Filter Your Stress Bucket: How to Know What Actually Belongs (Part 3)

In part three of this stress series, Amanda introduces the important step that comes before editing your stress bucket — filtering it. She shares two practical filters to help you get clear on what actually belongs in your life: the rubber vs glass ball distinction and your personal core values. This episode is honest about the fact that this process is often countercultural and sometimes relational, and Amanda shares her own experience of what it cost — and ultimately gave — when she first started doing things differently.

3 Takeaways:

• Before you edit your stress bucket you need a filter. Random subtraction — just throwing things out — leads to dropping what matters while holding onto what doesn't. Clarity about what belongs comes first.
• The rubber vs glass filter asks: what in your bucket actually shatters if dropped, and what bounces? Most of us are treating everything like glass — which means your nervous system never gets to rest, even when rest is available.
• Your core values are the deeper filter underneath rubber vs glass. They reveal what's actually worth carrying and what's been in your bucket out of habit, obligation, or an unconscious contract you never agreed to. Get clear on your values first — the editing gets so much easier from there.

Resources mentioned: Brené Brown Core Values Exercise

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Transcript

SPEAKER_00 0:00

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. This is part three of our stress management series. And quick update or heads up before we dive in. What was originally going to be a four-part series is now five parts. Because as I was putting together this specific episode, it became really clear that what I planned for this was actually two distinct conversations. And I really want to give them their own space. So I'm splitting it. Today is about filtering your stress bucket. And the next episode is going to be about editing it. So if you are actually going through this process as you're listening with this series, I think you're going to be glad that I do it this way. My hope was that with each of these episodes at the end, there was just a singular, clear, and distinct ask. So quick recap of what we've talked about so far, what those asks were. Part one was about understanding stress. So what the bucket was, the seesaw, the difference between acute and chronic stressors. And there was a big reframe of stress management and how it's not just about having less stress, it's about the balance between stressors and supporters, especially in the reality of modern day life. And the ask of that episode was just start paying attention. Start paying attention to what your stress load feels like on a regular basis. Then in part two, that was all about your stress bucket assessment or your full Seesaw assessment, where I invited you to take an honest but structured inventory of both sides: baseline stressors, daily stressors, and your supporters. And I also touched on the difference between kind of overflow and a trigger. And I heard back from a lot of you that that boom was like a big aha moment that you hadn't put together before. So glad that was there. So if you haven't listened to those episodes yet, I want to invite you to go back and start there because what we are going to do today directly builds on having a general picture of what is actually in your bucket. So I'm assuming now that you have looked at your stress bucket. You know what's there, or at least a little bit more than you did before. And so the natural next question becomes: okay, so like now what? Now what? What do I actually do with this assessment, this new awareness of just how overwhelming my life has been or currently is? And I'll start by telling you what the answer is not. What I don't want you to do is just to grab anything from your stress bucket and randomly start throwing it out. And my hope is that after this episode, you're also not just standing there staring at your bucket, feeling overwhelmed and hopeless either. When it comes to filtering and editing your stress bucket, before you do, I think it's really important that you do a little self-exploration. You start to figure out what actually matters to you. Because editing your stressors, editing your life without personalized filters, it's just random subtraction. And we are not trying to minimize your life with this process. We're actually trying to make sure that what is in your life is actually yours. Something that you are consciously choosing. And in the places where we are trying to reduce or more intentionally choose stressors, we're doing that in order to make room for things that make you feel alive, things that feel purposeful. So before you edit your bucket, and again, that's exactly what we're going to talk about in the next part of this series. You need filters. You need a way of looking at what is in there and being able to say with some confidence, yep, that belongs, that belongs, this doesn't, this doesn't, that belongs, this doesn't, this is mine to carry, or something that I'm choosing to keep and carry, and this isn't. This is aligned with my values, and this isn't. This is what you will hear in this episode. This is a glass ball, or this is just a rubber ball. It's okay to let that one drop. So that is what today is all about is helping you to identify or to build up your unique filters. And before we get into the filters themselves, let me reiterate just how counterculture this process may be for some of you. I said in I think part one, that the default of modern life is dysregulation. That the current of it, of modern day life, is towards more, more stimulation, more consumption, more busyness, more noise. And filtering your bucket is one of the first steps that you can take in figuring out how you are going to swim against that current. Because this process requires that you stop, that you get honest, and that you ask, what actually matters to me inside a culture that profits from telling you that everything matters all of the time. Saying no, setting a boundary, stepping back from something, opting out of extracurriculars for your kids, or choosing simplicity over accumulation, these things may also come with the judgment or misunderstanding of people around you. And that is something you may, and well, I say may, you will. You will have to learn how to hold. Not everybody is going to understand why you are choosing to do things differently. Not everybody needs to understand that. When I did this for what was probably the first time in my 20s, it was a really clumsy and hard process. I did not yet have the skills of communicating clear boundaries. So, in a lot of areas of my life, I just started to do things differently because I really felt like I had no other choice. I was breaking. And I really hurt my relationship with both of my sisters in that process. For us, there was a lot of a meshment. I was a second mom figure in a lot of ways to both of them. And unfortunately, my own kind of mental health breakdown and my attempts at rebuilding myself also overlapped with their lives being really, really hard. And that meant that I wasn't there in a lot of the ways that they expected me to be. In a lot of the ways that looking back, I maybe even wish I would have been. And it took us another couple of years to repair some of that, but we did. And then it took me another couple of years to stop blaming myself entirely for those ruptures, but I have. And I also want to note that in my different phases of filtering and editing my life and my stress bucket, I've had other relationships lost in ways that weren't repaired. And I've had to navigate the anger or the grief that comes with that too. But ultimately, the context I want to set for you in sharing this is that in this process of trying to move your life closer to the one that feels like yours, not the life where you're defaulting to autopilot, not the life where you feel like you're drowning for the sake of everybody else around you, or just because life keeps pushing you down. In this process, you are likely going to have to stop overfunctioning and to stop self-abandoning in a way that the people around you have probably become accustomed to. Going through this process has often caused strain on some relationships, friendships, my marriage, even strain with myself as I've had to go inward and really look and self-confront why I do the things that I do. And often and frequently I have needed professional support, both in the form of coaching and therapy along the way. But what I want to tell you is that every time I have taken the time to assess and filter and edit my stress bucket, I ultimately land closer to a life that feels like mine, that feels like what I want, the one that I want to be living, the one that I want to be in. And every time I land a little closer to feeling like my authentic self in it. So I just want to acknowledge that before we go further, that this work isn't just practical. It's often relational and an act of reclaiming your nervous system from a world and friendships or family systems that often profit from your dysregulation. So do with that context what you will. But let's move on now into the filters. What are some of the filters that you can apply to your stress bucket assessment? And the first filter I want to give you, and one that we often use with clients, is to paint things in your life as either glass balls or rubber balls. So imagine that everything in your bucket, every stressor, every commitment, every obligation, everything that you're holding is either a rubber ball or a glass ball. The rubber balls are things that if you drop them, they bounce. They might roll under a couch, there might be a minor consequence, but they recover. These things are okay. Glass balls are the things that if you drop them, they shatter. There is real damage done. They don't often come back the same way. These are the more precious parts of your life, the higher stakes, things or relationships or situations in your life. And for so many of us, the problem is that we are treating everything like it's glass. We are bringing the same level of urgency and nervous system activation to every stressor, every commitment, every relationship, every item on our to-do list. And not only is that exhausting and unsustainable, it leaves you feeling like you are failing at everything all the time. Because when everything is urgent, nothing ever gets your full presence. And your nervous system never gets to rest, even when rest might be technically available, because it's constantly being pulled in a million different directions. And I know what that feels like deeply, deeply personally. Any time in my life when I am feeling pulled in a million directions, when I'm just stretched thin, behind on what feels like everything, feeling like I'm failing everyone. It's almost always because I have not recently applied this filter. I haven't stopped and honestly asked myself, Amanda, what is actually glass right now? What matters most right now? The one, the one or two things. And when I do ask, when I sit down and get really honest about it and refocus my energy, here's a couple things that happen. My house usually gets messier. My emails get answered a lot slower. My meals for my family get simpler. And honestly, I usually have a few people at least mildly annoyed with me because those things or those people or those relationships or those commitments, they're not my glass balls. But because I have made those adjustments intentionally, because I got clear on what my glass balls were, answering emails slower, my house being messier, people being annoyed with me, it doesn't, it doesn't feel like failure like it did maybe a week before. It feels like an intentional choice to protect capacity for what actually matters most. So the first question to ask of things in your bucket, the first kind of filter to apply is just to go through and say, hey, is this glass? Or have I been treating it like it's glass when it's actually rubber? Looking at your stress bucket and maybe identifying, maybe you want to circle, what are the things that feel the highest stakes for me? Because that's gonna be information. That's gonna be information. Now, if that filter feels a little too ambiguous for you, sometimes it does for our clients. Here's another layer of filters that you can start with that get a little bit more personal. Because the rubber versus glass ball distinction, it's not universal. What is glass to you might be rubber to somebody else. What matters to you in this season of your life is not the same thing as probably what matters to your neighbor or your sister or your coworker, or even what might matter to you in a month or a year from now. And the most reliable way to tell the difference is not, is not, is not by what feels urgent, because urgency is often manufactured by the culture, by other people's expectations, by old stories that you're still living inside, old patterns of behavior. One of the more reliable ways to tell the difference between what matters most and what doesn't is by getting clear on your core values. So this becomes another filter that I think goes deeper than the rubber versus glass balls because it helps point to your why underneath that. So your core values are the things that matter most to you when you strip away the noise, the shoulds. And these are not the values you think you should have. These are not the values that you were uh in your upbringing told to have. They're not the ones that sound good, but they're the ones that feel most true to who you actually are right now in this season of your life. So when something in your bucket is in direct service of something that you genuinely value, maybe it's your health, your most important relationships, your creative work, your integrity, your faith, we can look at that stressor and say, it belongs here. Even if it's hard, even if it costs you something in time, energy, money, sanity. And I actually did a whole episode on this. The equation of looking at things, does this give more than it takes? And maybe that that's not a filter I was planning on including in this episode, but that could also be a filter that you go through and you look at your stress bucket and you're like, does that give more than it takes? Does that give more than it takes? Does that give more than it takes? Is that in alignment with my core values? Some of our stressors are worth carrying because of what they're connected to. This filter of core values helps you see when what or how you're carrying something in your bucket is more out of habit or obligation, fear of judgment, the story you've been telling yourself about who you have to be, than being truly authentic to something you've consciously chosen. And when it is, those things are some of the first things that become candidates for the three Ds of editing your stress bucket that we're gonna talk about in the next part. And I promise I'm gonna give you more detail on how to identify your core values in a few minutes. But before I do, I want to give you some context for how this has mattered in my life and my healing. So much of this core values exercise for me has been seeing the places where I have unintentionally, truly, self-abandoned completely and recklessly, prioritizing other people's values, other people's expectations, other people's comfort. And I did this so consistently for so long that I had completely lost track of my own values, expectations, needs, wants, comfort. I had lost track of what my personal core values might be. And when I finally sat down and got clear on, and the first time it was like, I don't know. I looked at this list, I was like, I don't know, I don't know, I don't know. Like my parents said that was important. Like, this is important to this person that I really respect. It took a lot of setting aside the shames and the shoulds of what my choice might be. It took a lot of reminding myself that nobody else ever had to know or or see what these were to get to being a little bit more clear on what I actually valued personally. And so many things in my bucket that had felt like non-negotiables before through this filter of my identified core values. Well, it made a lot of those non-negotiables suddenly look very negotiable. And here's a real example, not of the first time I went through this process, but kind of a rego. A few years ago, I did this exercise about the time of the original stress bucket series on the podcast. And almost overnight, because again, I've done this exercise many times, I'm able to make changes in my life in accordance to what I see faster, which we'll talk a lot about in the next episode. Start with one thing, go very slow. This is not a good example of that. Again, done this a million times. But almost overnight, I quit the PTO at my son's school. We stopped swim lessons, I stepped down from a church responsibility that I'd taken on. And then I spent about the next six months very, very intentionally minimizing our home. I went through about six bags of clothes. I got rid of, I think probably a quarter of my like just kitchen accessory stuff. I was sick of every drawer being like one spoon away from being stuck closed. I minimized kids' toys and kids' clothes, so that overall there was just less to manage, less decision fatigue, more breathing room in my everyday environment. And what is so awesome is probably two years ago that I spent six months doing that. And that has now become kind of a default way that I move through my home. Whenever my kids' playroom explodes, I go through and I clean it. And with every object, I ask myself, is this actively being played with or contributing to mess? At the end of every season, I go through my clothes, what didn't get worn, what doesn't fit. Okay, let it go. Just like let it go. So over time, the next layer of what I filtered and ultimately edited was also this underlying belief system that I was holding. Because sometimes what we're going to edit and filter are things on our to-do list, things on our floors, things external in our daily life. But also, we have some underlying belief systems that we are holding that we can also filter that also had a place in your stress bucket assessment. What are the beliefs about yourself, the world, other people, your relationships that feel heavy for you? So, for example, about the time of this assessment I was talking about, one of the things that I stopped making was my husband's breakfast and lunch. Specifically, I stopped making it out of the sense of obligation, especially on the days where he was also working from home. Now, do I still often make breakfast and lunch for the whole family? Yes, because we do things for the people that we care about. But what I filtered and ultimately let go of wasn't necessarily the task. Although I do, I do make him breakfast and lunch far less now. But it was the weight of the obligation. What I filtered out was the story of, ooh, that's what a good wife does. And I was like, says who? Like, says who. So another just soft filter question that really comes in handy when it comes to editing your stress bucket is to look at what you're doing or how you're doing it, why you're doing it that way, and just be like, says who? Like, says who that's what a good wife does. Says who you're supposed to fold your kids' laundry. Like, says, says who? My core values, is it my core values that say this, or is it some like preconditioned something from somewhere else? And so that filter helped me to let go of that should, that mental load, that unspoken contract that I had signed without ever consciously agreeing to it. And it really, in the last couple years, has allowed me to also call into question and cancel so many more of those unconsciously signed social contracts in my life and how I show up as a wife, as a mom, as a business owner, as a podcast. Podcaster, all of it. And that is ultimately what getting clear on your values does is that it can help you see what is yours to carry and what you've just been carrying because you never stopped to look close enough at it. You never stopped to get clear enough on the fact that maybe you do have some choice there. The question becomes: how do you actually figure out your core values if you aren't sure already what they are? Because I think a lot of people here like get clear on your values and feel a little stuck. Like I did my first time. So what I'm gonna do now is offer a little bit of a framework, point you towards an additional, more detailed resource that will actually guide you, literally hold your hand through this whole process. Um, this is also something that we do with all of our clients who go through Restore. But if you are gonna do it on your own, here is some guidance. First, first, first, first, friend, there's no wrong answers. And your values right now in this season of your life do not have to be the values that you carry over forever. If you are in grad school, those core values are gonna be different than after you've graduated and you're in your career. If you are a parent, that gets to be different than when you're an empty nester or before. Your core values are allowed to shift as you do in different seasons of your healing and as your life does. So take the pressure off from finding the perfect permanent answer and just try to focus on what feels most true for you right now. Now, Brene Brown has a very detailed core values exercise that I really love, that I think she's done really well, and I'm not gonna attempt to redo it. And it's a free resource that she has. So I am going to link in the show notes a link to a blog that has like a downloadable printable packet that also has linked, I think, to one of her podcasts that walks you through that exercise in great, great detail. But in case you don't want to do all of that, here's your abbreviated version of what you can do if you want to start today. Step one is to pull up a list of values. So again, in her PDF, there is a great list of core values. You also can just Google list of core values, find one you like and print it out. And then you're gonna go through that list of words with a pen. Circle all of the ones that resonate, the ones that you're like, yeah, okay, that matters to me. That matters to me, that matters to me. Don't overthink it. Just circle the ones that that pull at you. You will probably end up with somewhere between like 10 and 15 circled, if I have to guess. Then, this is where it gets a little tricky. You are gonna go back through. I usually take like a marker or a highlighter, and you are gonna ask yourself if I can only keep two to three, three, absolutely max, which three feel most essential to who I am right now? And you're gonna highlight those. And those three core values become your filter. And here is one thing that I want you to watch out for as you do this. There's a difference between aspirational values, the ones that you think that you should have, the ones that sound really good, that are socially acceptable, and your actual values. So if you find yourself thinking about circling things like achievement or productivity because you think that's who you want to be or what you should be, but what actually feels most alivening to you is connection or creativity. Go with the later. Again, nobody ever has to see this piece of paper, but ditch your shoulds. Which of these are truly like a life that would feel regulating? A life that would feel fun for me, embody these fun or meaningful or purposeful, embody these three things most. So here is what I want you to do before we get to part four together. Do the core values exercise, then take those two to three values and just hold them up against your stress bucket. And of everything there, asking yourself, does this serve what I actually value? How many of these things that I'm carrying and holding can I tie directly back to one of my core values? Are these things glass or rubber balls? Is this mine to carry or something that I want to keep choosing to carry? Or is it just something that I I never put down and I don't know why. And you do not need to do anything with those answers yet. We're just finding our filters and then putting them alongside our bucket and just noticing, just starting to see your bucket through those filters. Because in part four, we are gonna take that clarity and do something with it. Part four is where I'm gonna try to give you a concrete framework for acting on the things that these filters reveal. All right, friends. Three takeaways. Takeaway number one: before you edit your stress bucket, you need filters. Random subtraction, just throwing things out. It is exhausting. And honestly, it often leads to you dropping what matters while holding on to what doesn't. We need the clarity the filters bring first. Number two, the rubber versus glass filter, and what it asks you is what in your bucket shatters if dropped versus what bounces. We cannot bring the same level of urgency. We cannot give the same weight of time, energy, and resource to the rubber balls in our life. And takeaway number three is that your core values are the deeper filter underneath it all. They tell you what is actually worth carrying and what has just been in your bucket out of habit or obligation, an unconscious contract that you never really even meant to sign. So when you can get clear on your values first, the editing gets so, so much easier. All right, friends. Until next time, I'm sending so much hope and healing your way.