Self Enquiry Stress Questions:

What are your stress triggers?

For example:

1. Lack of sleep.

2. No downtime.

3. Your baby or child crying for long periods.

4. Too busy and frantic.

5. Worrisome thoughts – financial/marriage/health issues.

What are your stress signs?

For example:

It’s important we learn to identify how we react to stress and how it manifests initially. Learning to know our signs now can help us halt the process.

For example: speaking loudly, shouting or yelling. Irritability, losing focus or unable to concentrate, forgetfulness, distraction, increased heart rate.

What could you do instead?

The most basic way to replace a habitual behaviour is to replace it with another behaviour or task straight away – force yourself to repeat this process until the new behaviour or task becomes habitual replacing the old habit – in scientific terms we want you to rewire your brain so your current automated programming is altered. Because at the end of the day we are just really complicated computers with an extra database of emotions.

This takes determination, dedication, practice & hard-work – but our nervous systems will thank us.

Some of the things you could do instead?

When an emotional trigger hits we have a 90-second window where we can decide to uptalk it to a more frenzied state or down-talk ourselves into a calm state.

Try and list 5 things you could do instead:

This needs to be basic, straight forward and safe to do anywhere:

-Breathe in for four, hold for four, breathe out for four.

- Walk straight outside into nature. If you are a tactile person touch it with your hands and breathe in mother nature’s energy.

- Close your eyes if you can safely with your children around! TRY and remain still and silent, be curious and notice where the stress arises from in your body, is it in your stomach? Throat? Hot head? Breathe purposefully into this area without judging the emotion, try and do this for 90 seconds, then if you need to, respond (rather than react).

- Have sign you and your husband know when you’ve had enough. Hold up a T for timeout sign walk out of the room and repeat either 1, 2 or 3 steps above.

- Keep a rubber band on your wrist – when you feel triggered, ping it lightly against your skin for awareness of your emotions.

Stress is often unavoidable but if we have the awareness behind the stress - it can begin to lose its power - the only person that can take away its power is YOU x

Gem x