Have you ever had one of those weeks?

There is no way around it – it has been a shit 7 days! And I am here to admit that I am not perfect – and that I have not dealt with it all very well!

It started off with lunch with my mother! This is always a source of stress and anxiety for me.  There is absolutely nothing like family to press your buttons! I felt that I had got out of it relatively unscathed having not lost my temper, not cried, and only being criticised a couple of times. So not bad generally.

But I was clearly feeling a bit fragile as on Tuesday I had a meeting with someone and received some criticism that knocked me off my feet.

I have often been told that I wear my feelings on my face! But I have been working soooo hard on it. I am using all of the tools and techniques that I have on myself daily. I have been consciously working on how I feel and how it comes [Read more…]

What causes stress?  Well that’s different for everyone.

Some of us get stressed by work, deadlines, targets etc. Others get stressed by lack of work life balance.  Some of us get stressed by the people around us.  What causes stressed cannot be defined as a single thing.  It is all about how we deal with it.  And the best place to start is to understand what is going on when we get stressed.

Stress is essentially an evolutionary response.

We have a primal part of our brain – often called the lizard brain, or the chimp (if you have read the Chimp Paradox by Prof Steve Peters (which I really recommend)) – and this part of the brain is responsible for our fight, flight or freeze response. So when we see something new it’s this part of the brain that responds first – assessing whether we need to run away from it, fight it, freeze and hope it goes away, or whether it is safe. The lizard brain releases various hormones which prepare us to respond and these hormones get our heart pumping faster, reduces digestion, sends blood to the muscles and gets our lungs working faster.