What is Stress? Learning About the Stress Response Cycle

Now I have to get something off my chest before we begin...

Stress cannot be eliminated.

I apologize if you found this article and thought that stress would be banished from your life and you would have only happy days.

Unfortunately, that is not how life works. Instead, we have these glorious ups and downs to show us how impactful both the highs and the lows are on our overall journey.

What I can tell you, is that stress can be more manageable and not take over your life when it happens. We can incorporate coping mechanisms, tools, strategies, and systems to have in place when stress inevitably occurs.

This blog will help you understand what stress is, how the stress response cycle works, and how to complete the stress response cycle once it is triggered.

So what is stress?

Stress is defined as "a state of mental or emotional strain or tension resulting from adverse or very demanding circumstances." The only thing that this definition is missing is that we can often put this stress on ourselves, especially as Teacher CEOs.

Think of stress as the pressure or tension that arises in your body and/or mind when you perceive a threat of some kind (internal or external, big or small).

We can perceive this stress either through our own emotional insecurities/thoughts, or through contextualized external factors that impact our state of being. 

Even though stress cannot be controlled, we can understand it better and use that knowledge to better help us tackle our day-to-day stressors.

For more information on how stress affects the brain, head over to our Free Stress Relief Toolkit for Teacherpreneurs. Inside, you will find a variety of information and resources to help you manage your stress today (without any financial strain either).

The Stress Response Cycle

Simply put, the stress response cycle is: when your mind and body respond to some sort of stressful stimuli, your mind and body see it as a threat, respond, and then cope to complete the cycle and feel safe again.

This cycle will include a triggering event (outside your mind/body control), taking in information to determine a response, reacting through a physiological response (i.e. fight, flight, fawn, freeze), becoming actively aware of stress occurring, before finally coping with the stress to complete the cycle and come back to neutral.

We experience these stress response cycles all the time; however, we can end up staying in these stress responses if we are not able to actively become aware of the stress and cope with it in a healthy way.

In order to help us work through this cycle, we need to first understand what triggers the stress response cycle. 

What Triggers a Stress Response Cycle

A stress response is triggered whenever your body or mind perceives some sort of threat. One of my favorite analogies for this, from Emily Nagoski Ph.D., is to think of it as an evolutionary survival technique: as if you see a lion stalking you. 

You see the lion and your body immediately has to determine if I run from the lion, fight the lion, freeze so it runs past or because I can't do the other two, or do I try to appease the lion with something else it might want (like a steak). 

In a moment's notice, your body and brain have decided what to do to keep you alive. In modern terms, we may not be up against a lion, but we do have stress triggers that cause similar responses. And unfortunately, sometimes the lion can be ourselves, our guilt, or our anxiety.

To learn more about triggers and each type of stress response, keep an eye out for our upcoming articles that discuss this further. Sign up for the Newsletter to be alerted right when new articles go live.

How to Complete the Cycle

Not finishing the cycle leads to a build up of stress that eventually releases in other ways: think burnout, lashing out, random emotional outbursts you can't explain, being more irritable, etc.

To complete the cycle, you need to understand the stress response that you are experiencing, understand the needs of that response, and complete certain actions to make your body and mind feel safe again. Here, we need to be aware of our behaviors to lean into the stress over avoiding it.

To complete the cycle, you will need to first actively become aware of the stress you are experiencing (this can be more difficult with chronic stress). 

Then, you can add in healthy coping mechanisms to process that stress; thus reassuring your mind and body that it is back in a safe environment. For example, if you are in a flight response, you may need to move your body in a walk or run to help your body feel like she has successfully run away from the danger.

By using healthy coping mechanisms to process events or emotions, you are better able to move forward without holding onto any stress from that initial situation. The risk of not fully processing these events and instead placating them with a temporary comfort, is that we keep that stress inside. Eventually, it builds and builds over time as more stress piles on unprocessed, before showing up in more malicious ways (like physical ailments, burnout, panic attacks, depression, and more). 

Use the Jewels of Teaching: Teacher Life Balance System to be sure you are finding processing strategies that work for you, so you can relieve yourself of those stressors as they occur. 

Learn more about the Teacher Life Balance System here.  

Find a System That Works

Hopefully, you understand more about the impact that stress is having, where it is coming from, and why it shows up the way it does. If you would like more information and resources, start by joining the FREE Stress Relief Toolkit Resource Hub. 

There are new resources and strategies added every month for you to implement and be sure you are completing the stress response cycle. 

If you would like a little more support and more dynamic resource strategies, I suggest joining the waitlist for the Teacher Life Balance Membership where we meet over Zoom once a month to discuss different stress management concepts, have a Q&A session to help you on your journey, and collaborate ideas for using the membership resource that is released each month.  

Plus, you can find more stress management support in my Store or throughout the rest of the Blog. 

Let me know in the comments what else you would like to know about stress and stress management!