Day 1342: Subjective Stress

Last week, I got my yearly review at work, which could have been a source of subjective stress.

Instead, my subjective opinion is that it was an excellent review, which reduced my stress.

My supervisor objectively stressed my need to reduce my subjective stress, as follows:

Goal for next year: Decrease subjective stress level. Keep mindful of her strengths and accomplishments and resource limitations while managing the intense level of requests so she can continue to provide excellent patient care with less stress to herself.

I subjectively want to stress this, here and now:

• I subjectively think that “decrease subjective stress level” is an important subject for my supervisor to bring up.
• The hospital where I work can be very stressful, subjectively and objectively.
• I constantly explore the subject of stress reduction in group and individual therapy.
• Like many health care professionals, I am better at helping others decrease stress than my own subjective self (which has been the subject of many articles in the health care field).

How is your subjective stress level?  What increases it?  How might you decrease it?

I’ve been thinking about the subject of stress a lot lately. My subjective opinion is that my stress level is higher than usual because my  son is leaving home to attend Edinburgh University this month and I’m having open heart surgery soon afterwards. Both these sources of stress of  have been the subject of many recent blog posts here.

Subjectively, it occurs to me that both those stressful events are objectively stressful. That is, most people would agree they would cause stress to anybody.  “Subjective stress” is the stress I might add to that stress by worrying about subjects I can’t control (like whether my son will receive his student visa in time before his scheduled flight on Saturday), or by subjecting myself to fortune telling, catastrophizing, blaming, comparisons, all-or-nothing thinking, personalizing,  mind reading, and all the other cognitive distortions common to human subjects (which have been the subject of many of my previous blog posts).

I’d like to stress that I often decrease my subjective stress level by taking subjective pictures of my surroundings and sharing them here, like so:

Did any of those subjective photos increase your subjective stress level?  Decrease it?

Subjectively, I believe this number from Stephen Sondheim’s Company is a good example of subjective stress making an objectively stressful situation (a wedding) more stressful:

 

You leaving a subjective comment on any subject might reduce my subjective stress level.   Shall we find out?

Objective thanks to all who helped me create this subjective post and to you — of course! — for subjecting yourself to my blog, today.