Address Stress Workshop

An amazing workshop was held today by Lara Pennington with Mental Health America of Eastern Missouri. She helped us identify different types of stress and identify the biggest stressors in our life. We spent time identifying which stressors are chronic or acute and can be changed or are fixed. These are under the stress umbrellas of good stress and bad stress. Bad stress can lead to burn out, anxiety fatigue, and disease. The Workshop covered many coping mechanisms and strategies as well. We better understand what are physical symptoms of stress and which psychological symptoms and scored them to determine our current stress level score. She also hit on the possibility of not planning more than 50% of your day to allow for things that come up. This is especially challenging for anyone who works in a billable environment or really has a heavy workload and finite time to complete tasks. However, she says that too much stress is put on anyone who is expecting to complete 100% of each task planned for the day. It’s not typically possible. But, she does suggest that planning is also helpful for stress reduction as well. We welcome our members to watch this program.