Emotional Capacity: What is it? Why is it Important?

Stress is our body’s normal response to increased physical and emotional pressure. When we’re adding to our level of stress, and don’t have anything in place to counterbalance it, those stress levels go up and up until we reach our capacity, our emotional limits – negatively affecting our mental wellbeing.

We all have a different capacity for stress and our own emotional capacity will change over time. However, what is important is how we manage our stress levels to prevent ever reaching full emotional capacity.

ENTER, THE STRESS BUCKET

(FYI, This is a great illustration to do with your teenager)

The Stress Bucket Model (Brabban and Turkington 2002) is a very useful visual tool to demonstrate how stress works and how we can both feed into and help relieve our own emotional capacity.

Imagine a bucket sitting on a stool in front of you. That bucket is your emotional capacity. Your bucket may look different from my bucket or your friend’s bucket. We all have buckets of different sizes depending on things like genetics, our life events up to this point, our age, health, and more.

WHAT LEADS US TO REACH OUR EMOTIONAL CAPACITY?

Flowing into the bucket are all the areas of your life that cause you stress – school pressure, work pressure, family pressure, lack of sleep, not eating well, disagreements, money problems – all of these add water to our stress bucket. And the more we add, the higher the level gets.

Eventually, that level hits the top of the bucket, and, inevitably starts to overflow. We’ve now hit our emotional capacity.

WHAT HAPPENS WHEN WE REACH EMOTIONAL CAPACITY?

When our stress bucket is full, we start walking an emotional tightrope. Often it takes the smallest thing, just a drop added to that bucket, for the water to overflow and for us to snap. People often refer to it as ‘the straw that broke the camel’s back’. Other people can’t see how much water is in our buckets and what we have experienced up until now so they often think we have overreacted.

We become much more reactive and irritable as every drop added to the bucket causes more to spill over. The water in our bucket is full of all sorts of stress hormones such as cortisol and adrenaline and, if left, they’ll stagnate and start to affect our physical and mental health more severely.

We’ll start to feel the effects of burn out, start to experience increased symptoms of depression or generalized anxiety disorder, feel fatigued, experience headaches or nausea, and we’re unable to cope with life in the way we once did.

ADDING HOLES TO OUR STRESS BUCKET

To stop our bucket from overflowing we need to add holes to our bucket; outlets to allow some of this stress to flow out in a healthy way.

• Self Care – The thing to remember when considering self-care is the ‘self’ – first, you are responsible for your self care. Second, the things which energize you, help you process, calm and soothe you, you will know best. If we are looking after ourselves and making time for our own needs, we will keep our levels low enough to be able to avoid them overflowing.

• Saying No – We need to monitor our own stress bucket. We can’t take on extra pressure if we are already filling up too quickly. That might be telling your employer you can’t take on extra work, telling a friend you are not able to help with a project or telling yourself you need to stop trying to please everyone else.

• Saying Yes (to You) – Spend time doing things you enjoy. When you are happy and relaxed it ensures the taps stay clear of blockages and the stress bucket can empty smoothly.

• Therapy – A counsellor or therapist might be able to teach you techniques to keep your stress levels lower and help you identify areas of your life that need adjustment for this to happen.

• Relaxation – Whether that is mindfulness, exercise, yoga, a nap or something else – spending time in the moment and finding techniques to relax can help keep those levels down.

We need to keep the holes open all the time. It’s great to add all our holes in when we feel we are reaching our emotional capacity, but if we stop the self-care, the bucket will fill back up again. Self-care is not only for when we are unwell – it is a preventative tool also.

WE ALL DESERVE TO GIVE OURSELVES A BREAK

Different pressures will add a different level of water depending on our situation.

It is not a competition and it is important to remember that your own emotional capacity is your own responsibility.

You got this! Now go win the day!!!

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