Spirit: Is it Your Best Path Through Work Stress?
On this episode, Dr. McManus guides your journey down the Spirit Path by highlighting key struggles of work stress for this path. The journey concludes by reviewing two stress relief tools that harness the power of connection to help reduce the negative impact work stress can have on us.
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Hey everyone! It’s episode 32. Thanks for listening to our show.
Recently here on the podcast, we’ve been focusing on the negative impact work stress can have on women along with ways to alleviate it. In an effort to help working women navigate this type of stress I created a hopefully helpful quiz called “Your Path Through Work Stress.” The quiz involves answering 10 introspective questions so you can learn more about your unique experience of work stress and which science-backed stress relief tools are most likely to help you reclaim your peace. If you’d like to find out your results before listening to the rest of this episode, then just head on over to psychope.com/yourpath. The quiz will also be linked in the show notes for you.
So, I refer to the quiz results as paths. A couple episodes back, I reviewed the Mind Path. And for context, I want to mention here that the Mind Path is informed by well-established mental and cognitive symptoms of stress. On that particular episode, I provided an introduction to the design of the quiz. I explained how the quiz is based on psychological research on symptoms of stress and stress management techniques. I also shared how I used a mind, body, spirit framework for the quiz to give us a shared language for understanding and relieving work stress. If you’d like to hear more about the design of the quiz, what it is, what it isn’t, plus learn about the Mind Path, then feel free to check out episode 30. And, if you want to get acquainted with the Body Path, which is informed by physical symptoms of stress, then you’ll want to listen to the last episode, which was episode 31.
Today’s episode is all about the Spirit Path. Before starting our journey down today’s path, I want to acknowledge that when I designed the Your Path Through Work Stress quiz, I took a slightly different approach with the conceptualization of Spirit than is usually the case. Typically, the spirit aspect in a Mind, Body, Spirit framework refers to one’s religious or spiritual beliefs. Now, this might be how work stress is showing up for you, a feeling of disconnection from your faith or spirituality, but with my particular take on the Mind, Body, Spirit framework, the Spirit Path can also refer to feeling like we’re living a life that’s incongruent with our personal values as a result of our work stress. So, while that might involve values associated with one’s religion or spirituality, it could also be values and beliefs associated with other areas of life. Using this perspective, the Spirit Path can be relevant for someone who identifies as atheist or agnostic.
Many of the struggles incorporated into the Spirit Path were informed by well-established emotional and behavioral symptoms of stress. I’ll go into more detail on these Spirit Path struggles, but some examples of these types of symptoms of stress are irritability, interpersonal conflict, and withdrawal from enjoyable activities. I also took the liberty with the Spirit Path to draw on my years of clinical experience in the field of psychology and wove in some more subjective struggles of work stress that can negatively impact one’s overall well-being. Difficulties like that feeling of being out of alignment with your core values or belief system that I just mentioned.
The hallmark of the Spirit Path is a feeling of disconnection. If you’re a woman walking the Spirit Path, this feeling of disconnection might show up as feeling disconnected from yourself, others, a higher purpose or power or other aspects of life that are important to you like the arts, music, or nature.
Work stress has a tendency of showing up a whole lot outside of work for women on the Spirit Path. Work stress is often experienced as irritability that makes enjoying yourself during your time off from work really hard.
For women on the Spirit Path, work stress can also be connected to problems in important relationships. This might involve snapping at your spouse or children. Women often know in their souls they never would’ve uttered such hurtful words to their loved ones if they weren’t so stressed out from work. Unrelenting work stress has a way of turning us into someone we hardly even recognize and sometimes struggle to like.
Women on the Spirit Path feel like work stress is responsible for a loss of inner peace. Activities that can help with resiliency like self-care, hobbies, and other fulfilling pastimes start to suffer and are no longer prioritized when a woman on the Spirit Path is drowning in work stress. Once these helpful practices start falling off, you lose the beneficial buffer they were giving you against work stress. You’re left feeling even more vulnerable to the negative impact of work stress and become further disengaged. It can really get a vicious cycle going.
Another struggle felt by women on the Spirit Path is the negative impact work stress can have on creativity, both during and outside of work.
Now, if you’ve been listening to the PsycHope Self-Help podcast for a while, then you already know what I’m about to share is true. If you’re brand new to the show though, then I want you to know that we’re not just about naming problems or listing information about symptoms around here. We’re serious about solutions and hopefully helpful tips that can be incorporated into your own self-healing. So, let’s take our PsycHope approach with the Spirit Path.
Since it’s a loss of connection that’s felt deeply by those on the Spirit Path when experiencing work stress, it’s actually the power of connection that we’re going to use to reclaim our peace. Women on the Spirit Path benefit from harnessing the power of connection with stress relief techniques like visualizations and practicing gratitude.
Let me tell you a little bit about visualization. This is a powerful method that can be used as a self-help tool. Visualization involves using your imagination to help you ease the negative impact work stress is having on your spirit. The relaxation technique of visualization, sometimes called imagery, involves using our minds to picture better scenes or experiences.
The term visualization doesn’t really do this technique justice though because we can imagine experiencing a peaceful scene with all of our senses. Not only sight, but sound, touch, smell, maybe even taste. Visualization for relief from work stress can be thought of as intentional daydreaming for the purpose of tolerating an overwhelming situation or improving our feelings of well-being.
I’m a big fan of visualization so it’s rather surprising I haven’t done a focused episode on this relaxation technique yet. So, please know, you can expect an entire episode dedicated to this tried-and-true stress relief tool in the near future. Even though I haven’t dedicated a full episode to visualization here on the podcast just yet, I did create a guided exercise on visualization. This guided meditation focusses on stress reduction through visualizing a peaceful place. You can find the Visualizing Your Peaceful Place Mindfulness Meditation on the PsycHope YouTube channel at @Psyc_Hope and there will also be a link in the show notes for you.
Gratitude is another promising stress relief approach for women walking the Spirit Path. That’s because gratitude helps us feel reconnected after a day of work stress tearing us down by acknowledging that there is indeed still good in the world. The practice of gratitude is incorporated into many social traditions and is a significant teaching in all major religions of the world. And, as we’ve learned from the past 2 decades of scientific research on gratitude, it has some amazing health benefits, including reducing stress. I did do a bite size episode on gratitude last year, but it was geared towards managing holiday stress. There’s a lot of research on gratitude that I didn’t get to share on that mini episode either. So, in the interest of thoroughly exploring the healing power of gratitude in a way that can be helpful all year long, a full-size episode on gratitude is in the works for you. It’s going to be perfect timing too because it will go live in November, which is a time of year here in the states anyways when our attention turns to that for which we are thankful.
Winding down here, I do want to bring your attention back to that vicious cycle experienced by women on the Spirit Path that I mentioned earlier: how time spent on enjoyable pastimes often fall off because of the amount of work stress you’re under. And how you not only lose the pleasure involved with self-care or hobbies, but the resiliency these sorts of activities help us build up against work stress. So, dialing the frequency of those activities back up can really make a difference for women on the Spirit Path.
I also have a bookend for you about the role of religion or spirituality when it comes to the Spirit Path. I still stand behind what I shared at the beginning of the episode, that the Spirit Path does not have to involve faith or spiritual beliefs, but I also have a special message for those of you who do identify as religious or spiritual in some way. I want you to know that engaging in actual religious or spiritual practices, such as prayer or sacred meditations, can be of immense value to you as you navigate work stress. Just as hobbies and self-care activities may become less frequent when we are under work stress, involvement in our church, synagogue, or other sacred activities can also suffer. Maybe you’ve noticed this pattern for yourself. If attending your religious services or engaging in other sacred or spiritual rituals was always meaningful to you and is an important piece of who you are, then it’s quite possible– and scientific research would support it, too – that regularly participating in those practices again will help with emotional connection, and that is an antidote to work stress for women walking the Spirit Path.
So, I’m curious, have you taken the Your Path Through Work Stress quiz yet? And if you got the Spirit Path as your result, does it seem accurate in terms of what you’ve been going through with work stress? I hope these beginning ideas of stress relief tools for women walking the Spirit Path encouraged you to find your way through work stress by tapping into the power of connection so you can reclaim your sense of inner peace.
If you haven’t taken the Your Path Through Work Stress Quiz yet, then you may be wondering if your results will be the Spirit Path or one of the other 3 paths. To find out, head on over to psychope.com/yourpath or just click the link in the show notes.
Be sure to tune in to the next episode when we journey down the final path through work stress. Much peace till next time!
Show Notes
Episode 32, originally published on October 30, 2023
Your Path Through Work Stress Quiz
Ready to find your best path through work stress? You can find the quiz right here: psychope.com/yourpath
Disclaimer
The information shared on the PsycHope Self-Help podcast does not constitute professional help nor is it a substitute for professional help. If you think you might benefit from more than self-help, here are some helpful resources:
Find a therapist:
Psychology Today, directory for locating a psychotherapist. More details here: https://www.psychologytoday.com/
Mental health crisis resources:
Suicide Prevention Hotline: call or text 988
Crisis text line: text HOME to 741741 to connect with a Crisis Counselor for any emotional crisis
