‘We all have our very own stress bucket’
This miserable looking bucket is here to help show you what we do with all our stress and negative thinking.
It’s a stress bucket, we all have one (a wonderful client once described her’s as an Urn). Unfortunately as we navigate through life we accumulate stress and it pours or drips steadily into our bucket, we then fill it up with negative thinking, like negatively forecasting the future – I’m never going to have any friends, lose weight etc. We can also negatively introspect about the past. Next we add more to the bucket with negative chatter, whether that be internally to ourselves or with others. Then we can add some more to the bucket with our dear mood hoovers – those folk who are never happy unless they are moaning and groaning seeing the bad and negative to every situation. Throw in COVID-19, the news etc and you can see that the stress bucket can fill up very quickly.
When the bucket fills up it has nothing else to do other than overflow, this is when we throw a crazy tantrum, suffer anxiety, panic attacks, lash out, or retreat to the safety of the sofa or bed and don’t interact with the world for a while. Guess what all that does? it fills the bucket back up again and now we are in a vicious cycle.
The very image of a stress bucket has helped me enormously and it certainly did for one previous client who expressed how she felt protective of her Urn, no way was other peoples moans and groans going in there, she was mindful of her responsibility for her Urn, she took great care of it and ensured that she had spare capacity.
Because life does throw curve balls our way sometimes and if we have no spare capacity in our bucket we cannot cope with life.
So whether you have a lovely Urn, or an old bucket, we can consider self care as not letting negative thinking, speaking and doing into our bucket.
Being positive is a mindset it takes time, your learning new skills and making new pathways in the brain, and yes you’re human you’re going to get it wrong sometimes but you are also getting it right and you are taking control of your life.
Not only can we take control of what we put into our bucket we do have a method of emptying it. Sadly it’s not as swift as the picture would suggest but little by little we can.
We do it quite naturally whilst we are in our Rapid Eye Movement (REM) sleep, this is where we partially empty out our stress bucket. Sadly it’s restricted and if we are experiencing disturbed or poor sleep you can see how we are in a vicious cycle.
Hypnotherapy can help you get back on track by helping with the process of bucket emptying so that you are feeling yourself again.
