English Conversations on Stress Management | Common Expressions, Phrasal Verbs, & Idioms

Let me ask you, when you feel stressed,

how would you describe the way that feels?

How do you manage stress and ask for help?

The moment I asked you those questions,

I'm sure you had an immediate emotional response and you had quite a few

thoughts come to mind. However,

you might not be sure how to fully express those thoughts in English.

Maybe you're missing the precise vocabulary that would allow you

to really say what you want on this topic.

Today we're going to solve that problem because your ability to

recognize, manage,

and reduce chronic stress is essential to your wellbeing,

and if you have friends, family,

or coworkers you regularly communicate with in English,

it's very likely the topic of stress management is going to come up.

In this Confident English lesson today,

you're going to learn the vocabulary you need to confidently discuss stress

management.

We'll talk about common obstacles to overcoming stress or

situations that increase stress.

We'll also discuss strategies that help to minimize and reduce stress.

Along the way,

you'll learn four tips to help you strengthen your own stress management skills.

Before we get started, if you don't already know,

I'm Annemarie with Speak Confident English.

Everything I do is designed to help you get the confidence you want for your

life and work in English.

One way I do that is by sharing my weekly Confident English lessons where I

highlight my top fluency and confidence building strategies as well as advanced

level vocabulary just like in this lesson today. So while you're here,

make sure you give this lesson a thumbs up on YouTube and subscribe to this

channel so you never miss one of my future lessons.

And now let's dive right into this topic of how to have conversations

in English on stress management. To do that effectively,

we have to understand exactly what stress is. In English,

we define stress as negative,

physical or emotional reactions to difficult situations or

experiences. And although all of us experience stress,

the cause of stress and the way that it manifests or the way we

experience stress differs from one person to another.

There are of course numerous situations that result in

that negative physical or emotional reaction. In other words, stress.

But four of the most common causes include workload

overwhelm, those situations when you think,

I can't get it all done, I can't catch up,

I have too much on my plate.

A second common contributor is major life changes.

For example, if you ever have a thought such as,

I can't keep up with life right now, there's too much going on,

or I didn't know this would be so hard.

Maybe you had a job change or something amazing like a wedding,

but suddenly that feels particularly stressful.

You didn't know it would be so hard. Perhaps you thought,

I thought this would be easier, or I thought this would be more fun.

A third common cause of stress is financial conditions.

If you've ever thought I'm totally broke, in other words,

I don't have any money,

I feel like I can't take care of myself or I can't take care of my family

right now, I don't know what I'm going to do.

And the last common cause on this list is personal relationships.

Those experiences when you think my heart is broken

or I don't know what happened, we used to be so close,

I thought I could trust her or I thought I could trust him.

When we have those stress feelings,

it isn't always easy to get out of them.

Let's take a look at four common obstacles that stand in the way

of managing or even reducing stress.

The first one is falling into the extremes of hustle culture.

Hustle culture is the belief that you have to perform at your

maximum capacity all the time in order to

achieve success or get the results you want. And as I'm sure you know,

working as hard as you can every single day will lead to

overwhelm and stress.

The second common obstacle is believing or accepting that

stress is a sign of success.

This is closely connected to that idea of hustle culture.

Unfortunately,

there are many who celebrate hustle culture and they celebrate

this idea of working as hard as possible all the time.

And the more they do that,

the more they believe or the more it might appear that they're

successful. When we accept stress as a sign of success,

we don't give ourselves any opportunity to take a break.

The third common obstacle is not prioritizing wellness.

And if this is a challenge for you,

I have a couple lessons I'd like to recommend.

The first one is a lesson that I did on self-care.

I'll share a link to that lesson down below.

The second one is on time management.

If you struggle with creating a better work-life balance,

that lesson might have some great tips for you.

One more lesson that might be useful is a lesson I recently did on well-being

in the workplace. I'll include links to all those lessons below.

And now the fourth common obstacle to managing stress successfully

is the belief that you're a lone wolf or a superhero.

A lone wolf is someone who prefers to do things on their own.

They don't want any help from anyone and they don't want anyone to be

around them. They like to do everything alone.

If you're struggling with any of those obstacles and

as a result you have an overwhelming amount of stress,

let's talk about four tips to strengthen your stress management

skills so you can find better balance. Tip number one,

find your sweet spot.

Finding your sweet spot means you have identified a process,

a series of steps or a situation that is most beneficial

to you and allows you to be your most effective.

The first step to identifying your sweet spot and managing

stress is to admit when you have a full plate.

This idiomatic expression means that your schedule or your workload

is beyond your capacity.

If you realize that you have a full plate,

it's time to check in with yourself.

So if you're going to check in with yourself,

it means being clear with yourself on the current situation.

Some questions you can use to help you do that are to ask yourself,

are there any areas of your life that you're neglecting right now?

Are you finding it difficult to stay focused?

Do you feel moody or on edge?

Do you often work after typical work hours or on the weekend?

Are you making minor errors in your work?

Do you feel sleep deprived, exhausted or overwhelmed?

If you answered yes to quite a few of those questions,

it's quite likely you've got too much on your plate right now.

So to help you find that sweet spot,

that series of action steps or that process

that allows you to be your most effective,

try these action steps first,

create a list of all the tasks you need to complete and then start to

group them together according to priority.

Then start your day with the tasks that are most important to you or that

help you achieve the goals you have or the primary deadlines.

After you set aside time to work toward those goals,

then you can shift your focus into the smaller tasks or the less important

tasks. Here's why. Why this process is important.

How many times have you gone into work or started your workday thinking, Oh,

I have so much energy. I'm ready to get this big project finished,

or I'm going to finish this deadline by the end of the day.

And then you check your email and there's a task waiting for you,

something that you have to get done, some little task, but it distracts you,

and then there's another one,

and then there's an update on your team communication channel,

and that completely takes your focus in another direction,

and suddenly it's the end of the day, you don't know what happened.

You don't know where time went. All you know is the big items,

the important items on your list didn't get done,

and the moment you see that you have that intense feeling

of stress and overwhelm by prioritizing those tasks first

thing at the start of your day, before you check email,

before you review any team,

communication channels or social media will help you begin to check off

those most important items and help you feel accomplished and

effective along the way. When you do that,

you might find there are times when you have to say no to

requests from others. If you struggle with politely saying no,

when others ask for your help, I've got a lesson on that topic.

I'll share a link to a lesson on how to politely say no without feeling guilty.

In the notes below the video,

the last thing you can do to help you find your sweet spot is to set firm

boundaries between your working life and your personal life.

This is something I talked about in my lesson on wellbeing at work

and an example of setting clear boundaries would include letting others

know that you'll be offline every day starting at five 30 in the evening.

Any emails or updates that come in after five 30 can be dealt

with the following work day.

The second tip to help you manage stress successfully is

to reframe or redefine success.

If you think back to the obstacles we talked about,

one of them was this idea that stress equals

success. However,

if you are part of hustle culture and you're struggling to keep up,

you're struggling to sleep at night,

then you might need to redefine what it means to be successful.

Of course,

the pathway to success varies from one person to another,

and you can reframe what success means to you.

To reframe means to look at something in a new way.

If you want to try reframing success, here are four things you can do.

Number one, reassess what success means to you.

What does success look like or feel like according to you?

Don't worry about what anyone else thinks.

This is about you and your pathway to success.

So spend a little bit of time asking yourself those questions.

What does success for you look like? What does it feel like?

The second thing that you can do to reframe success is to set

tiny flexible goals that help you reach your

top priorities or your top goals.

Little steps that will allow you to make forward progress

even if you do the bare minimum,

because the truth is there are some days where we have more time or more

energy than others.

So even if your one little step is to read

one page in a book, to finish a book in English,

then you've done what you need to do that particular day to make progress.

One sentence I like to use for these tiny flexible daily goals

is to tell myself today I'm going to show up by to

show up means to arrive and be present.

So an example might be,

today I'm going to show up by reading for 15 minutes,

or today I'm going to show up by reading in English for five minutes.

The third thing you can do to help you reframe success is to also

reframe your setbacks as learning experiences.

Without a doubt, when we experience a setback,

it's natural to feel frustrated and even a bit discouraged,

but if we stay focused on that frustration and on that setback,

we increase the amount of stress that we feel to better manage stress

and overcome those difficult moments. Try some of these sentence starters.

Today I experienced and define your

setback and then add, and I learned that,

and then share what you learned from that experience.

Another example is, despite X, despite this setback,

I was able to understand Y I was able to understand

and then define again what you learned from that experience.

A third option is to simply say,

Next time I will and then state what you will do differently

next time.

Let me give you a clear example of how we might use some of those statements.

Imagine at work you had a series of back and forth emails

about an upcoming event,

and in the process you got confused about the date and in the

end you missed the event. Of course,

doing so could cause extreme stress and disappointment,

so to reframe that setback, you could say something like,

Through this experience,

I learned the importance of double checking and setting up reminders on my

calendar app.

The fourth and final thing you can do to reframe success is celebrate

the small wins. Remember,

we talked about the importance of those tiny flexible daily goals.

If you have a goal of reading every day in English and finishing a book and you

were able to read for five minutes today,

that is a win and it deserves to be celebrated.

Our third tip for managing stress successfully is to declutter your

mind and your space.

Cultivating and protecting the spaces that allow you to think

work and rest effectively are crucial to stress management.

How often have you been trying to think deeply about solving a problem

or trying to get work done, but you're distracted by your environment?

Decluttering is one way we can begin to eliminate that

overwhelm in all of that distraction.

To declutter means to tidy things up and to remove

anything that's unnecessary, to put things in their proper place.

If you're looking to declutter your physical environment,

you can organize your workspace and even think about what

is around you that you no longer need.

Is it something that you could give away or donate?

Is it something that simply needs to go to the trash? Once all of that is done,

you can also begin internal decluttering.

You can give yourself time and space for meditation and deep breathing

that allows you to begin to organize your thoughts and hopefully

remove some of the negative or stressful thoughts that you're having.

In addition to all that decluttering,

it's important to also create time and space to recharge your

batteries.

This means to regain energy and motivation through

recreation and rest.

Notice that it doesn't mean work to regain your energy.

It means find opportunities for recreation or rest.

And now our last tip today for how to successfully manage

stress is to accept that it takes a village.

Sometimes when it comes to dealing with stress, we need extra help,

and as a result,

it may be time to embrace the idea that it takes a village.

This means that it takes many people working together in cooperation

to achieve a goal.

This also means waving goodbye to any stigmas that may be associated

with asking for help.

A stigma is a negative or unfair belief a group of people

might have toward something else,

such as asking others for help. When it comes to asking for help,

there are multiple ways you can do this, including reaching out to friends,

talking to a career counselor, calling an anonymous help line,

joining a stress management group,

meeting with HR at your company or asking coworkers for

help. If you're not sure how to do that in English,

try one of these sentence starters to help.

Perhaps you recall a coworker talking about dealing with stress and

trying to manage it so you could reach out to that coworker and say,

I remember you had a similar experience.

Would you mind lending me a hand with or,

I feel stretched thin and need more support?

Could you help with to be stretch thin means to no longer have

the time, energy, or resources to use towards something.

And a third phrase you can try is, Do you have time to talk?

I feel overwhelmingly stressed and would really appreciate a listening ear

right now with these four stress management tips in mind.

And now that we also know the obstacles that can stand in our way,

I want to ask you the questions I asked at the beginning of this lesson.

When you feel stressed, how do you manage it?

Do you use any of the strategies we've talked about today? If so,

try using some of the new vocabulary and share your approach

to stress management.

Or perhaps there's a strategy you use to manage stress that I didn't talk about

today. If that's the case,

I would love for you to share how you manage to reduce

stress. You can share your tips and strategies in the comments below.

If you found today's lesson helpful to you, I would love to know,

and you can tell me in one very simple way.

Simply give this lesson a thumbs up here on YouTube, and don't forget,

while you're at it,

subscribe as well so you never miss one of my Confident English lessons.

Thank you so much for joining me, and I look forward to seeing you next time.