Your Stress Tolerance Bucket

Last post I introduced the idea of the Stress Tolerance Bucket — a metaphor for your system’s threshold for stress and what may happen when it starts to fill up.   I want to dive a little deeper and clarify a few things.

What’s the Stress Tolerance Bucket?
The STB is your system’s capacity to tolerate stress.  It’s filled with a variety of stressors at any given moment. As your bucket gets close to filling up, your system will send you warning signals such as physical pain or emotions such as anxiety.  A bucket that overflows is represented in this analogy as tissue damage/actual physical injury. I go into further detail in my last post here.

This is just a model.
This seems obvious but you never know— you don’t actually have a bucket in your body . . . or any organ or tissue that even acts like this bucket.  Also, this analogy is stripped of loads of complexity so we can understand a very small shred of how pain works in the body, and not everything about pain can be explained using this analogy.  It’s not this simple. It’s just a model.

Let’s define stress.
I’d like to define stress when in reference to the bucket model since it’s a bit different than the way we talk about stress as a product of daily life. Stress is the effect of a stressor and a stressor is any external or internal condition that challenges the homeostasis of your body.  Eating a big meal is a stressor.  Extreme weather conditions are stressors. Exercise is a stressor. Learning something new and difficult is a stressor.   Thinking about stressors as good or bad can limit how we choose to deal with them.  You might instead refer to the definition above.  They are things that challenge us.  Most times, our bodies do an excellent job at adapting to the stressors by regulating our system with hormones, movements, and immune responses, all without us even realizing it.

Size matters.
Your stressors come in different sizes, therefore taking up different amounts of space in your bucket. The stress on your system of getting a bad paper cut is less than say, the stress of a fight you have with someone you love.  The fight with a loved one “takes up more space” in your bucket than the paper cut in terms of what your system can handle.  Another example, not getting enough sleep on a regular basis might take up more space in your bucket than eating a heavy meal one night this week.   This probably sounds pretty straightforward but can be very useful to think about.  Remember that our buckets send us warming signals when we’re close to filling up. When someone cuts you off in line and you lose it on them, you can guess you’re filling up on your bucket.  The angst caused by that person’s action was just enough to send you overboard.  But was it really about that person cutting you off? No.  That’s a small stressor in the bucket. It’s likely because of the much bigger stressors in the bucket such as lack of sleep.  This can happen with pain, too.  Let’s say you do an ordinary movement you do everyday, such as getting up from your dinner chair, but on this particular day, you pull a muscle in your back.  Was it about getting up from the chair?  No—that small movement isn’t the problem stressor, after all you do it every single day.  The problem stressor is more likely something in your bucket that’s pretty big—maybe your boss is overworking you, that fight with your loved one, lack of sleep, etc.

Everyone’s stress bucket has a different warning threshold.
Your system is trying to protect you from overflowing your bucket. Remember that according to this model, bucket overflow means tissue damage—an actual physical injury.  This is what evolution cares about—preserving the body for survival.  Because our systems are smart, they have mechanisms to produce things physical pain and discomfort to warn us when our buckets reach certain levels that seem too close to the brim for comfort.   You should read that again.  The signal of pain many times comes BEFORE damage. The key point here is that these signal levels are different for everyone.  Some people may experience warning signals when their bucket is only half full while others may not get signals until they’re actually getting close to a full bucket. 

SO WHAT CAN YOU DO?

You can take stressors out of your bucket.  
There are some things you can’t control in your bucket, like the political climate or your angry neighbor.  But there are plenty of things you can.  Working toward removing the stressors that take up more space in your bucket will offer you bigger bang for you buck.

You can change your bucket’s warning threshold.
No one wants a bucket that starts warning them of overflow when they’re not even close to the brim.  While you can definitely eliminate stressors from your bucket to alleviate your symptoms, you can also increase level at which you receive warning signals from your body.  This is where things like meditation, taking care of ourselves with good food, community and social bonding, vacation, etc come in.  Things like this can increase our tolerance to our stressors—we can literally have the same number of stressors in our buckets, but our system doesn’t send us alert signals so quickly—we’ve raised the tolerance threshold. 

You can change the size of your bucket.
This is my movement and strength training plug, finally!  If filling the brim of the bucket equates to a physical injury to your tissues, than the size of your bucket itself is representative of your tissue capacity.  So to increase the size of your bucket, you increase your tissue capacity—aka get stronger.  The stronger your tissues are, the longer it might take for your system’s protective mechanisms to kick in.  

In closing.
I’d like to repeat, this is just a model, and none of these bucket factors happen in isolation.  The complexity of the system includes limitations in our structural makeup, the health of all the systems in our bodies such as hormones and immunity, past experiences and current belief systems, etc.  Just look at this diagram!! However, while complex, there’s a take home here about what we know and what we can control.  There are ways to create system strength and resiliency when it comes to pain, and understanding the factors that influence our Stress Tolerance Bucket is the start.

Keep moving.