer term changes if you are always in sleep deficit, whether you can just be like, "Actually, I care about current me, but I also care about future me.

I don't think I am just here for a good time. I would hope to think that I'm here for a long time and therefore I need to invest in my own physical health, wellness, really." That's what I'm saying. So why is it okay for you to exist on five and a half hours sleep or less sometimes because you want to be up scrolling where you feel like you need some time to yourself at the end of the day? For me, I needed to invest that time in sleep. And it did mean that every day could feel a little bit monotonous, especially when the children were young. It didn't feel like I'd necessarily achieved a thing or had that kind of relaxing sense of, but for those short period of time, although I know when you've got children, they can feel like long periods of time, I needed to spend my downtime where I wasn't immediately being needed by my kids sleeping.

That's kind of how it boiled down for me. Because if we are knackered, then our physical health might well be impacted on as well. So our stress and our short-term habits, whether we might be drinking, more units to cope with our stress the way we feel, that can impact on our physical health, our wellbeing, that steals from our sleep as well, of course, because we don't begin to start to get the benefit from sleep until we've processed any units of alcohol. And all of this stress, when we're thinking about the costs, it's a joy stealer. It's not going to make life feel very enjoyable unless of course you're looking at dopamine rewards. If you've got acute periods of stress followed by either a short acting dopamine hit, a reward for something that you get, that might feel like that's okay in a short term. But in longer term, we're really going to think that life is supposed to feel enjoyable.

It's not supposed to be all about stress, constant, constant, constant, because that'll wear you down. That will impact on your relationships, both of your friends, with your family, maybe your intimate relationships, your partners, your children. Irritability is not fun. And what we don't want is for you to constantly feel like you're ebbing and flowing. You're getting yourself back to feeling like you're able to go again by the time you're walking out the front door in the morning, but then by the time you come home again, you're so stressed, you're so overwhelmed, you're so depleted that you then got to spend the whole time putting yourself back together again. I would really just encourage a little bit of reflection about whether it needs to be that way and whether there are any factors you can do so that things feel more comfortably within your stride. I think it's also worth having a look at when this longer term stress might be contributing to a presentation of what we call burnout.

I don't have time to cover that here, but I did a really lovely series called Burnout Bites with Dr. Claire Plumley, which is all about what burnout is and how it differs to a number of different things, including stress. There'll be details in the show notes and in the description. And the elephant in the room might be that if you are working right now, this stress might mean that actually you need to take a period of time off work so that you can address some life factors, so that you can sort things out, so that you can be kinder to yourself and get that breathing space to feel really well so that whatever your job is, that you feel like it's something that you are looking forward to, that you are enjoying. And the same thing with if the stress is coming from parenting or children or your friends, your family, how can you ask for help to allow yourself some time to make some changes to help things feel more comfortable, more achievable, and less like they're depleting you, more like they are enriching you?

Just before we finish, I want to have a little bit of a kind of quick fire consideration. Number one, stress can come from our own personal values as well and how we feel that we're measuring up against them. So doing a little bit of a values-based exercise can be really helpful. If you'd like a full list of values, you can Google act full list values that will bring that up for you and you can have a little check off about what you think your personal values are for your life, for your relationships, for your work, for many different life domains, because sometimes that stress can be that conflict, that clash with our values because it doesn't feel like we're living to our authentic self. Next is that high functioning stress is still stress. Even though you're getting all of your stuff done, it doesn't mean that that's okay.

It means that you are very efficient, but it doesn't mean that that should be your norm. Thinking about our weekends and whether they are just a recovery debt, so very much like they might be in the midweek where you feel like you're just like, oh, and then the weekend you just need to recharge and rest yourself so that you can physically carry on with your Monday morning tasks. It shouldn't really be that way. I do think that weekend should be a way of having a very different structure than your work week structure, but things that you enjoy, things that build you up, things that you look forward to, as well as of course some rest and recharge, but it shouldn't just be this constant ebb and flow. Having a little look at the borrowed expectations. Is this actually my goal? Is it someone else's goal?

Is this my timeline or someone else's timeline? Really do examine that. Stress, of course, lastly, before we finish, can narrow our perspective. Sometimes something comes into your inbox and you're like, I must do this immediately, but just taking a moment to think, actually, I've got more pressing concerns that I need to address and whether I can add that to my to-do list and I can come back to that because I know it is important, but right now I need to have this laser focus, but also stress can mean that we're very blinkered. We're not seeing other perspectives. So speaking to someone that you trust, someone that you care about, someone who's on your side, and that might include a therapist, a psychologist can really help you to consider other ways through when it's feeling really challenging. And one thing I'm going to leave you with is if you could reduce your life stress in this particular domain that you're struggling with at the moment by 10%, what would that look like?

What could you do? What changes could you make? I'd love to know in the comments, whether you're watching on YouTube or on Spotify, you can make comments.