Stress Awareness Month: Understanding your Stress Container

For Stress Awareness Month (April), Ali Grady, Co-Founder and Director of Coaching and Training at The Thrive Team, introduces us to a practical way of visualising how we experience and manage stress.

The Stress Container

In this video, Ali shares a powerful visual model. Imagine yourself as a container where your stress is stored. The size of your personal container varies depending on how resilient or vulnerable you’re feeling at any given time. When you’re feeling more resilient, your container is larger but during periods of vulnerability, it becomes smaller.

Stress constantly flows into our containers through work demands, financial pressures, relationship issues, and unexpected problems. When our container isn’t large enough to hold all the incoming stress, it overflows, showing up as our personal “emotional signature”, those tell-tale signs that we’re not coping well.

Managing your stress flow

Ali explains that we all need a “tap” on our stress container. This is our helpful coping strategies that allow pressure to release steadily. Having this release means that we can manage our stress levels effectively, preventing overflow.

However, sometimes we develop unhelpful coping mechanisms that block our taps. When this happens, our stress has nowhere to go, and overflow may become inevitable.

Learn more

Watch the video featuring Ali for her insights and to see the stress container concept in action.

If you want to put this into practice download our free stress container tool and take five minutes to reflect on your personal stress container. This is also a brilliant tool to share with friends and colleagues!

If you’d like to speak to us or find out more about how we could support you or your business, get in touch. We’d love to hear from you.