People tend to think of a stressor as something—a situation, experience or stimulus—that is distressful. However, that’s not always the case. Some fairly routine stimuli are stressors even though we don’t think of them as such. Why? Because what all stressors having in common is that they cause us to burn energy in order to remain at our functional best. Thus, embedding Self-Reg in our personal and professional lives requires us to think of stress more broadly than we have in the past. What’s more, we experience stress in and across five distinct domains of experience: biological, emotion, cognitive, social and prosocial.
This four-page tool offers dozens of examples of stressors in each of the five domains. The examples serve as a great reminder of the diversity of stressor and can also spur us to think of other types of stressors, including hidden stressors, that may be affecting us or a child or adult we care about or work with.
