Your Nervous System is Not Your Enemy - Part 2
Crisis. Burnout. What tips you over the edge, doesn’t always take the form of a monumental drama.
Running on empty can come in the form of micro stressors. Little things that you don’t even notice that happen in your day, seemingly insignificant, harmfully accumulating under the radar, building momentum to trigger life spiraling out of control.
Most of us assume the cause of stress is the bigger things in life, the looming deadline, the conflict at work or home, the emergency. So when we feel exhausted without any clear huge catastrophe to justify it, we can feel confused and almost a little shameful. If we can’t point to a major impact, are we just being weak?
The cause is micro stressors. The multitude of little things that happened in your day that, added together, become huge.
The smaller things can often have a more detrimental effect than the bigger things. A major stressor is easy to recognize. We all see it, feel it and know how our body will respond. We understand the process X + Y = major meltdown. It’s easier to process with a clear beginning and end. We know once we have worked through it, we will recover.
Micro stressors aren’t that straight forward or easy to identify and therefore harder to overcome.
Being interrupted several times at work when you’re trying to finish a document. Notifications that come in when you’re in the middle of an important task. A passive-aggressive message you decide not to respond to, that niggles away subconsciously. None of these are what you might call ‘a big deal’ on their own. But they amass to a number of unresolved smaller issues that get absorbed throughout your day.
Meanwhile your nervous system has recognized each potential little threat and is waiting for the signal that it is over, a sign that it is safe. Micro stressors don’t provide that finish, that completion, that safety. You receive the notification, soak up the message, feel the interruptions but you don’t give your nervous system the all clear that the moment has passed.
Multiply that dozens of times in your day and your system stays in its fight or flight mode, never fully alarmed, never switching off, just resting in a state of limbo. Never reaching calm. And therein lies the anomaly.
Micro stressors look like a normal day, nothing to see here.
· Notifications pulling your attention away half way through a task
· Constant context switching between projects or conversations
· A knock, a text, a ‘quick question’ small interruptions that seem insignificant but register
· Low grade friction – a cluttered inbox, rushing between one meeting and the next, a message taunting you for a dreaded reply
None of these things would feature as something that stressed you out today. But they are no less important to acknowledge.
So, take a minute and think through everything that happened today. Write down three small stressors that showed up, not big dramatic happenings, small ordinary things.
Now pick one. Not to eliminate it but to provide it with an ending. Because really the actions required to provide closure on micro stressors can be as simple as taking a deep breath after sending the dreaded reply. A ten second stretch after you close the tab. Stepping outside for thirty seconds after a meeting that ran on too long.
The aim is not to avoid every small stressor that happens but to give them the ending your nervous system is waiting for.
Final thoughts
The state of calm is not devoid of stress. This is neither realistic nor the point. Calm represents how quickly and how completely you bring stress, whether it shows up big or small, to an end. Close the loop. The nervous system isn’t waiting for a quieter life. It’s waiting for permission to finish what it started. The saying ‘don’t sweat the small stuff’? Your nervous system may not agree.
PS “The nearer a man comes to a calm mind the closer he is to strength” Marcus Aurelius. Leave your stressors behind and find your inner calm contact Positive-Soul.