The Stress of Evaluating Yourself Through Other People’s Eyes
Dear Reader,
Today let us look together at the treacherous term ‘stress’. By treacherous, I mean that when someone says, “I feel stressed”, we tend to nod knowingly as if we are in that person’s shoes and know exactly what they are feeling and thinking. Yet stress can conceal many different experiences.
“I feel stressed”
Ella was preparing to move house. Understandably she was ‘stressed’ by the move. She had boxes to pack, deadlines to meet and numerous practical problems competing for her attention. She described herself as stressed.
However, when Ella walked into my office and said, ‘I feel stressed’, rather than assuming this is a normal feeling for when someone is moving houses, I approached it with curiosity. As we explored her stress together, we grounded the word ‘stress’ in her experience. Ella described it as muscle tension, back pain, a racing heart, an inability to enjoy packing and organising (something she used to find enjoyable) and difficulty sleeping. Her stress sometimes reached seven out of ten. From an outside perspective, all these symptoms are perfectly understandable. Moving house is not generally the most relaxing experience.
However, identifying the circumstances and symptoms did not actually explain what was causing the stress in Ella’s mind.
Reflection
When you say you are stressed, what does that mean for you?
What are the symptoms of ‘stress’?
When stress follows you to bed
One symptom that clued us into the cause of the stress was that Ella was staying awake at night.
At night, there was no packing or moving boxes to be done. But Ella ‘kept thinking’. So, I explored this ‘thinking’ by asking Ella: What, specifically, are you thinking about?
That question became the turning point.
Reflection
Do you ever say to yourself, “I keep thinking”? If so, what are you actually thinking about?
Is this thinking helping you, or are you just ruminating?
The voices inside the stress
Ella was actually not thinking very much about packing, moving boxes or the new house at all. Instead, she kept replaying other people’s comments about her packing strategy.
Family and friends had questioned her labelling system, joked about how long she might take to unpack and commented on the number of possessions she had. Ella taken those words away from the conversations and continued processing them at night.
This led Ella to say: “Maybe I don’t see myself the way everybody else does.”
There it was.
The comments were not merely being heard as opinions about boxes. Ella was experiencing them as judgments about who she was, particularly her identity as an organised person.
The deeper question then became:
“What is the thinking that makes everybody’s opinion matter so much to you?”
Ella was externally referencing herself, i.e. she was using other people’s perceived opinions to evaluate, judge and criticise herself. Ella had found a very good way to self-flagellate and make herself miserable.
Reflection
Whose or what words do you keep thinking about after a conversation ends?
Are you allowing someone else’s opinion to define your identity?
Keeping other people’s judgments outside of our own identity
External feedback can be valuable. The difficulty arises when we give another person’s casual opinion more authority than our own knowledge of our circumstances.
The reframe was simple:
They don’t know.
The people commenting on Ella’s packing strategy did not know every practical constraint Ella faced, why her system worked for her or even the limitations she was working with.
As we established this frame, Ella began to separate other people’s comments from her identity. Their opinions reflected what they could see and say, but that did not define who she was. A comment about how she packed or how many possessions she owned was simply that: a comment about one aspect of one situation. It was not proof that she was disorganised, nor did it have to become a judgment about her as a person.
By reminding herself “They don’t know,” Ella could consider what others said without automatically making it about her identity. She could decide whether their feedback contained anything useful and leave the rest with them, rather than keeping herself awake at night thinking about their words.
Reflection
Are you able to distinguish between useful feedback and feedback that should be left with the person who offered it?
Stress described how Ella felt. Exploring the thoughts that caused that feeling revealed what was hiding inside it: a perceived threat to her identity as an organised person. After reframing the meaning she gave to other people’s comments, Ella’s stress fell considerably, and she was able to find enjoyment in packing again.
Therefore, before we try to “manage stress,” we may need to ask a more useful question:
What is hiding inside ‘stress’?
If you recognised yourself in this article, click the Let’s Talk button on the top right to book a free 20-minute conversation and together we can explore what may be keeping you stuck, and see whether coaching is the right support for you.
Details have been changed or generalised to protect the client’s privacy. This experience is shared with her permission.
