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Stress Diary
Identifying the Causes of Short-Term Stress
Stress Diaries are important for understanding
the causes of short-term stress in your life. They also give
you an important insight into how you react to stress, and help
you to identify the level of stress at which you prefer to operate.
The idea behind Stress Diaries is that, on
a regular basis, you record information about the stresses you
are experiencing, so that you can analyse these stresses and
then manage them.
This is important because often
these stresses flit in and out of our minds without getting
the attention and focus that they deserve.
As well as helping you capture and analyse
the most common sources of stress in your life, Stress Diaries
help you to understand:
- The causes of stress in more detail;
- The levels of stress at which you operate
most effectively; and
- How you react to stress, and whether your
reactions are appropriate and useful.
Stress Diaries, therefore, give you the important
information that you need to manage stress.
How to Use the Tool:
Stress Diaries are useful in that they gather
information regularly and routinely, over a period of time.
This helps you to separate the common, routine stresses from
those that only occur occasionally. They establish a pattern
that you can analyse to extract the information that you need.
Download our free Stress Diary
template and make regular entries in your Stress Diary (for
example, every hour). If you have any difficulty remembering
to do this, set an alarm to remind you to make your next diary
entry.
Also make an entry in your diary after each
incident that is stressful enough for you to feel that it is
significant.
Every time you make an entry, record the following
information:
- The date and time of the entry.
- The most recent stressful event you have
experienced.
- How happy you feel now, using a subjective
assessment on a scale of -10 (the most unhappy you have ever
been) to +10 (the happiest you have been). As well as this,
write down the mood you are feeling.
- How effectively you are working now (a subjective
assessment, on a scale of 0 to 10). A 0 here would show complete
ineffectiveness, while a 10 would show the greatest effectiveness
you have ever achieved.
- The fundamental cause of the stress (being
as honest and objective as possible).
You may also want to note:
- How stressed you feel now, again on a subjective
scale of 0 to 10. As before, 0 here would be the most relaxed
you have ever been, while 10 would show the greatest stress
you have ever experienced.
- The symptom you felt (e.g. “butterflies
in your stomach”, anger, headache, raised pulse rate,
sweaty palms, etc.).
- How well you handled the event: Did your
reaction help solve the problem, or did it inflame it?
You will reap the real benefits of having
a stress diary in the first few weeks. After this, the benefit
you get will reduce each additional day. If, however, your lifestyle
changes, or you begin to suffer from stress again in the future,
then it may be worth using the diary approach again. You will
probably find that the stresses you face have changed. If this
is the case, then keeping a diary again will help you to develop
a different approach to deal with them.
Analyze the diary at the end of this period.
Analyzing the Diary
Analyze the diary in the following ways:
- First, look at the different stresses you
experienced during the time you kept your diary. List the
types of stress that you experienced by frequency, with the
most frequent stresses at the top of the list.
- Next, prepare a second list with the most
unpleasant stresses at the top of the list and the least unpleasant
at the bottom.
- Looking at your lists of stresses, those
at the top of each list are the most important for you to
learn to control.
- Working through the stresses, look at your
assessments of their underlying causes, and your appraisal
of how well you handled the stressful event. Do these show
you areas where you handled stress poorly, and could improve
your stress management skills? If so, list these.
- Next, look through your diary at the situations
that cause you stress. List these.
- Finally, look at how you felt when you were
under stress. Look at how it affected your happiness and your
effectiveness, understand how you behaved, and think about
how you felt.
Having analyzed your diary, you should fully
understand what the most important and frequent sources of stress
are in your life. You should appreciate the levels of stress
at which you are happiest. You should also know the sort of
situations that cause you stress so that you can prepare for
them and manage them well.
As well as this, you should now understand
how you react to stress, and the symptoms that you show when
you are stressed. When you experience these symptoms in the
future, this should be a trigger for you to use appropriate
stress management techniques.
Summary
Stress Diaries help you to get a good understanding
of the routine, short-term stresses that you experience in your
life. They help you to identify the most important, and most
frequent, stresses that you experience, so that you can concentrate
your efforts on these. They also help you to identify areas
where you need to improve your stress management skills, and
help you to understand the levels of stress at which you are
happiest, and most effective.
To keep a stress diary, make a regular diary
entry with the headings above. For example, you may do this
every hour. Also make entries after stressful events.
Analyze the diary to identify the most frequent
and most serious stresses that you experience. Use it also to
identify areas where you can improve your management of stress.
This is an abridged excerpt from the ‘Knowing
Yourself’ module of Managing
Stress for Career Success, the Mind Tools Stress
Management Masterclass. The full article on Stress Diaries
also gives you Stress Diary templates that ease your use and
analysis of your Stress Diary. While Stress Diaries help you
understand short-term stress, other powerful techniques in the
'Knowing Yourself' module help you to understand the long-term
stress in your life and show you how to deploy your own resources
most effectively to manage this stress. The ‘Planning
for Change’ module then helps you to identify and use
the most effective techniques to deal with this stress.
Click here
to find out more about The
Stress Management Masterclass, and
here to visit the Stress.MindTools.Com
site, which has many more
articles on stress.
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The next article shows you how to identify
work priorities. This is an important part of managing the stress
of work overload. To read this, click 'Next article' below.
Other relevant destinations are shown in the "Where to
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Warning:
Stress can cause severe health problems and, in extreme cases,
can cause death. While these stress management techniques have
been shown to have a positive effect on reducing stress, they
are for guidance only, and readers should take the advice of
suitably qualified health professionals if they have any concerns
over stress-related illnesses or if stress is causing significant
or persistent unhappiness. Health professionals should also
be consulted before any major change in diet or levels of exercise.
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Extension Resources (Not included in the
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Getting a Good Night's Sleep - Starting each day fresh,
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Toffler's Stability Zones - Finding peace amid chaos*
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with Office Politics - Navigating the minefield*
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