Having a melt down because no-one can decide what they want for tea? Raging at the car that just pulled out out in front of you?! Getting pissed off because someone moved your stapler?!! 😠
Reacting overly-emotionally to relatively mundane and insignificant events is a common indicator that your resilience levels may be dangerously low; enter the Lantern Stress Kettles! (C)
For anyone who hasn't seen this before, the idea is that we all have an amount of emotion bubbling away at the base of our kettle and external events (depicted by the red arrows) cause spikes or bursts of emotion. Insignificant events (small arrows) case small spikes which, if your resilience or tolerance is high, do not break through or cause any noticeable impact.
Major events however like bereavement or crisis cause huge spikes which breakthrough even the highest resilience which is absolutely normal and to be expected.
The danger comes when the tiny events & spikes cause huge, instant reactions as this is an indicator that your resilience may be at a much lower level than you realise! These tells are really important to recognise as we have an incredible capacity for self delusion when it comes to accepting that we're perhaps not in as good a shape as we think we are!
What to do then? Well that is different for all of us but it was the subject of conversation at last night's Self Care input at the local co-working space and it also forms part of the larger personal resilience and stress management input I do for dozens of different organisations and groups across the country.
For me it's a case of recognising as early as possible and managing my remaining energy as efficiently as possible to get the necessary work done whilst planning the recharge activities that I desperately need to get the levels back up!
Today is a perfect case in point as I have tonnes of post-delivery admin to catch up on but I was getting tired, irritable and twitchy so I canned it all and went out with Izzy for a drive through the hills and a piece of cake!
Job done and now I'm back getting the last bits finished before a fresh start tomorrow! Hope this helps you but you can always shout if you need someone to talk to (or eat cake with!!)
All the best people!
Phil
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