How Workplace Stress Can Turn a Professional Situation into a Stress Snowball
In the middle of November last year, I found myself at a hockey rink. Finding yourself at a hockey rink in the middle of November isn’t exactly an out-of-the-ordinary thing to do; however, in my case, the rink was iceless and was instead populated by half a dozen antique fire trucks, glass cases filled with canvas hoses, helmets, and fire-retardant overcoats, and a pile of fifty ancient fire hydrants, arranged haphazardly in one corner of the empty bleachers.
I was shooting interviews for a documentary series. My camera was aimed at one of the fire trucks, with a chair erected in front, where my subject would sit under the gleaming lights.
The room was unheated; in fact, it was one of those instances where the old metal building acted like a refrigerator and trapped the icy cold inside, so even though there wasn’t any snow on the ground outside, we were chilled like bags of peas.
This was the makeshift home for a museum of historic firefighting equipment, and our two interview subjects for the day were a 90-year-old historian who had written the book on all of the paraphernalia that surrounded us, and a man in his late 60s, a retired fire chief who had valiantly fought blazes for thirty years and whose lung health had paid the price for it.
The other two players in this story, besides myself, were The Director, who had shown up forty-five minutes late and was now on his phone trying desperately to make a bank transfer, and The Producer, whose responsibilities were actually many and varied, but who seemed smugly satisfied with the towering task of providing coffee and a bowl of Hershey’s Kisses for the team.
The story that’s unfolding, I’ve told many times before, and up until very recently, it was a tale of remarkably bad behaviour. That was until I reassessed the whole situation through a Self-Reg lens and recognized the snowball of stress that was accumulating in the room.
When What Looks Like Misbehaviour Appears in a Professional Setting
The Director, busy on his phone, pushed his responsibilities to The Producer, who was forced to deliver questions to our first interview subject, the 90-year-old author. When he arrived, the author’s daughter, and chauffeur for the day, had explained to us that his hearing wasn’t what it used to be and that questions needed to be concise and enunciated for him to give the best answers.
I shifted my camera in towards the author’s chair so The Producer could be closer to the subject, and she started to ask questions: flowery, extrapolated questions, filled with lingering anecdotes and multiple-choice answers. The author stared at her and nodded, obliging as best he could, but I could tell he couldn’t make heads or tails of her queries. The Producer had promptly ignored every single one of the requests from the author’s daughter!
So we tried again, and again, and again. Each time a question was asked, I nudged The Producer to simplify, to clarify, and to project, but we were getting next to nothing on video. We were holding our elbows tight, trying to keep warm, and the only solace in this disaster was the towering bowl of Hershey’s Kisses I was making my way through between takes.
All the while, for what ended up being nearly two hours, the retired fire chief waited, calmly, quietly, and also in the cold. When we finally reached the end of the first two hours, and it was his time to be interviewed, I led the chief to the hot seat, put his microphone on him, and did my best to apologize for the wait. He said he didn’t mind, that he was just happy to be able to tell his firefighting story, but then he paused and asked me a question:
“Would you mind framing out my hands? We’ve been waiting so long that my medication has worn off and now I have the shakes, and I’d like very much if we didn’t see that on camera.”
Of course, I obliged, but as soon as I turned away, my vision went red. I instinctively popped another Hershey’s Kiss in my mouth—a maladaptive coping strategy, to be sure—then rallied The Producer and The Director behind an early 20th-century water tanker and went to town.
This TV set had devolved into complete unprofessionalism! The Director was still on his cellphone, now on his laptop too, signed into a banking account. He was completely ignoring the disaster of a day he had cultivated, and The Producer, in a stunning display of ignorance, had kept a 90-year-old man in a bitterly cold arena for two hours because she had pointedly ignored the requests of his daughter, to say nothing of the ailing fire chief who was still waiting for us to commence his interview. I let them have it! I was cheesed, ticked, vexed all at once.
How could anyone who considered themselves a professional behave so badly?
Understanding Stress Behaviour vs. Misbehaviour Through Shanker Self-Reg
This is where the Self-Reg lens finally comes into play, and why I’m likely to never tell this story in the same way again, because I asked the questions: Why? And why now?
All of the behaviour I experienced that day was the result of overwhelming stress in all five domains!
The Five Domains of Stress in a Professional Environment
We were all experiencing massive biological stress, trying to take on a creative and technical task while our fingers and toes turned to icicles.
The Director had locked onto his phone and laptop because the deadline for an important bill had passed and his partner at home had called him to make sure it was paid immediately; a huge stressor in the Social Domain.
The Producer, who was forced to ask the interview questions, had never taken on that task before, and the Cognitive Domain stressors of trying to present coherent questions, while also following along with a hastily compiled page of notes from The Director, were completely overwhelming.
And I myself was juggling huge stressors in the Social and Prosocial Domains. I was working in a group where I felt most of the group was letting me down, and I was also feeling enormous prosocial stress as I empathized with our two subjects, each challenged by the situation in their own ways.
What I also realized, after being hospitalized almost immediately after this very incident (more on that in a future blog), was that I had spiked my blood sugar by eating chocolate all day, so all of these stressors were heightened by my own biological stress, and there was no way in that moment I would have been able to reframe that situation and apply any of the Shanker tools.
Reframing Misbehaviour as Stress Behaviour: Lessons from a Self-Reg Journey
However, what gives me hope is that all these months later, I see that all of that misbehaviour amongst the fire trucks was actually stress behaviour. I guess it’s a camera person’s prerogative to reframe.
Every Self-Reg journey will have hard days, but the hard days mean that the next hard day, with the right tools, might be a little easier!
For further learning, check out our wide selection of Self-Reg Books and Resources, including the 2025 edition of REFRAMED: A Self-Reg Revolution by Stuart Shanker.
