Identify Your Stress Signature to Find Inner Calm Wherever You Are
The BASIC-ID tool offers a quick way to understand your stress response so you can manage it
We exist with a bunch of inherited genes, and early childhood baggage we likely had no influence on.
This skews our perception of the world we’ve lived in, and will experience, in infinite ways.
As a result, we have our own personal stress signature and ignore it at our peril.
Stress is such a common term and concept now that it’s almost unthinkable that we may not know how we respond to it.
That might sound odd, but in my years of coaching clients with chronic stress and burnout, people still aren’t clear about what’s going on for them.
That’s because stress doesn’t always look or feel the same between different people.
Sure there are common symptoms, such as racing heart, tiredness, feeling overwhelmed, sweaty palms, muscle tension, nausea, headaches, dizziness, overthinking, memory loss, foggy head etc.
But not everyone is guaranteed to get the same heady symptoms cocktail each time they feel stressed.
Depending on the type of stress, you might react slightly differently. I know this happens to me.
Sometimes I have a strong physical response to stress - I get the shakes, my voice quivers and I can’t seem to focus on one thing due to the adrenaline pumping through my veins.
Other times, it’s more ‘in my head’, with thoughts swirling around on repeat and my problem-solving brain circuits in overdrive trying to find solutions to abstract or annoying issues.
Stress Affects Most of Us and It’s Getting Worse
Mental Health UK conducted one of the largest stress surveys in the UK and a shocking 74% people said that stress had overwhelmed them and affected their ability to cope. That’s 3 in every 4 people you might meet in the street!!
With these stats, that are likely replicated across the globe due to recent world-wide events, we must do something to recognise and handle our stress differently if we want to live healthy and fulfilling lives.
With a wide range of symptoms that occur, it’s easy to see how people miss the early or ongoing signs of stress.
Couple that with comparing yourself to the people around you, you might not realise that your stress shows up in a different way for you.
This is why I’m such a fan of leaning into individual differences and using tools that give a simple framework that anyone can use.
That way we can track what shows up for us and the causes so we do something about it.
The other important aspect I’ll cover here is recognising the full experience of stress - are you ignoring signs and symptoms because you don’t realise they are related?
What is Stress Really?
We use the term ‘stress’ liberally, but do we know what it means?
There are lots of slightly different definitions of stress, but in my coaching training, I found I liked this one from one of my tutors, Stephen Palmer (a cognitive behavioural and counselling expert).
Stress occurs when perceived pressure exceeds your perceived ability to cope.
Stephen Palmer, 2003
What should jump out at your from this definition is the use of ‘perceived’ - twice! Just as beauty is in the eye of the beholder, so is stress.
I got really irritated at my old boss in my last day job contract because he had some old-school views on things, even though he was only a couple of years older than me. He seemed to handle high pressure and stressful situations in our banking days pretty well though.
However, that made him less than understanding if other people found stress and excessive workload overwhelming. I remember calling him out when he said ‘I don’t know why that person is stressed, they aren’t that busy’.
I told him he didn’t have the full picture and that stress was relative. He huffed and ignored me.
This is why the ‘perceived’ part of the definition is so important. What one person might find stressful, another might find exhilarating, motivating, easy, awful, or something else.
A mate of mine loves face-to-face meetings, going into the office and ‘holding court’ with clients and investors.
I go into the office twice a week, enjoy catching up with people, am less productive, and exhausted at the end of the day.
Same activity - vastly different experiences and responses. Whether one is ‘right’ versus the other depends on what you and your company or business values.
How we believe we might cope is also a perception - others might think we are coping fine, but internally we feel like the world is caving in.
What is true though is the range of responses, and what we do when we recognise it.
Stress Is a Multi-Faceted Experience – So What Are You Missing?
I used to numb out and dissociate earlier in my life due to childhood traumatic events.
I also collected several unhelpful coping strategies, such as eating disorders, erratic sleep and being initially very reactive to any perceived rejection before zoning out and distancing myself.
I was deeply unhappy for many periods of my life.
Over the past 15 years, I’ve had good therapeutic help and treatment, and my own training to become a Burnout Coach is a great reminder for how I’m handling life.
What I notice time and time again with clients, friends or colleagues is how restricted their view of stress often is.
Some believe stress is just the physical response of exhaustion and lack of focus. Others believe it’s when they are so overwhelmed, they can’t think straight.
For someone else, it’s when they get irritated and angry, blowing up at their kids and feeling guilt for days after.
All of these are a stress signature and response.
But it can be hard to work out what is going on when there are so many facets to the stress response.
That’s why the BASIC-ID tool below is so handy.
The acronym tells you which mode of the stress response to hone in on.
For some of you, you may not really notice the thoughts or emotions, but get distracted by physical signs.
Or you could only notice the thoughts and not any of the physical signs at all.
The BASIC-ID tool summarises the following modes of the stress response:
B: Behaviour - What actions do you take, or want to take?
A: Affect - What emotions/mood appear?
S: Sensation - What bodily sensations do you notice?
I: Imagery - What visualisations or images appear in your mind?
C: Cognition - What thoughts, self-talk or beliefs appear?
I: Interpersonal - What happens socially - do you go towards or away from people?
D: Drugs/Biology - How healthy are you, and what are you consuming - medications, drugs, nutrition, fluids, exercise etc?
To start with the BASIC-ID tool, I suggest you mark each of these modes in order of priority for you first.
Note which ones tend to drive the most intense responses or are noticeable when you have a stress response.
Cognitions and sensations are often at the top for me in my stress signature. Depending on the nature of the stress and stressor, sometimes the affect/emotion mode becomes distracting too.
When we’re having a stress response, it’s easy to ignore what we’re fully experiencing. I like the way this tool breaks everything down across physiology, mindset/thoughts, emotions, actions and interactions with others.
Over time, you might notice patterns - in how you respond consistently to stress, or how certain stressors show up in your stress signature in a particular way.
Once you’ve worked out which modes are more noticeable versus others, this primes you to reflect on what happens when you respond to stress and what to do instead.
Create Your Version of Inner Calm
Taking this bespoke approach to identifying your stress signature means you can tailor your reaction to stress.
With my coaching clients, I ask them what they’ve done in the past to deal with the issue they are concerned about.
Not only does this build agency and confidence that they have more control over the situation than they think, but it’s a reminder that people are adept at managing all types of stress.
We get into unhealthy or unhelpful habits or patterns, and forget what we did in the past that actually worked. Those strategies would be ideal to use right now, so I guide those insights out during our conversations.
It seems obvious but it still surprises me how I forget strategies that work for me and would bring inner calm to my day.
I need to be flexible with my approach too.
Sometimes I need to get distance from my thoughts or reframe them. Other times, I need to focus on other modes.
I always bang on about the basics as being a good place to start - sleep, nutrition, hydration, movement, play and connection.
The basics list aligns well to some of the BASIC-ID modes - focused on Behaviour, Sensations, Interpersonal and Drugs/biology.
This is because I find helping my body and making sure it’s functioning as well as it can, improves some of the mindset/emotional modes that can be troubling.
During my art-based coaching studies over the past 12 months, I’ve been leaning deeply into the Imagery mode.
Not only does visualising events or situations help us prepare for them, or alleviate stress related to them, using guided imagery is an excellent way to express emotions and feelings that don’t quite make sense.
How many times have you responded to someone who asks ‘Are you OK?’ with ‘I don’t know, I just don’t feel right’.
Our brains haven’t quite made sense of those feelings and sensations and visual expression helps us make meaning of internal experiences not yet processed.
Since introducing a creative art journalling process to my week, I understand my stress signature better, and find a calmer detachment from situations that were initially intense or troubling.
Define your stress signature to create an alternative route to inner calm:
Write down what occurs in each of these modes to define your stress signature
Prioritise the modes that are the most noticeable or resonate the most
Then write down what to do to manage your stress response in each mode. Lean into what has worked for you in the past or something you’d like to try but haven’t
For example, if you notice your body and muscles are getting tighter, and you are isolating yourself due to work stress, see if you can introduce a socially-related exercise activity.
Did you used to play football with your mates but stopped going because you were too busy?
Prioritise that so you can lean into the modes that will counteract the stress response, or more importantly, the stressor itself - working too hard and deprioritising self-care.
This approach helps you create your bespoke inner calm strategy for the relevant situation when you need it, and explore what got you there.
Key Takeaways
You and your stress signature are unique. Sure there are common symptoms across us all, but we don’t all have the same combination when stress appears.
Using a structured approach like the BASIC-ID tool offers a handy guide when you feel overwhelmed or distracted.
The other benefit is that you tailor your approach to creating inner calm for each stressful situation.
This isn’t the same as randomly joining a yoga class or drinking green juice every day. If that works for you, great.
But you likely have strategies that work for you, within particular stressful cases, so use those to build a sustainable way to manage stress.
Building awareness is never a bad thing. That way, you use wisdom to respond effectively, and explore the root cause once you notice common patterns.🚀
Which mode or modes do you notice the most when you’re stressed?
The idea of a "stress signature" is really interesting. It makes sense that we all react differently to stress. I agree with your point, Sabrina, about revisiting past coping mechanisms that worked for us. Sometimes we forget the good stuff!
Such a timely article, many thanks. Had a series of stress provoking things this morning and I could not keep my calm. Shame! I was deeply troubled later by the tone of my comment... The awareness and the wisdom that comes with keeping calm ; will work on it.