Stress Diary
Identifying
sources of short-term stress
You're
tired. You've had a hard commute. The office receptionist was grumpy and curt
when you arrived at work, and you've already dealt with two minor crises today.
Then a member of your team spills his coffee over some important work.
Should you have snapped at him? Probably not, but it was the "straw that
broke the camel's back" at a time when you were really stressed.
So how can you reduce the levels of stress you experience, so that you can deal
with problems in a calm, gracious way; and improve the quality of your life at
the same time?
This is where Stress Diaries are useful for understanding the causes of
short-term stress that you experience. They help you target and manage the most
significant sources of stress in your life, and they help you think about how
you handle stress, so that you can learn to deal with it better.
Introducing
Stress Diaries
The
idea behind Stress Diaries is that, on a regular basis, you record information
about the stresses you are experiencing, so that you can identify repeating
patterns and then manage them. This is important because these stresses often
flit in and out of our minds without getting the attention and focus that they
deserve.
As well as helping you capture and analyze the most common sources of stress in
your life, Stress Diaries help you to understand:
- The causes of stress in more
detail.
- How you react to stress, and whether your
reactions are appropriate and useful.
- Stress Diaries, therefore, give
you the important information that you need to manage stress.
Using
the Tool:
Stress Diaries are
useful in that they gather information regularly and routinely, over a period
of time. This helps you to separate the common, routine stresses from
those that only occur occasionally. By targeting repeating or major
sources of stress, you can hopefully significantly reduce overall stress
levels with a minimum amount of effort.
How much stress you can tolerate before your performance starts to suffer.
Make your Stress Diary and make regular
entries in your Stress Diary, for example, every hour. (If you have any
difficulty remembering to do this, set an alarm to remind you to make your next
diary entry.) Also make an entry in your Stress Diary after each incident that
is stressful enough for you to feel that it is significant.
Aim to keep the diary for several days or a week. Every time you make an entry,
record the following information:
- The date and time of the entry.
- The most recent stressful event
you have experienced since the last entry.
- How happy you feel now, using a
subjective assessment on a scale of -10 (the most unhappy you have ever
been) to +10 (the happiest you have been). As well as this, write down the
mood you are feeling now.
- How effectively you are working
now (this is a subjective assessment, on a scale of 0 to 10). A 0 here
would show complete ineffectiveness, while a 10 would show the greatest
effectiveness you have ever achieved.
-
- The fundamental cause of the stress (being as
honest and objective as possible).
You
may also want to note:
- How stressed you feel now,
again on a subjective scale of 0 to 10. As before, 0 here would be the
most relaxed you have ever been, while 10 would show the greatest stress
you have ever experienced.
- The symptom you felt (e.g.
"butterflies in your stomach", anger, headache, raised pulse
rate, sweaty palms, etc.).
- How well you handled the event: Did your
reaction help solve the problem, or did it inflame it?
Analyzing
the Diary
At the end of
the period, analyze the diary in the following ways:
- First, look at the different
stresses you experienced during the time you kept your diary. List the
types of stress that you experienced by frequency, with the most frequent
stresses at the top of the list.
Next, prepare a second list with the most unpleasant stresses at the top
of the list and the least unpleasant at the bottom.
Looking at your lists of stresses, those at the top of each list are the
most important ones to deal with.
Working through these, look at your assessments of their underlying
causes, and your appraisal of how well you handled the stressful event. Do
these show you areas where you handled stress poorly, and could improve
your stress management skills? If so, list these.
- Next, look through your diary
at the situations that cause you stress. List these.
- Finally, look at how you felt when you were
under stress. Look at how it affected your happiness and your effectiveness,
understand how you behaved, and think about how you felt.
Having analyzed your diary, you
should fully understand what the most important and frequent sources of stress
are in your life. You should also know the sort of situations that cause you
stress so that you can prepare for them and manage them well.
As well as this, you should now understand how
you react to stress, and the symptoms that you show when you are stressed. When
you experience these symptoms in the future, this should be a trigger for you
to use appropriate stress management techniques.
Taking Action
There's no point
knowing these things unless you take action on them. Make a plan for dealing
with the most important sources of stress that you identify, and put the first
actions in this plan onto your To Do List or Action Program. And where
you find that you need to improve your stress management skills, make sure
these are on the plan too.
Also, don't feel that you're being self-indulgent by working on this plan as
part of your job: If you're happier, your team will be happier, people will be
more motivated, and everyone will be more effective and more productive.
Summary
Stress Diaries
help you to get a good understanding of the routine, short-term stresses that
you experience in your life. They help you to identify the most important, and
most frequent, stresses that you experience, so that you can concentrate your
efforts on these. They also help you to identify areas where you need to
improve your stress management skills, and help you to understand the levels of
stress at which you are happiest, and most effective.
To keep a stress diary, make a regular diary entry with the headings above -
it's often best if you do this every hour. Also make entries after stressful
events.
Analyze the diary to identify the most frequent and most serious stresses that
you experience. Use it also to identify areas where you can improve your
management of stress.
