Understanding Stress (Part 1)

In this episode, Amanda introduces a new four-part series on stress by reframing what stress actually is, and why stress itself isn't really the problem. She explains how stress is a natural, necessary nervous system response, but becomes harmful when it remains unresolved and accumulates over time. Using the stress bucket and see-saw metaphors, she offers a more honest and actionable way to understand and work with stress in modern life. 

3 Takeaways:

1.  Stress isn’t the problem—chronic, unresolved stress is. A healthy stress response activates, completes, and returns to baseline. 
2.  Stress is either processed or stored. When the cycle doesn’t complete, it accumulates in the body and shows up as symptoms. 
3.  Effective stress management isn’t about eliminating stress—it’s about balancing your stressors with enough consistent support to help your nervous system recover.

CLICK HERE for the full show notes, resources, and 3 tangible takeaways!

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Transcript

Welcome to Regulate and Rewire, an anxiety and depression podcast where we discuss the things I wish someone would have taught me earlier in my healing journey. I'm your host, Amanda Armstrong, and I'll be sharing my steps, my missteps, client experiences and tangible research-based tools to help you regulate your nervous system, rewire your mind and reclaim your life. Thanks for being here. Now let's dive in.

Hey friend, welcome back. We are officially over 150 episodes into this podcast and that feels wild to me. I know that some of you have been here since day one and others of you might be tuning in today for the first time. And I just need you to know that I am still in awe and so grateful for the worldwide community that has gathered and continues to show up and listen. And be here with me week after week as I teach. I started this podcast because I love to teach.

I love to educate. And I wanted to share with anybody who found it helpful what really moved the needle in my healing journey, which was understanding and approaching anxiety and depression through this nervous system lens. And my goal here is to fill the gaps between understanding the science and filtering that through the lens of your unique lived experience to help you better understand that underlying physiology behind your psychology and ways not only to understand why you're struggling, but also what, like what tangible things you can do to move towards healing, which I hear over and over again is what lands and resonates so much with so many of you is the tangible takeaways that you have, the education that just lands somewhere deep in your soul of, oh, this makes sense. This makes sense. I make sense.

My symptoms make sense. And today we're kicking off a four-part series on stress management that I think combines the education and the application. really well. The why and the what when it comes to understanding stress, stress physiology, and the role that it plays in creating the activation that we often label and experience as anxiety, or eventually the shutdown that we call depression.

So if you've been around for a while, some of what I'm going to share in the series may sound familiar from my original stress bucket. series a couple years ago. But I'm coming back to this topic because the way that I teach it has evolved, the way that I understand it has deepened. And because if you are still here listening, there's a good chance that your stress is also still around. And if anything, I think this conversation has gotten even more urgent. The series is even more needed. And I hope that it gives you new and real ways to work with your real life circumstances, with the world circumstances, and just with all of the things that you are currently holding. 

So here's what we're going to cover across the next four episodes. Episode one today is about understanding stress, not just the surface level, like, oh, stress is bad. Try to reduce it. But a deeper, more honest picture of what stress actually is and what we're really trying to do when we say we want to manage our stress. Better. That's a nice thing to say, but what does that actually look like? What does that work look like? Because again, not all stress is bad and stress as a human is unavoidable. So I think we would all do well to approach it a little bit more skillfully. 

Then episode two is about assessing your own unique. So taking a real inventory of what is going on in your system and in your life. 

Then after that assessment, we have episode three, which is where I am going to walk you through how to take a look at that stress load and consider editing it. Where can we delete, do differently, delegate? And if there are big stressors that we can't control, well, another lens of stress management that I don't think is talked about very often is, okay, maybe we can't decrease our stress, but can we add to our support system, to our supporters? And what are some creative ways that that can look in your life? 

Then episode four is the long game. What does it look like? to just have to manage your stress reactively for the rest of your life, but to actually start building and sustaining a life that your nervous system actually wants to live in, that it can actually hold. 

And as you're listening to the episodes in this series, you might notice a part of you thinking, oh man, like I don't want to just understand this. I actually want support in applying it. And if that's coming up for you, I want to remind you that you don't have to do this work on your own. This is the exact work that we do one-on-one with our clients inside Restore. So that is where we take this work beyond understanding, beyond concept, and actually help you integrate it into your life, to your patterns, with your unique nervous system in a way that's not only supported in the moment, but that's sustainable. in your actual life circumstances. So if you find yourself wanting somebody alongside you actually in this work with you, not just listening, but applying it, restore might be a really good fit. And if you want to explore that, there's a link in the show notes to book a completely pressure-free discovery call with me where we can just see if it makes sense for you at this point in your healing journey. 

All right, without further ado, let's dive into part one of this series, all about understanding stress.

Starting with the fact that stress is not the problem in and of itself. And I know that might sound like a weird way to open a series on stress management, but like always, just stay with me, stick with me. We live in a culture, or at least I think there are corners of this that have declared war on stress. There's messaging like reduce your stress, eliminate your stressors, simplify your life, all while the world just keeps getting more and more and more and more stressful. And I understand why those messages are there. Chronic stress is genuinely harmful when there is too much stress, unsupported stress, stressors that don't resolve, overwhelming, unintegrated stressors from our past that lives just below the surface every day of our present lives. That kind of chronic stress takes its toll. And the research on that is real. And we'll talk more about that. But the generalized framing of stress as some enemy to be eliminated is inaccurate. And in my opinion, it's also unhelpful because it puts us in a constant battle with a biological process that's never going away. And it completely misses what stress actually is. Stress. Stress is your nervous system's response to a demand. That is it. 

There is a stimulus and your system has a response. When your brain perceives that something is being asked of you or something is coming at you physically, emotionally, cognitively, relationally, your nervous system mobilizes resources to meet that demand. Heart rate changes, hormones shift, your attention narrows, your body gets ready to respond in a way that handles the stressor in a unique way, partly based on just pre-programmed biology, but also the way that we respond is colored by our past lived experiences. 

So what we're talking about… stress response that kept our ancestors alive. It keeps us alive. It is what gets you through a hard work presentation. It's what mobilizes you when your kid gets hurt, what sharpens your focus for a deadline. Stress can be, or this, when I say stress, I'm talking about this, the stress response in your body can be really useful. It's energy. It's also information. It is your nervous system saying, hey, I'm paying attention and I'm readying or I am ready. So the problem was never and is never stress itself. 

The problem is when this stress response does not get a chance to complete. The problem comes when your system stays activated long after the demand has passed. Or when your nervous system is running on high alert, not because of one single acute stressor, but because of dozens of them that just stack up over time with no recovery built in. That's chronic stress. 

And before we talk about why I think chronic stress has become so common, I want to give you a little bit more science on what's actually happening in your body, because I think it changes how you understand. maybe everything else we're going to talk about in this series. 

So when stress works the way that it is supposed to, it follows a cycle. Something happens, a demand, a threat, a challenge. Your nervous system activates. Hormones like cortisol or adrenaline flood your system. Your heart rate might go up. Your digestion may slow or change. Your muscles get ready. Your body is doing exactly what it should in those moments. And then, and this is the part that really, really, really matters, the stress resolves. The stressor passes. You respond, you move, you wait until it just goes away on its own. And your nervous system then fully resets into a regulated parasympathetic state. That rest and digest, that safe and social. So maybe you had a hard conversation and it clears and you're like, okay, I'm good. That sucked in the moment, but now I'm good. Or maybe this looks like you running from the thing that's chasing you and you survive and that thing goes on its merry way. You're good. Okay. Let's go back to collecting berries, weaving baskets. I don't know. But at some point, Your nervous system needs to get the signal that you've handled it, that you're safe again. So it can come back down, heart rate slows, digestion resumes, cortisol drops, recovery happens. That is an acute stress response. And it's genuinely not bad for you. It's actually essential that we have these experiences as human. In the right dose, it actually makes you sharper, stronger, more resilient.

The problem is that most modern stress doesn't follow that cycle. It doesn't follow that arc. The stressors don't resolve. The email thread doesn't end. The financial pressure doesn't clear. The relationship tension just sits there and goes unaddressed. Your nervous system activates and then it stays activated because it never gets the signal. that it's safe to come back down because it's just one thing after another, after another, after another. And the reality is that stress, this initiation of this process in our body, it either gets processed or stored. Like that's it. Those are the two options. When a stress cycle completes, when your nervous system gets to move through that activation and back into recovery, the stress gets processed. Your body metabolizes it. You might feel a little tired afterwards. But you feel clear and you're able to reset. But when the cycle doesn't complete, when you have to just push through into the next stressful thing, when we bypass or we suppress or just never get the chance to reset or resolve, that is the stress that gets stored. 

When we talk about kind of trauma being stored in your body, what we're talking about is kind of this accumulation of survival and stress energy in your body. And the stored stress accumulates over time in ways that can look like anxiety, irritability, chronic pain, exhaustion, getting sick, falling apart over something small all the time, just feeling fragile, feeling really fragile or hypervigilant all the time. And this is why two people can go through the same hard thing and have completely different outcomes because potentially their accumulated stress looks.

So when we talk about chronic stress, that's what we mean. Not just a lot of stressors, but a system that has been in an activated stress response for so long with little to no real recovery. A system that has so many stressors without having enough supporters. And the stored stress load becomes your baseline. There are so many chronic health conditions, inflammation. autoimmune conditions that are often linked directly towards this unresolved stress response.

And before I go any further, I really want to reemphasize this idea that modern stress doesn't always follow the arc of stress that resolves. Because I think stress is often framed as a personal management problem. And while there's almost always an element of that, of it being a personal management problem. What is also true is that our environment itself is often chronically activating and that context is really, really important. So most of us are living in an environment that is structurally, relentlessly activating. And I don't think most of us have fully reckoned with or even fully understand what that actually means for our nervous systems. 

Think about it for a minute. Think about what your average baseline day looks like. You wake up and within minutes, maybe even seconds, your phone is in your hand. Notifications, news, emails, somebody else's highlight reel, somebody else's crisis. The algorithm has been engineered. by very, very smart people with a lot of resources to keep your nervous system just activated enough to keep scrolling. And that's not an accident. That is the product. You move through a day then that is almost entirely devoid of the things that historically regulated human nervous systems. Extended time in nature, physical labor with a clear beginning and an end. Deep face-to-face connection, genuine rest, communal support. The village that used to help raise the children and share the load and sit with you in hard seasons, for most of us, that village is gone. are carrying individually what humans were always designed to carry collectively. So then you come home at the end of the day and instead of your nervous system getting to wind down, you've got more screens. You've got more stimulation, more content, more noise. The Netflix queue that's always there, the group chat that never really stops, this low hum of emails that you like aren't answering. And then we wonder why we can't sleep. And I'm not saying this to depress you. I am saying it because I think a lot of people are walking around believing that their chronic stress is a personal failure. That if they were just a little bit more disciplined or more resilient or more together, they wouldn't feel this way. And that story is not only inaccurate, but I think it is personally cruel. Because it adds a layer of shame on top of what you're already experiencing as an overflowing bucket. Your nervous system, in most cases, is responding appropriately to an environment that is genuinely, chronically over-demanding. 

And that is worth sitting with for a minute before we move into anything else in this series. And, and, and, and... here's where I want to call you up because I think you can hold both of these things at once. Within that real structural reality, there is also real agency and accountability. Not oftentimes full control, not the ability to opt out of the world entirely, but meaningful daily choices about how you orient to it that can make a big difference. And stress management done honestly is the practice of taking that agency seriously and repeatedly because the default of modern day living is dysregulation. And I think that this is the first 100 years of human history where that is really true, that the default of daily life is dysregulation and it's not slowing down.

You know, imagine like a river current. That's what I'm talking about. The current of modern day living is towards more stimulation, more consumption, more busyness, more noise. And swimming against that, choosing sleep over the next episode, leaving your phone and going outside, building actual stillness into your day, saying no to one more thing, one more thing on your schedule, but also one more object in your house. That is a countercultural act. That is also what regulated living demands of you. It requires swimming upstream in this culture that profits from your dysregulation in so many ways.

So the frame that I want to hold throughout this series is this, that stress management is not about being broken and fixing yourself. It is about being a conscious, intentional human being inside a system that was not designed with a healthy nervous system in mind. And for you, that means deciding on purpose to orient to your daily life differently, to control what you can control, to reduce what you can reduce, to find support for what you can't and to stop apologizing for the ways that you are choosing to do things differently. For the things that you choose to put down, to step away from, the places you decide to ask for help, any of it. That is the work. That is the work. And it starts with understanding what you're actually working with. And to do that, I want to introduce you to two metaphors that I come to constantly in my work, in my coaching, in my teaching, because I think they do a really good job at explaining stress in a functional, workable way. 

So the first is the stress bucket. So I want you to picture a bucket. This is your bucket. And this bucket represents your... nervous system. Your nervous system's carrying capacity. Now you and I understand that if we're talking about an actual bucket, an actual bucket can only get so full before it either starts to overflow or before it's too heavy for you and I to pick it up. And yet a lot of times when I think we think about our capacity, we feel like it's a little bit more ambiguous than that. Like, oh, we can just say yes and yes and yes and yes. And don't ever expect it to get too heavy to pick up or to overflow. It does. And so this is why I love this bucket analogy to represent your nervous system's carrying capacity. And every stressor in your life, the big ones, the small ones, the obvious ones, the invisible ones, the past and the present, all of these stressors go into your bucket. I want you to imagine that your stressors are the water, the weight in this bucket. 

So other examples, when I'm talking about the water in your bucket, I'm talking about every hard conversation. every night of bad sleep, every financial worry, every workout your body hasn't recovered from, everything on your to-do list that's been sitting there for three weeks, the unprocessed emotions you've pushed down, all of that accumulates in our bucket. 

And here's what I think is missed in most conventional approaches to mental health. The bucket fills from a lot more than just our obvious headline stressors. It also fills from things like blood sugar dysregulation or imbalance. Your nervous system experiences low blood sugar as a threat or things like hormonal imbalances, gut issues, mineral deficiencies, all of the things that we focus on in the functional lab work arm of what we do here. That's called regulated health. We regularly, with our clients, Assess these things. Where are the red flags? Where are the underlying physiological stressors or imbalances that no amount of talk therapy or strategy are going to solve if we aren't looking at them directly? All those things go in the bucket. Think about things like sleep debt. Even one night of poor sleep changes your stress response for the next day. Consistently poor sleep because of that Netflix habit. that's a significant ongoing input into your bucket. Relational tension, conflicts you haven't addressed, physical pain, sensory overload, noises, screens, on and on and on and on. I think we get it. I think we get it. There's a lot of things that can get added to our stress bucket. 

And another thing about this bucket, if you will, or your nervous system, is that it doesn't distinguish between the types of stressors. It just fills up. So it doesn't matter if it's underlying physiological stressors or relational stressors. There's just a general accumulation. And when it gets too full, it overflows. And that overflow is your symptoms in this analogy. Overflow looks different for everyone. Maybe it's anxiety. Maybe it's irritability or shutdown, exhaustion. Again, coming back to a lot of the overflow and symptoms turn into chronic pain or health conditions. 

The overflow, your symptoms are your nervous system's way of saying there's too much. There's too much here. 

I remember a season in my life a number of years ago. where I was just like convinced I was bad at stress. I was certain that I could just get better at handling life like other people could handle this much. Like why can't I? My life didn't look hard from the outside, but it felt so hard to be in for me on the inside. But then when I actually started to look honestly at what was in my bucket, the physical load, the relational stuff I was carrying, the sleep I wasn't getting, the emotions I was bypassing, it made perfect sense. And this is the experience that I watch our clients have over and over and over and over and over again. When they do their stress bucket assessment, which we're going to talk through in the next episode in this series, I watch every single one of them look down at their assessment, at their paper. And they look at me and they go, oh my gosh. I mean, I knew I was stressed. I knew I was caring a lot, but oh my gosh, this makes sense. Why I feel the way I feel, why I am the way that I am makes so much sense. And those three words, this makes sense, are what oftentimes help clients to put down shame just long enough to step into curiosity and self-compassion that helped them to look at that assessment honestly and say, okay, that's the why. Now it's time to move into the what. And it allows them to actually have the capacity to step into the what that starts to manage their stress bucket differently. 

And so this reframe matters. Because this belief that I'm bad at stress, or maybe you think you're just bad at stress, why can't you handle things as well as other people? That leads to shame and more pushing versus this idea of, oh, my bucket is full. My bucket's really full. That leads to the curiosity that allows you to actually do something about it. 

Okay, so we have the bucket. Now I want to add the second metaphor because this is new since the first Stress Bucket series and it has changed so much in how I think about stress and it plays a big role now in how I manage the load of motherhood and running two businesses, a dog, a house, and just like all of the things that my multifaceted life demands. So this metaphor involves a seesaw. So I want you to imagine a seesaw, like the one that you might find on a child's playground. Now on one side of that seesaw are your stressors, your bucket. Just imagine your bucket is in the seat on one side of the seesaw. Then on the other side of that seesaw is a stack of blocks. And those blocks represent your supporters, your regulation practices, your good sleep habits, your nourishment, your movement, your connection, your village, the things that help your nervous system. discharge stress, recover, delegate responsibility, and really just build and support your capacity over time. 

Now, most stress management advice is entirely focused on your stress bucket side of the seesaw. Reduce your stressors, say no to more things, simplify, eliminate. And yes, that's part of what we're going to talk about too. If there are stressors you can actually remove from your life, there's a good chance you absolutely need to do some of that. That matters. We're going to talk again more about that in episode three of this series. But here's the problem. A lot of the stressors in your bucket, you can't just eliminate them. You can't opt out of grief. You're probably not going to flush your kids down the toilet. You can't always fix the financial pressure or make your nervous system stop tracking the tension in your marriage or the narcissistic tendencies of your parents. Life has stressors. That is just part of being a pesky human doing life alongside other pesky humans.

So the goal is, with this seesaw analogy, is actually to find just something that resembles some kind of balance. And sometimes you're going to find leverage in decreasing your stressors. But other times and many, many times in life, the real leverage is going to come from seeking out supporters and getting really creative about what that might look like in your unique life. So when the supporter side of your seesaw is strong, your bucket feels more manageable.

Like right now, again, I want you to imagine that your bucket is sitting in front of you, right there at your feet. Now try to pick it up. It's probably heavy. And maybe you can't pick it up or maybe when you do try to pick it up, it's so full that water just like spills all over the edges and messes up your floors. Now instead, put that bucket back down. Now I step up next to you and I say, okay, let's do this together. On the count of three, we both reach down for the handle.

Three, two, one, and we pick it up together. It might still be heavy. A little water might spill, but probably less. the same load, but we handle it with less trouble. That is what your supporters can do. And then when our supporters are depleted, when there is just an immense imbalance in this equation, when you're not sleeping well or eating well, you feel isolated, you're running on empty, your bucket is going to fill faster, empty slower, and just overflow sooner. Life is just going to feel harder. 

And so this is why, again, another reason why two people can have objectively similar life experiences but have completely different stress experiences. It's not always about who's stronger, who has better coping skills. Have we looked at both sides of their seesaw? What do their supporters look like? 

So when I say stress management, what I actually mean is this. Learning to read your own system. Understand. what's filling your bucket and what's draining it and intentionally building a supporter side that's strong enough to meet the demands of your actual life. That's the whole thing. And that is what we're going to talk about in the rest of this series. 

So before I let you go today, I want to give you something to actually do with this between now and next week. I invite you to start noticing your bucket. We're not analyzing or fixing, just start to notice. How full does my bucket feel? What do I kind of think is filling it?

Some of the obvious stuff, some of the sneaky stuff, the sleep, the food, the relationships, emotions. Just maybe every time you sit down on the toilet, because that's a place I know we all end up a couple times a day. Ask yourself, full does my stress bucket feel? How do I know? How do I know that it's full or how do I know that I'm actually doing okay? 

Next week, we are going to do the assessment. We are going to go through both sides of this seesaw in more detail. And I'm going to walk you through how to take this honest inventory of your own system. Because in my opinion, this assessment is one of the most useful things that you can do to set a strategic and personalized path towards healing. And it has helped so many of our clients, again, not only make sense of their symptoms, but it becomes their personal blueprint. It is the beginning of them charting a much clearer personal path towards the what, what can I do to actually, 

all right, friends, here's your three takeaways from today.

Number one, Stress isn't the problem. Chronic stress is the problem.

A healthy stress response activates, completes, recovers. We run into problems when our system is stuck in this stress response and that stress has nowhere to process, nowhere to land, nowhere to reset from or to. 

Number two, stress is either processed or stored.

When that cycle does not complete, That stress doesn't just disappear. It accumulates in your body, in your nervous system, showing up as symptoms. 

And number three, stress management isn't just about having less stress. It is about balancing both sides of that seesaw, reducing what you can on the stressor side, and then being really intentional about building up the supporters that meet you in this particular season of. your life.

All right, friends, that's it for today. Until next week, I am sending so much hope and healing your way. 

Thanks for listening to another episode of the regulate and rewire podcast. If you enjoyed what you heard today, please subscribe and leave a five star review to help us get these powerful tools out to even more people who need them. And if you yourself are looking for more personalized support and applying what you've learned today, consider joining me inside Rise, my monthly mental health membership and nervous system healing space, or apply for our one-on-one anxiety and depression coaching program, Restore. I've shared a link for more information to both in the show notes. Again, thanks so much for being here and I'll see you next time.