Understanding and Managing Your Stress Load: Unpacking Your Personal “Stress Bucket”
Welcome to the Vibrant Humans blog, where we help professional working mamas lighten their mental and emotional load and reclaim their lives.
I’m Sarah Wittry, a fellow physician mom practicing palliative medicine, a life coach for professional working mamas, dedicated to guiding you towards a more balanced, vibrant, and fulfilling life.
Today, we're diving into a powerful analogy that can help you understand and manage your stress load better—the Stress Bucket. I was introduced to this tool/analogy a year ago and it’s been so incredibly helpful me as a way to visualize what’s keeping me feeling overwhelmed and when and how I need to make practical changes or audits to lighten my load.
I hope you find it helpful as well, and can utilize it in your own life whenever you’re feeling like things are too busy or unsustainable (which, let’s be honest, happens most days!?!)
Visualizing Your Stress Bucket
Imagine a big wooden bucket with a handle, like the kind you might see filled up with water. This bucket represents your capacity to handle stress.
Some days, this bucket might feel larger; other days, it might seem like a thimble. The size of your bucket can depend on various factors—your overall health, sleep quality, support system, and even your mindset.
Now, think about all the things that pour into this bucket every single day: deadlines at work, taking care of your kids, managing household chores and issues, navigating relationships and other people’s moods and priorities, dealing with unexpected events, and even the minor annoyances like traffic or a spilled coffee. Each of these stressors adds water to your bucket. Some things add a couple drops of water, and others are like a whole glass getting poured in at once.
When your bucket is full and more water keeps getting poured in, what happens? It overflows. This overflow = us feeling tapped out, overwhelmed, anxious, on edge, reactive. Those times when you just can’t handle one more damn thing. Our bucket overflows when we snap at our kids, have an internal freak out when we get told we need to see ANOTHER patient in the next half hour when we’re already way behind, or when the chicken we swore we took out of the freezer before work is actually still very much in the freezer.
But here's the thing: many of us are walking around with our buckets dangerously close to overflowing all the time. We might not even realize how full our bucket is until it spills over. And that’s often why we feel so stressed and overwhelmed. Our stress loads are LARGE and our capacity to hold it all is — well, human. Superhuman, I’d argue. But it is still true that we each have a capacity to carry a certain amount of things before we can’t anymore, and our load is too heavy, and we feel it.
Taking Stock of Your Stress Load
Let's take a moment to get clear on your current stress load. Visualize your own stress bucket. How full is it right now? Is it half full? Three-quarters? Is it already spilling over?
Understanding your stress load is the first step in managing it. It’s crucial to compare your current load to your capacity with kindness and compassion. This isn’t about blaming yourself for having a full bucket. It’s about recognizing the reality of your situation and giving yourself the grace to acknowledge it.
Imagine if we approached this with the same compassion we would offer a friend. If a friend told you she was overwhelmed, you wouldn’t tell her to just suck it up or handle it better. You’d listen, empathize, and probably suggest some ways she could lighten her load. It's time we offer ourselves that same level of kindness.
Why Our Buckets Overflow
For many professional working women who are also raising children, our stress bucket gets full due to a combination of high expectations, both self-imposed and external, a lack of boundaries, and the constant juggling act of balancing work, family, and personal needs.
We’re so busy taking care of everything and everyone else that we forget to care for ourselves. Or we want to, and know we need to, but the day just doesn’t have enough hours for us to do so!
And here's the wake-up call: if your stress bucket is always full or close to overflowing, it’s not a sustainable way to live. You deserve better than constantly teetering on the edge of overwhelm. You deserve to feel energized, alive, and spending your time on things that actually matter to you. Not other people’s priorities and asks.
Managing Your Stress Load
So, how can we manage this stress load? How can we prevent our buckets from overflowing?
1. Identify Your Stressors: First, we need to identify what’s pouring into our buckets. What are your biggest stressors? Write them down. You might think you already know, but getting it all out on paper helps, I promise. I’ve created a worksheet to help you do just this, with a visual of the bucket and everything.
This could be work responsibilities, family obligations, financial worries, or health concerns. Once you have a clear picture of what's filling your bucket, you can start to address these stressors.
2. Increase Your Capacity: Next, consider your capacity. Are there ways to increase it? This work happens in the short-term with things like prioritizing and improving our sleep quality, building or expanding our support system, or engaging in an activity that recharges you. Over time, there is a great deal of deeper work that can also be done that can help you create more capacity overall (work with inner narratives/habitual thought patterns, emotions, and behaviors, imposter syndrome, worthiness work, etc). This deeper work can be done over time with a trusted guide and support system. But that doesn’t mean that small ways to focus on increasing your capacity aren’t worth it. They absolutely are! Even a small increase in capacity can make a big difference in how you handle stress, and how you FEEL in your day to day. This matters, in a big big way.
3. Reduce What's Going In: Also, look for ways to reduce what’s going into your bucket. What are you adding to your load that’s on autopilot that could be re-examined? This might mean setting boundaries, delegating tasks, or simply saying no more often. Remember, it’s okay (even if it goes against the cultural norms) for you to prioritize yourself (dare I say, no one else will do it for you!?)
A Tool to Help You Calm the Chaos
To help you get started, I’ve created a Stress Bucket worksheet that you can download for free. This worksheet will guide you through the process of identifying your stressors, assessing your capacity, and finding practical ways to manage your stress load. It’s a fantastic tool to help you calm the chaos in your life and create a more balanced, vibrant existence. Download Your Stress Bucket Worksheet HERE.
For additional support and to be part of a like-minded community of other professional working moms on a personal growth journey, I warmly invite you to join the Vibrant Humans Facebook group. I share tips, resources, and encouragement and we help each other step into our own power and thrive.
Download Your Free Stress Bucket Worksheet Here
If you found this post helpful, please share it with other women who could benefit from these insights.
Imagine a world where it was normal for professional working women to routinely feel empowered, balanced, and truly vibrant. That vision lights me up!
Until next time, take care of yourself, prioritize your well-being, and remember—you have the power to audit and manage your stress load, and live a vibrant, fulfilling life.
With love and gratitude,
Sarah Wittry
