It is a common saying that if you cannot handle stress, you cannot be successful. Your stress tolerance is like a bucket, some people have a more giant bucket, while others have a smaller bucket. Smaller buckets get easily filled with stress and overreact, while the giant buckets have more capacity to be calm before losing it out.
Once the water starts over-flowing in your bucket, your body goes into a fight-or-flight mode, and the symptoms follow. A burnout, depression, mental breakdown or physical symptoms, anything can happen, it’s the way your body reacts to the overflow.
Long-term overflow can cause serious health problems due to the constant release of the stress hormone called cortisol. So basically you have two solutions to manage your bucket: you can pour out the water from your bucket, or, you can increase the size of your bucket.
The first solution, pouring out the water can be done by removing the stressors from your life. These are generally perfectionism, neuroticism, conflicts, everyday events, relationship, and family responsibilities, career, and financial pressures, major life events, unmet needs, or hidden emotions, and automatic responses from past experiences.
The second solution, to increase the size of your bucket can be done by moving your focus on exercising, nutritional diet, self-care, breathing exercises, yoga, having fun, mindfulness, staying busy, having support et cetera.
Unaddressed stress can have such dangerous consequences that you can’t even imagine. It is our responsibility to stimulate our vagus nerve time and again to keep our parasympathetic nervous system healthy and not let our bodies go into fight or flight mode without having any real danger which needs it.
Final word: try to keep your bucket as light as possible, try to increase the size of your bucket as much as you can to live a happy joyful stress-free life.
