Balancing Life
Health, Counselling and Disability Services
Today’s Agenda
• Causes and impacts of stress
• Know yourself
• Prevention is better than cure
Sources of Stress
Most, if not all workers will experience a few
really difficult experiences in their working lives,
sometimes considerably more in particular
settings.
• Personal characteristics (self doubt and
expectations)
• Relationships with colleagues or clients
• Work Practices (work load and time
restraints)
• Inherent challenges of the work
How we can feel as a professional
• Valued/ needed
• Frustrated
• Connected
• Angry
• Fulfilled
• Vulnerable
• Effective
• Guilty
• Motivated
• Harassed
• Sense of purpose and
meaning
• Defensive
• Better physical and
mental health
• Burnt Out
• Incompetent
• Compassion Fatigue
Impacts of Chronic Sympathetic Arousal
Fight/ Flight/ Freeze
•
•
•
•
•
•
Muscle tension
Impaired immunity
Increased heart rate
Disturbed digestion
Impaired sleep
Elevated cortisol levels
How our thinking can change
when stressed
• Hippocampus: effects on memory
• Amygdala: over aroused/ negative bias
• Cingulate cortex: reduced capacity for
attention and concentration
• Prefrontal cortex: less effective executive
functioning, planning, decision making
Stress, Exhaustion and Burnout
The Exhaustion Funnel (Professor Marie Asberg)
From Dr Maura Kenny MBCT workshop
• Professor Asberg suggests that those of us who
continue downwards are likely to be those who are
the most conscientious workers, those whose self
confidence is closely dependent on performance at
work.
• The harder it is to work, the more effort is put into
work, leaving even less energy and time for leisure.
This results in an ever increasing accumulation of
symptoms as the funnel narrows and exhaustion sets
in.
• From Dr Maura Kenny MBCT workshop
Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi, author of “Flow: The Psychology of Optimal Experience,”
Impact of Stress
on Performance
What helps
• Self awareness
• Self care strategies
• Supervision
My early warning signs
• In my body…
• In my actions…
• In how I feel…
• In how I think…
Reactive vs Responsive
• Self Awareness helps you to step out of
automatic pilot
• Is it possible you are being reactive?
• Taking responsibility and being
accountable
Developing Response- ABILITY
Becoming more skillful
Managing the transition
from work each day
• Before you leave work
• Review of the day and next day
• When you leave work
•
•
•
•
On the way to the car/ train/ bus/ bike
On your way home
When you get home
Who you speak to and what you speak about
How I act towards myself in
difficult times
Ways to take care of yourself
• Look for a range of activities
• Experiment with new things
• Be patient, kind and compassionate
with yourself
Supervision
Organise supervision within your work group
• Formal
• Informal
Review techniques that work well and modify others where
possible.
Benefits:
• Improved performance
• Reassurance of competency
• Shared responsibility
• Stress release
Wise action when stress is building
• Take a breathe to think about what is going
on
• Remember when you are stressed you might
feel like you can’t do any of these things but
can encourage yourself to try
• Do something pleasurable like…
• Do something that makes me feel like you’ve
achieved something…
• Something you will try to do as a result of
today….
Autobiography in Five Chapters
1) I walk down the street.
There is a deep hole in the
side walk.
I fall in.
I am lost…I am hopeless.
It isn’t my fault.
It takes forever to find my
way out.
2) I walk down the same street.
There is a deep hole in the
sidewalk.
I pretend I don’t see it.
I fall in again.
I can’t believe I’m in the same
place.
But it isn’t my fault.
It still takes a long time to get
out.
Autobiography in Five Chapters
3) I walk down the same
street.
There is a deep hole in the
sidewalk.
I see it is there.
I still fall in…it’s a habit.
My eyes are open.
I know where I am.
It is my fault.
I get out immediately.
4) I walk down the same
street.
There is a deep hole in the
sidewalk.
I walk around it.
5) I walk down another
street.
COUNSELLING
Anne Hayes
anne.hayes@flinders.edu.au
 PHONE 8201 2118