Contagious Stress

You're listening to The Uppercase Life where we're developing the stamina to work harder and go farther because we've got things to do. I'm your host, Joseph Brewster. This is part two in a two part series on stress. And if you haven't already, I encourage you to go back to listen to the previous episode about types of stress and how to deal with them.
But today, I want to talk about something a little bit different, and that is what I'm going to call a stress transfer. Stress is an expected side effect of any significant effort. I mean, when you're trying to do things, whether personally and professionally, you're going to deal with a certain amount of stress, and that's completely normal. However, sometimes we're dealing with other people who are experiencing high levels of stress, maybe for reasons we aren't even aware of, and we may begin to take on the weight of their emotions by proxy in what I'm going to call a stress transfer.
I'll define it as a situation involving at least two people where one person is experiencing an elevated level of stress, which they're then passing on either advertently or inadvertently. In a lot of cases, to another person who wasn't stressed before that time, it's almost like contracting a virus. One person gets sick, the other person is healthy. The sick person coughs on the healthy person.
And now both people are not feeling very good. I want you to think of a time when you hung out with a friend or family member or maybe talked with a coworker and you contracted a case of stress accidentally. This might be even more common if you're a naturally empathetic person or someone who generally feels obligated to help other people fix their problems.
So how do you go about dealing with potential stress transfers? I want to give you a few things that I think are really important when you're dealing with someone else who typically transfers stress to you. And here's the first one. Choose compassion over personalize ation. So I have my own company and I work with a lot of different clients and recall distinctly having a situation where we had a project with a client and we had an established deadline for some of the things we were trying to get done.
And something came up unexpectedly in which the client had an account that had lapsed due to a credit card being changed, and as a result, that service had shut down their account, which then threw the whole project into a bit of a disaster mode. And the client was calling us and was very stressed and anxious and asking, can we push all of these deadlines forward?
An immense amount of time? And I was looking at these emails that were coming from the client and thinking to myself, This is going to be a nightmare. And I found myself feeling stress. In fact, I found myself feeling like late in getting this done, which really wasn't true. We had agreed upon a deadline that the client was now trying to change.
I think so often we encounter people who are going through difficult times in life, and by default they're expressing that to us in a way that pushes those problems over onto our shoulders. And we think, Well, I care about the person or I care about the project, and therefore I should take on this stress. But really, that's not what they need you to do.
There's a quote by Eleanor Roosevelt that I've heard many times throughout my life, and it goes something like this It's no one can make you feel inferior without your consent. And I always thought that was a brilliant quote and very empowering in the sense that you can tell in this dynamic. Eleanor Roosevelt talking about there is someone who's making choices you can't change, who is trying to make you feel inferior, but they can't do that without your consent.
You see, they can make choices to try to transfer stress over to you, but you also have to make a choice to accept that transfer. And when you do that, you're personalizing it. So when I say choose compassion over personalization, what I mean is don't take it personally. To a certain extent. You're hearing that this person is feeling the stress.
Respect those feelings. Acknowledge those feelings. It will benefit them more when you don't take the stress on personally, but you see them as an individual who's struggling with the stress. And you have the self-will to say, But I'm not going to take that personally. I'm going to be compassionate for you instead. Second thing is, and this one could be probably a whole episode.
Establish boundaries. We all know this intuitively, but sometimes in the moment it's really hard to do so. Here are some different types of boundaries I'm going to encourage you to establish, especially in relationships with people that have the ability to transfer stress to you, establish boundaries around your reactions. You don't always have to react. And even though you can't change how they feel or the stress levels they're experiencing, you do have control over your reactions to make sure you have some boundaries around that, because sometimes we're put into what feels like compromising situations and we react to that stress in ways that we're not really proud of later.
You don't have to react just because someone comes at you with stress. You don't even have to respond back to them in that moment. Make sure that you have some boundaries for your own reactions so that if you see an email or text or even somebody says something to you that feels highly stressful in that moment, you can step back.
You don't have to react to that in that moment. Put some boundaries around your reactions and then put some boundaries around your personal access. Can people interrupt you at any time? Can people just walk in when you're working? Can they text you at any moment, call you at any time of the day? Maybe you need to have some boundaries around access because if you know you're going to be dealing with situations that might be stressful, you want to be able to deal with them intentionally.
You don't want to be interrupted at any given time, and then you need to have some boundaries around your interactions. Can they just say whatever they want? Can they cast you out? Call you names when they're stressed out? That's not okay. So we need to set some boundaries around what is it that they can do in those interactions while they're stressed?
Because I respect that you're stressed and I want to respect your feelings, but at the same time, I have the ability to set some boundaries around the way you treat me when you are stressed and you can't just act however you feel around me if it's going to be damaging potentially to me, and then consecrate a sanctuary for yourself.
And what I mean by this is find a place that you don't permit people to disturb you and make sure that you can take retreats or relax and establish that sacred space for yourself. I would suggest just don't even take your phone that place. Go there and just relax. Now, I do want to take a moment and say this.
If you out there listening and you are a mother, especially if you are a mother of young children, you probably just heard everything I said and thought to yourself, I can't do any of these things right. I mean, maybe I'm in a situation where I just can't set boundaries around. When they can interrupt me, they're going to interrupt me in inopportune times all the time.
And and we really are on call as parents. And maybe you have some other situation that's like that. Maybe you're a caregiver for for someone in your family. The way you can do that in those sorts of situations is by relinquishing control. And this is really important. So when we started having children at a very, very early age, as early as I felt like it was safe to do so, we started leaving those children with babysitters and caregivers so that we could take time away.
It's really important to do this because if you're in a situation where there just isn't a lot ...