STEPS

What keeps stress going?

Once stress gets a grip, other changes make it worse:

• Self-esteem drops / Self-confidence drops
• You become more and more self-conscious
• You feel threat from all sides
• You doubt you can cope with things you coped with in the past. You may start to avoid them as a result.
• Worry becomes second nature to you
• Your body reacts easily to stress
• You may feel that your back is to the wall: that problems keep hitting you and that you have no way to fight back
• You may feel that stress brings out the worst in you
• You may feel that stress changes your nature

The sense of control in your life weakens. In the past, you swam over the waves. Now the waves break over your head and all you can see are bigger waves on the horizon. You feel it is all you can do to keep your head above the water. To find out why this happens, we must look at the vicious circles:

We have looked at the way stress builds up and gets a grip. This is very important. If you see how stress feeds itself, you can see how to starve it. You will then see why the new skills you learn in the self-help handout will help you do this.

We start with that basic model - Thoughts, Actions and Body feed the feelings of stress:

Adding to the vicious circle

Once stress gets a grip, other problems will feed into it. These may include:

• Mental health problems
• Physical health
• Life problems

Mental health problems

Once stress gets a grip, new mental health problems may arise, e.g. anger, poor sleep, panic, drink. These now feed the vicious circle.

Physical health

Ill health may also feed it, e.g. irritable bowel problems, asthma, migraine, angina, etc. Migraine wears you down and makes you feel stressed. Stress makes the migraine worse. Pain adds to your stress. Stress makes you feel pain more acutely. So we can add these problems to the vicious circle.

Life problems

These may be problems in the family, with friends, money or with the job. They could be to do with your home, the area where you live. So, these things feed the circle.

The two way street

Some of these problems make the stress worse and, in turn, are make worse by the stress. You have another vicious circle. So panic attacks make stress worse but then stress makes panics worse - a two way street. So, on the diagram on the next page, you will see that some arrows have two heads to show a two way street. Others have only one head, e.g. living in a high crime area may make your stress worse but your stress won't make crime worse. This is a one-way street. So, look at how stress can be fed:

Combining the problems

You can see that you may have a complex range of things helping keep your stress alive. Some people may have very few things feeding the circle. Others may have a lot. Changing only one may have little impact on your stress. Many people can't see why stress stays when all the problems in their life clear up. The vicious circle lets you see why this is so:

You must get the circle out of the way first before you can get rid of the stress. So before you start to learn how to control stress, you must first work out what your own vicious circle looks like. This will then help you focus on your targets. Then you need to hit as many problems as you can.