November 2019--Stress management and business consultant, Jen Butler, says there are three types of stress we need to know about: Situational, Psychological, and Physiological. When we can recognize the type of stress, we can better deal with them appropriately. The first step is to recognize the three types.
The first type of type of stress is called situational stress, and it's 90% of the stress you experience on a daily basis. It's those types of things that start and stop, for example, running late getting out of the door in the morning and then interacting with a difficult patient.
"Just like a patient coming to sit in your chair, they can't start doing something about their periodontal disease until you, as the doctor or the healthcare team, evaluate them, assess them, and educate them," says Butler. She challenges us to write down the things that happened during our day that are situational such as an argument with a spouse. "Even relationships can be stress triggers because you can avoid them or improve them. You can do something about them," says Butler.
The second type of stress is psychological stress. This stress starts solely in the mind. "It's 100% self-induced and it makes us think that we are ill equipped to handle a situation before us or an event like me right now talking on this video. My psychological stressor could be, oh, I'm not going to do a good job. Am I going to stutter? How am I going to look on camera? Those kinds of things." says Butler. It's important to look out for your mental health.
That self talk triggers our stress response. For example, "maybe conflict resolution is not within your comfort zone. So you have self-deprecating language or things that you're telling yourself that actually make the situation worse. Phobias, your fears, are psychological stressors and they happen in our unconscious mind because we talk and think so quickly we don't even hear the things that we're telling ourselves," says Butler.
And the last type of stress is physiological stress. This is the hardest one to overcome sometimes because a lot of the things that we use as coping methods to reduce our situational stress are actually maladaptive coping methods that continue our stress response. Here's Butler's example:
"Let's say you've had a very packed day full of situational stressors, multiple clients that drive you crazy, staff that didn't show up, a crown that didn't fit, a lab case that didn't show up, and a bad traffic jam. You're late to work. You're late to soccer practice. All of these situational stressors piling up. You've totally reached your stress threshold, and then you go home and you drink wine and you sit on the couch for the next several hours."
Instead of eliminating stress, you have transferred situational stress to physiological stress. "Stress is part of our endocrine system and our autonomic nervous system that is actually controlled by the same system that controls our heart or kidneys or lungs. So, we can't turn it off. We can't control it," says Butler. You have walked away from the situation but the stress is still within your body and affecting it.