This episode unravels the complex tapestry of tension we're all too familiar with, guided by the expertise of Rebecca Kirsting, an EAP psychological wellbeing team manager. Grasp the inner workings of your autonomic nervous system and understand how it dictates your responses to stress, much like the accelerator and brake in a car. Discover the powerful techniques to soothe the rapid pulse of anxiety and learn why relaxation practices are not just luxuries but necessities. Rebecca joins us to demystify the symptoms of stress and shares her wisdom on incorporating relaxation into our daily grind to keep the encroaching tides of anxiety at bay.
As the cost of living soars, resilience becomes our anchor, keeping us afloat amid the storm of financial and work-related stressors. We uncover the invaluable steps to bolster your mental fortitude and the transformative impact of gratitude practices on our habitual thought patterns. Delve into positive psychology's resilience theory, designed to galvanize your spirit and equip you with the strength to rebound from adversity. By dissecting and challenging our negative thoughts, we learn to detach, reshape our narratives, and emerge more robust. Join us on this journey, and remember, the calmest surfaces may hide the deepest struggles—don't navigate these waters alone.
This episode unravels the complex tapestry of tension we're all too familiar with, guided by the expertise of Rebecca Kirsting, an EAP psychological wellbeing team manager. Grasp the inner workings of your autonomic nervous system and understand how it dictates your responses to stress, much like the accelerator and brake in a car. Discover the powerful techniques to soothe the rapid pulse of anxiety and learn why relaxation practices are not just luxuries but necessities. Rebecca joins us to demystify the symptoms of stress and shares her wisdom on incorporating relaxation into our daily grind to keep the encroaching tides of anxiety at bay.
As the cost of living soars, resilience becomes our anchor, keeping us afloat amid the storm of financial and work-related stressors. We uncover the invaluable steps to bolster your mental fortitude and the transformative impact of gratitude practices on our habitual thought patterns. Delve into positive psychology's resilience theory, designed to galvanize your spirit and equip you with the strength to rebound from adversity. By dissecting and challenging our negative thoughts, we learn to detach, reshape our narratives, and emerge more robust. Join us on this journey, and remember, the calmest surfaces may hide the deepest struggles—don't navigate these waters alone.
Enjoy a moment of relaxing calm with the Vita Health Group well-being series of podcasts to make you feel good, keep you healthy, help you make changes to your life. Vita Health Group is an award-winning market leader and has been at the forefront of healthcare for the past 30 years. Vita Health Group making people better.
Speaker 2:Yes and hello. Welcome along to another of the Vita Health Group podcasts and thanks so much for joining us. As I've said, my job to host this series, along with a variety of guests and experts from Vita, we tackle a whole range of subjects which we hope you find very beneficial. Vita Health Group, of course, works by providing integrated physical and mental health services to employers, insurers, the NHS and private patients. Today's podcast is all about stress and do that and to chat more about it, I'm joined by Rebecca Kirsting. Rebecca is an EAP psychological well-being team manager and joins us from lovely Sunny Cornwall. Rebecca, you're most welcome. How are you?
Speaker 3:Hi, I'm very good. Thank you, Glenn. How are you doing?
Speaker 2:I'm good, I'm good, nice to talk to you. So today, all about stress. Then, before we get stuck into today's subject, which I think it's the forefront of so many people's thoughts and minds at the moment stress, I'm more so, and we always highlight COVID, but it seems more prevalent to so many people now, since COVID doesn't it.
Speaker 3:Oh, definitely, I think it's brought to the forefront for a lot of people certain things that they didn't think about probably before, and all of those sort of challenges and extra bits and pieces that maybe weren't such a problem for them before. I think it's highlighted a lot of things for a lot of people. And also thinking about that work-life balance, I think as well, a lot of people are more aware of it definitely.
Speaker 2:Absolutely. You're an EAP psychological well-being team manager, as I briefly mentioned just now. Sounds very complicated, I mean, in a nutshell, what does that mean? What do you do? What's your job in sales?
Speaker 3:Yeah, so I've been working for Vita for about a year, so I basically so I'm a senior psychological well-being practitioner and a team manager for the PWPs. So what a PWP does is we provide psychological support based on CBT, so cognitive behavioral therapy techniques, using something which is called guided self-help. So we have lots of different techniques and things that we use with our clients and things, but it's also based on that CBT. So I do offer some support, so I offer some therapy. But I also manage the team of PWPs over here. And sort of prior to working over here, I used to work in my local IAP service as a PWP and part of that role actually was doing lots of stress courses, so lots of experience when it comes to stress management.
Speaker 2:Okay, in a nutshell, what is stress? You know it's something. As I said at the start of the show, stress is with so many different people now and it takes so many different forms, doesn't it? You have serious stress, you can have mild stress. We're all stressed to a certain degree. I mean anxiety and stress. They're linked, aren't they really?
Speaker 3:Oh, definitely yeah, and when we think about stress it's more of, I guess, an umbrella term more than anything sort of symptoms of anxiety and depression. So it's a reaction to, basically one way or another, a lot of pressure. It involves lots of different systems within the body. So I'm sure lots of people out there will have heard of the fight or flight response. I mean, there's a lot of people talk about it and that's basically what happens within our body. That's what's activated when we're under stress. So it creates lots of physical, psychological symptoms, so heart racing, digestive issues, muscle tension racing, thoughts, breathing rate increasing and what's kind of underlying that is.
Speaker 3:So we've got a major sort of nervous system within our body which controls all of our automatic functions, so it's called the autonomic nervous system and that is basically split into two parts.
Speaker 3:So we've got our sympathetic nervous system and our parasympathetic nervous system. And a really good analogy to kind of think about these two systems is to think about your car. So you've got your accelerator and you've got your brakes, so your sympathetic nervous system is your go system and that is your accelerator that you'd have in your car and that's what's activated when we're under stress, basically, and the parasympathetic nervous system. So the opposite side to that, that's our brakes, it's the rest and digest part of our body and it's that one that we need to be activated in order to kind of relax, to sleep, just to sort of be nice and calm. But, just like in a car, we can't have both kind of systems activated at the same time, so we can't have both the accelerator and the brakes going. So in order to relax, we've got to learn to basically take our foot off that accelerator and start to press onto that brake a little bit more.
Speaker 2:And when you are stressed, I mean you become irritable, don't you Impatient? You get wellmed up, you get angry, you get overwhelmed by the smallest of things, don't you?
Speaker 3:Almost definitely. Yeah, it doesn't take much to sort of tip us over into that point when we feel that we can't function quite as well as we used to do Absolutely. It doesn't take very much at all, you're right.
Speaker 2:Okay, and what can you do to help manage the symptoms of stress then? I mean, it doesn't matter whether it's mild stress, serious stress. What can you do as an individual to help yourself before you maybe go and seek some professional assistance?
Speaker 3:Absolutely. There's lots of things that we can do, and one of the best things that we can start to try and do really to manage our stress better is basically introducing more things that help us to relax, so things that we can do to press that brake a little bit more. That could be anything that you kind of find relaxing. We know we're all very different, but it's just really consciously making some effort to carve some time out and that will make a big, big difference. It can also be really helpful to start practicing sort of breathing techniques and relaxation techniques. There's lots of different breathing techniques out there, but a really good one that I kind of recommend is the 46. So it's taking a deep breath in for a count of four, we then hold for a count of two and breathe out for a count of six.
Speaker 2:I'll tell you what. Let's do it together. All right, talk me through it, let's do it.
Speaker 3:Right. So if you put one hand, so really good way of doing this. So you want to make sure that it's an abdominal breath, so a good way of doing that is to put one hand on your chest and one hand on your abdomen and you wanna feel. The one on your abdomen is the one that's moving. So you take a deep breath in for a count of four. So I'll count for four. So one, two, three, four hold.
Speaker 2:Oh hold.
Speaker 3:One yep, hold one, two and then out. One, two, three, four, five, six.
Speaker 2:Okay, how many times do you do that? What's the repetition on that?
Speaker 3:Repetition for a few minutes until you start to notice that you're feeling a little bit calmer. Really good idea just to keep practicing that as often as you can do. A suggestion I would always say with breathing techniques is practice them actually when you're feeling calm to start off with. Because if you try and do it for the first time when you're already feeling quite overwhelmed and quite stressed, it's quite difficult to get into the practice of it, because you've got all of these other kind of things going around your head thoughts that are racing and all that kind of thing.
Speaker 3:Yeah, just try and practice it when you're calm then it's going to be much easier to bring it in when you're feeling a little bit more sort of anxious or stressed.
Speaker 2:So remind us, it's in for four, four seconds.
Speaker 3:In for four. Hold for two out for six.
Speaker 2:Okay, all right, so that's a good one to practice. Okay, so are there any things that we can borrow from CBT Cognitive Behavioral Therapy Rebecca, that might help us to manage stress?
Speaker 3:Oh, definitely. So there's a couple of sort of techniques, but a really, really good one that we use within guided self-help is something which is called worry management, so that helps with those, as I was saying, the racing thoughts that we get with sort of stress and things. What we're trying to look at is trying to help our brain to kind of recognize that worry is not helpful for us.
Speaker 3:It doesn't solve anything. It doesn't get us any further forward. So within sort of worry management, basically, what we're doing is we're trying to look at identifying the difference between what we call hypothetical and practical worries. So hypothetical worries are those what ifs? So what if something bad happens? And lots of us experience those. It's very, very normal to experience them, but it's just thinking about what we can do to help to manage that a little bit better. And then the practical worries are things that we can do something about.
Speaker 3:So a good way of trying to identify whether some things are practical or a hypothetical worry is to try and think about is this something that I could solve within the next few days? If there is a solution to it, it's going to be a practical worry. If not, so an example of that might be if your car starts on making an odd noise, you could take it to a garage. You could call breakdown cover. There's something that you can do, whereas a hypothetical worry, there's no immediate solution to it. So that might be something like what if there's traffic on my way to work? So it's things that are outside of our control. So, yes, we could set off earlier, but actually it's things that are outside of our control.
Speaker 3:So what we can try and do so with the hypothetical worries, because those are the ones that most of us kind of recognize is trying to do something to basically recognize that the worry is there. That's important. Recognize it's there, write it down and then trying to distract or refocus away from the worry. So it's then trying to take our attention. We can come back to it.
Speaker 3:I know it's far easier said than done to not sort of focus on a worry, but we can come back to it sort of later on, set some time aside and then just have a bit of a think about this. Was this an important worry? Was this something that was actually something that I could have done something about? Is have I worried about it before? Am I any further along towards solving it? The answer is generally no. So then we recognize that actually this is outside of our control. There's nothing that we can do, so therefore it's not helpful to us. So it's starting to sort of bring this into practice and the more that we do that, the easier our brain learns this pattern and stops going down sort of that unhelpful worry route.
Speaker 3:And we'll take it down a much more kind of a productive way and then, with those more productive or those practical worries, it's basically doing something about it. So, problem solving, thinking about what can I do to solve this issue Because, again, if there's a solution, that's what we need to be doing rather than spending our time kind of thinking about it.
Speaker 2:Are you finding, what with the cost of living crisis that many people are going through at the moment, rebecca, that the stress factor is increasing? Are you finding an increase in workload in what you do?
Speaker 3:Oh, definitely, we're definitely getting a lot more people coming through, definitely through sort of a lot of work stress. I think we get coming through. Obviously, with it being an employee assistance program, we do see a lot of people coming through with kind of work stresses, but definitely with the financial impact of what's going on in the world at the moment, that leads to a lot of worry, understandably, for a lot of people. And again, it's recognizing the differences with those. Is this something that I can do something about or not? So again, using those kind of techniques can be really helpful for those sort of worries and that stress can lead on, can't it to depression?
Speaker 2:And if it's serious, that's when you really do need to maybe go as a first port or call to see your GP and then obviously move on to somebody like yourself.
Speaker 3:Definitely, definitely. Yeah, it's definitely reaching out to sort of your GP, have a conversation within the UK. So within the systems are different for Scotland and Wales and Northern Ireland, but certainly within sort of England. There are IAP services across the country. You can reach out to it's free therapy, you can speak to them, have a conversation with them and they can put some things in place, some therapy in place to help you. But definitely GP is the first port of call wherever.
Speaker 2:You mentioned things that we could borrow from cognitive behavioral therapy. Are there any other ideas or tips that you can suggest that would help people to better manage their symptoms of stress?
Speaker 3:Yes, definitely.
Speaker 3:So something which I always like to recommend, and something that I'm actually quite a big fan of myself, is something which we call gratitude practice.
Speaker 3:So when we're under a lot of stress, what tends to happen is we get what's called a negative filter on our kind of our thoughts and how we're thinking about things, and what happens is our brain then develops this filter so it will only notice kind of the negative things that are happening within our lives. So with gratitude practice, what we're trying to do is basically to change that filter. So we're pushing ourselves to think about the positives, think about the things that are good within our lives, and then trying to focus on those a little bit more, for example, at the end of the day, trying to think of three good things that have happened that day. It can be really simple things like I got out of bed today. It doesn't need to be anything really kind of massive or life changing, but just something that helps us to focus more in on those positives, and then that will enable us to be able to actually look out for the positives more. Our brain will start to pick up on those and it becomes much better for us in that way.
Speaker 2:That's great, rebecca. Thanks for that. Tell us a bit more about resilience. I mean you touched on it earlier, but how can this help people manage their stress?
Speaker 3:So resilience theory comes from sort of positive psychology. So basically, what we're trying to do is to develop the ability to let things affect us less. So, for example, I'm kind of challenging out thoughts and feelings that stop us from being able to sort of bounce back from adversity what we kind of would recommend. So I would always recommend that people look into this in a little bit more depth, but it's a really good idea just to try and challenge these things out. So when a situation arises that causes quite a lot of negative thoughts or negative feelings, it's to try and look at the evidence behind those thoughts. So it's pinching a little bit from CBT here as well, but to give a really kind of good example, so something probably that we can all relate to, so if a friend hasn't texted us back for some reason so we're waiting, and maybe it's been a few days, they've not come back what might happen? So if, that being in that situation, what I might then be starting to think is oh God, they're ignoring me, they don't want to be friends anymore.
Speaker 2:Have I said something that's upsetting, exactly.
Speaker 3:Absolutely yeah. What have I done to cause this problem? But if we actually then start to basically examine that evidence a little bit? So it's about thinking about what is the evidence for this thought and what's the evidence against it. So when we really start to pull it apart, the only evidence that we have for that negative spiral that we've just gotten on is that they haven't responded. So that's all the evidence that we have for it. But then if we look at all the evidence against it, what we might realize is actually, maybe this person's just really busy.
Speaker 3:Maybe they've told us they've got a lot going on their plate at the moment. Maybe they've, you know, they kind of have all sorts of things going on in their own lives. It might be that actually, last time we spoke, everything was okay and they didn't mention anything that kind of happened. So it's about just really starting to pull that apart and really looking at the evidence and thinking how do I know that this is the truth of it? And oftentimes it's not. So it's then starting to help us to recognize that it probably has nothing to do with us. So we're taking that personalization out of it and by practicing that kind of skill regularly, we actually start to find that we can challenge that out much quicker and it helps us to kind of cope with those situations a lot better as well.
Speaker 2:You can be the most chilled out sort of person, can't you On the exterior, but inside you might be bubbling up with a lot of stress, a lot of anxiety. People have said to me oh, you're so chilled out, you just let the world flow around you. And I've got to say, from time to time, I do, inside, feel very stressed. I get a little bit anxious about stuff. You know more so, I think, recently than ever before, because what we're all facing the cost of living crisis and what have you it does affect us all. It doesn't matter how much money you earn or don't earn.
Speaker 2:But, you could be holding that back, can't you that stress inside and not show it? I'm guessing it is good to talk about that stress, isn't it?
Speaker 3:Absolutely yeah, reaching out, talking to people.
Speaker 3:You know the age old saying of a problem shared is a problem halved, and it definitely is the case Reaching out to people, talking to people, they can often come up with solutions that we maybe haven't even thought of towards different situations and things. So it's always a really good idea and it just lessens that burden. So if you can speak to somebody, even if it is just a friend, just talking to somebody about it, letting them know how you're feeling, makes such a big difference. And I think when we start to talk about things more, we also realise we're not alone with it. There's lots of other people that in the same kind of a situation as we are. If we think about it, if you were to look in a waiting room, so if you were at the doctor's surgery, the majority of people when we're there, we think that all of those people are there for medical health problems, but actually research has shown that the majority of people are there for something related to stress, whether it is a physical health condition or it's anxiety, depression, anything along those lines.
Speaker 2:It's scary, isn't it?
Speaker 3:It is absolutely yeah, yeah, yeah. But it just makes you think and makes you kind of realise that this is something that affects so many people, but we just don't talk about it enough.
Speaker 2:You know we often feel stressed when we confront you with those difficult conversations as well, don't we? I mean, we feel very, very stressed about it. You mentioned if somebody talks about you on social media and you don't get a response, or you know you've been texting somebody, you've been what's happening to them and you don't get a response. It's similar with conversations, isn't it?
Speaker 3:Oh, definitely yeah, and I think in those kind of a situation it is about trying to, as much as we can do, speak about it and talk about it. We're all guilty of it. I know I have been kind of in the past and things of avoiding those situations and avoiding those conversations because they feel overwhelming for us. But actually by starting to confront them and having those difficult conversations we can move ourselves forward and we can feel better for it. And a really good thing that we can do with that is something which is called assertive communication. It's a tool that we can all definitely benefit from.
Speaker 3:With assertive communication, what we're trying to do is to basically respect ourselves and others in kind of equal measure. The best way of starting that conversation is to try and understand that other person's point of view. Try and see where they're coming from Doesn't mean we have to kind of ignore how we're feeling about it at all. That's not what we're saying here. It's about just trying to understand where they're coming from. And when we approach a conversation in that way, it actually helps to disarm that other person as well, because they're going to feel that they're being listened to, they're going to feel hers and they're much more likely to be receptive to what we're saying as well.
Speaker 3:Once we've done that we've started off with that disarming it's then about putting our own point of view across. It's then about taking responsibility for our own feelings as well, what we call the I statements. I feel this, I feel the other, an example might be. I feel I need more guidance on this, rather than you haven't given me enough guidance. It's about the way that we say that, because if we approach it in the you sense, that person might take it more as we're being aggressive towards them or we're finding fault, whereas if we say I feel we're taking that responsibility back on ourselves.
Speaker 3:as to, this is something that's my issue, but you can help me with it. It's a subtle kind of a thing, but it helps us take more ownership there. Also really important when we're talking about kind of a certain communication is clarifying. Otherwise we can end up with those misunderstandings. Someone else can be coming from a completely different situation to it, to where we are. That can lead to further tension. So try and ask the other person's point of view and where the problem is, and always as much as we possibly can do, trying to end that kind of conversation on a positive as well.
Speaker 2:And there's a lot of help. Isn't there out there now? I mean you can go to lots of different sort of areas on the web. Look at stress on there. Obviously people yourself, at Vita, your GP. It's important to talk about stress if you've got it. And what surprises me, the number of younger people now that are undergoing stress. You know school kids particularly.
Speaker 3:Oh, definitely, and I think there's so much more pressure on younger people, not just, you know, I think schools, the school systems, obviously, the amount of exams and different things that they go through within schools there's a lot of pressure that's put on them in those kind of situations. But also social media people think of it. It can be this really fantastic tool, but actually it can create a lot of problems for people as well, because the images that you're accessing all the time that idea that people are in this, living in this wonderful world and they've got everything together, but actually it's a snapshot of that person's best part of their day. They're not showing you the other parts, the pits that are kind of not going so well, and it's about sometimes just pulling yourself back from that, and I think that's difficult for kids, particularly because they don't necessarily recognise that. It adds more pressure definitely.
Speaker 2:It's a fascinating conversation. We've only just really scratched the surface of this one, rebecca, it would be great to get you back on in the future for a more in-depth look at stress, but if anybody wants more details about, maybe, how you can help them or how Vita can help them, what's the best route?
Speaker 3:Yeah, so if it's the employee assistance programme, they can contact that directly. If they are sort of one of our customers but otherwise, go through our website, have a look on there and we've got a helpline as well that they can sort of contact.
Speaker 2:Okay, lovely to talk to you, rebecca. Great to talk to you today. I do Right, rebecca Kerr, staying there, an EAP psychological well-being team manager. Thanks for joining us on the Vita Health podcast today, rebecca.
Speaker 1:Thanks, glenn. Thank you for listening to this Making People Better podcast, part of the well-being series from Vita Health Group. Improving your lives, physically and mentally, drives everything we do, and getting you back to doing what you love is our priority. Vita Health Group Making People Better wwwVitaHealthGroupcouk.