Maybe you are listening to this in the car right now, driving home after a 13 hour day, your stomach might be rumbling 'cause you didn't really get lunch and you've still got a couple of hours of paperwork waiting for you when you get in, two people have gone off sick and tomorrow's already looking worse. And you are thinking I don't need anyone else to tell me I'm stressed. I know I'm stressed, I just need the ,world to give me a break.
And if that's you, I want to say this very clearly at the start of 2026. This podcast, this episode, is not about blaming you for not being relaxed enough. It is about stopping you from burning out in that pan that's heating up pretty rapidly. And those things that turn up the heat of the water in the pan, well, they're not always what we think they are. Because sometimes the stress that's really boiling you alive, it's not the stress that you think it is.
And that's what I wanna talk about in today's quick tip. Because have you ever gone into January just feeling really off? I know I do frequently. The holiday season is just absolutely hectic and I get back to work feeling pretty overwhelmed and not quite myself. And we often think it's because we are really dreading the workload really ramping up. We are dreading all those emails that are waiting for us and the tricky people we have to work with. Perhaps the teams we're trying to manage.
But what if the biggest sources of stress in our lives right now aren't exactly the things that you think they are? This is a You Are Not a Frog quick dip, a tiny taster of the kinds of things we talk about on our full podcast episodes. I've chosen today's topic to give you a helpful boost in the time it takes to have a cup of tea so you can return to whatever else you're up to feeling energized and inspired.
For more tools, tips, and insights to help you thrive at work, don't forget to subscribe to You Are Not a Frog wherever you get your podcasts. Now, for the last few months I've been wearing an Oura ring. This is one of those sort of fitness wearables. It tells you your sleep data, it gives you your heart rate, it tells you your average heart rate variability, which is a really, really good way of measuring your stress levels, and it's pretty accurate.
Now I'm not wearing this 'cause I'm sort of any sort of health guru, but really just out of curiosity, But you know what? It's shown me something I really didn't expect, Most of my stress bikes, they're not happening when I'm doing stressful things, they're happening during moments that I would never have clocked as stressful, moments that I just dismissed as mildly irritating, or times where I felt really tired and depleted.
And the more I've explored this, more I've looked into what I was actually doing at the time, the more I've realized that for me, and I think for other doctors and professionals in high stress, high stakes jobs, we're actually really terrible at recognizing our own stress. And this is not because we are completely oblivious or we're totally unskilled, but because we've been conditioned for years to override our warning signs and just keep going.
So I am gonna tell you about three different times when my Oura ring told me that I had a massive stress peak. And the first one is the sort of thing that I'm sure we can all recognize. So, I moved house recently. We moved into a village outside Cambridge. I'm absolutely loving it, and one of my colleagues asked me in a meeting how I was enjoying living in the countryside.
And I said, it's absolutely brilliant things seem to be easier and less busy than in the towns, and there's just more availability for things. For example, when I phone up the garage to book my MOT in, they said, sure thing, we can do it at the end of this week. At which point I realized, oh no, I've forgotten to take my car in for its MOT. It was literally an hour late. Now, immediately I went into the stress zone and I was like, oh, no. What if I've missed the MOT?
It runs out tomorrow, it's really, really urgent. Luckily, there was someone around that could drive me to the garage and bring me home so it all got sorted. I recognized that I was stressed, I was able to do something about it, it propelled the interaction. So the spike when I looked at my, data matched exactly what I felt. So that sort of obvious stress, it's an obvious warning, isn't it? It's like a, an obvious warning light on the dashboard of your car.
You know, warning, tyre pressure, or warning, something's wrong with the engine. It's like when you see a really sick child or or a patient that you think something's gonna go really badly wrong, or perhaps a complaint email, which is flagging up that there's a problem here and you probably need to fix it. And we need these warning lights. We need our amygdala to do its job to tell us when there's potential danger up ahead so that we can take evasive action.
And many of us thrive on some of these stress spikes. If you work in A&E, you are used to really sick patients coming in and dealing with them. And let's face it, this is what we've been trained to do, deal with appropriate, stressful situations that other people might perhaps find incredibly stressful off the charts stressful. Now it's worth noticing that not every warning light indicates that there is something stressful going on.
For example, my car flagged that it was due for a service, when actually what had happened was the engineers had forgotten to turn off the warning light. So there was a warning light, but there wasn't actually anything wrong. And so one of our jobs is to be able to distinguish between actually a real threat that we have to deal with and an implied threat that our amygdalas are worrying about.
So there's that, that thing with the patient where, yes, something might go wrong, but is this an actual threat or are we just extrapolating that and catastrophizing, and pre reliving stuff that hasn't happened yet? But this is really obvious, right? We recognize ourselves as being stressed at the time, our heart rate goes up we feel panicky. We can't think straight.
We would be able to say, I'm really stressed right now, or I'm definitely in my sympathetic adrenaline zone, and we need these warning lights. But there was another time that I noticed a real spike on my data where, I'd gone right up into my stress zone. A friend of mine had invited me to Cambridge Film Festival.
We went to see a film which was badged as being incredibly beautiful and very moving, and I got there a little bit late to the cinema, didn't have enough time to eat, so we went straight in and we sat down to watch this film. And the scenery was spectacular. It was beautiful. But the film itself, nothing happened. Now I apologize to any film buffs.
This is obviously not my thing, but after I'd done 10 minutes of mindfulness, a few minutes of breath work, I was starting to get really, really bored. Once I'd appreciated the beautiful scenery, the wonderful filmography, I just found myself getting really irritated, quite restless, feeling very sort of ants in wanting to move around. Now, I do have ADHD, so this is quite typical for me when I'm bored.
But after an hour and a half of sitting in this film, as we got out, I thought to myself, well, there is an hour and a half that I'm never gonna get back of my life. And I was in a really bad mood. And the problem is in a cinema, you can't just get your Kindle out, can you? You can't get your phone out and just start reading stuff that you're actually interested in.
Now I just put this down to me being a bit intolerant, but when I looked at my data, there was a massive stress spike about 20 minutes into this film, which I experienced as restlessness and irritability. But actually this lack of stimulation for my brain, this feeling that I could be doing a lot of other things that I really wanted to do, it actually boiled down to the fact that I'd been ignoring my own needs. I didn't really want to go, I didn't find the film interesting, I was hungry.
I'd squashed down all my needs to please our friend. And as a result, I was in my sympathetic nervous zone. It showed very, very clearly on my data.
And I wonder if you've experienced times when you've been in endless meetings at work that didn't seem to go anywhere, they were just looking at stuff that wasn't relevant to you, or you're on hold to a colleague, they're not answering, but it's really important, and you're just sitting there thinking, I could be doing anything, but it's quite boring. Or maybe you're doing some mandatory training that goes on for three hours longer than it should.
I've certainly got that feeling when I'm sitting in a conference where I've paid a lot of money to be there and I've certainly given up time to be there. And the keynote speaker has been the dumbest thing ever, hasn't done the research to actually tailor it to the audience. Side note, that's another thing that really bugs me.
But often when you're at a conference that you've been really looking forward to and you are just in a session that is irrelevant to you, that irritable, restless feeling you get that might be actual stress. Not just a personality flaw, a personality defect, but it's your body saying like, my needs aren't being met here. Now, I think this sort of restlessness, this irritation is a bit like driving a car and just hearing that funny noise.
You know, something isn't entirely right, but it's not quite often enough for you to stop the car, and you think, well, I'll look into it when I get home. But that funny noise, the misfiring, the jerky engine, that is something trying to get your attention. And it's really worth taking notice of. But as doctors, we have just been trained to override this. We've been trained that our needs don't matter at all, that everyone else's needs come in front of ours.
So we just get used to those feelings of boredom, of irritation, of restlessness. And then a couple of months ago, I had lunch with a couple of people I didn't know very well. But someone had suggested that, that we met up 'cause we're working in the same sort of industry. And initially it was, it was lovely, it was good fun.
But then one of them just started talking and carried on talking and talked for about half an hour about themselves and just dominate with the impressive knowledge that they had about everything that they were doing and the systems and the models that they were teaching everybody. And about 15 minutes in, I just noticed myself feeling incredibly tired, incredibly depleted, and I just wanted to get out of there. Now while I was going home, I checked my data and yep, there we have it.
Another huge stress spike. About 20 minutes into that conversation, my stress levels were off the scale, but I didn't feel stressed, I felt really de-energized. I felt really, really depleted. Because what was I doing in that conversation? Well, initially I was getting quite annoyed by the other person being completely unselfaware about the other people that were there. But actually I was comparing myself.
I was thinking to myself, oh gosh, I don't know this, i'm not as knowledgeable about this, what have I got to offer here? And I soon went into a shame spiral of, who am I to be talking to anybody about this sort of thing when there are other people that just know so much? I remember once I was driving along and the engine just lost, pat put my foot on the accelerator and very little happened. Well, that's just like in this situation.
All my own personal power went and I realized that I was telling myself a lot of shame stories about, well, I'm just not good enough, i'm not the same as this person. And that's exactly what comparison does to us. And you might have experienced, if you're in an NDT with very, very confident people that know everything about a tiny little specialty, and you might not know as much as they do, but of course, you know stuff about yours.
Or perhaps you've got a trainee who's very intellectual, knows all the latest research. And of course you've not been in that training environment for 10, 15 years, so you might not know that, but hey, you've got a whole load more clinical wisdom. Or if you look online, you've got these social media super doctors that just seem to be very shiny and how can they do all this and still look amazing, right? Maybe that's just me comparing myself to people like that online.
Because I tell you what, there are some absolutely amazing podcasters out there, and the minute I get on Instagram, things like that, I start comparing myself and then I go into this, oh, completely depleted place of I'm just not good enough. So often when we are stressed because of the shame stories we're telling ourselves, and that's an amygdala threat, isn't it? What if I'm not good enough? Our energy just collapses. And this often just looks like exhaustion, fatigue, extreme depletion.
Now, here's the problem. When it comes to stress, we only really notice the warning lights at the times where we can literally feel ourselves getting stressed and we can identify as stress, but we miss those car backfiring, those funny noises, or when we sort of lost power and we go into depletion mode. But that's what subtle stress looks like.
It can be irritability, restlessness, or perhaps just overthinking stuff, ruminating on stuff, or maybe even avoiding the things we really need to do because we feel so depleted when we try and do them. So subtle stress can look like sort of irritability and, and restlessness and just narkiness. Well, this is a very subtle form of fight out of the fight, flight or freeze response, isn't it?
The avoidance of stuff, the just sort of stepping back and not doing it well, that's the flight response, isn't it? That's the, the bit of us that deals with the threat by just saying, well, I'm just not gonna go anywhere near it. Or we've got the freeze response. So just overthinking things, can't actually get anything done 'cause it's just going round in our head. Or we're getting these micro gill moments that are just making us unable to make the decisions that we need to make.
And of course we haven't just got fight, flight or freeze, we've got fawn. So when we go into the the over helping and squashing down our own needs, that's often the fawn response you've got right there. So if we haven't got that flashing warning light that we identify as stress, but we've got these other things, rather than identifying them as stress, we say that they're flaws in our character. There's something wrong with me.
But what if we reframe that and we realize this is our brains telling you what your unique brain actually needs. It's telling you that there is a threat here, that something is not right. And we often miss these because we've been trained to tolerate them. We've been trained to think that everything's our responsibility. So if we do feel a bit narked, well that's just us being selfish.
We've been trained to have this superhero delusion that we can cope with everything all the time, and so we override those body signals. We work in the urgency trap, so we miss eating like I hadn't gone and eaten before I went to the cinema. And because we avoid conflict, we avoid stating what our own needs are. This is all systemic conditioning, and one of the real lies that we've been conditioned and, and groomed for is that we should be perfect.
So when we encounter people who seem to know everything, we immediately compare ourselves and go, oh, no, why didn't I know this too? But recognizing when some of these small signs are actually stress symptoms is really, really important. Because if we are not labeling things as stressful, we're blaming the wrong things for our stress. We purely blame the workload or patient demand or rotas or toxic system. And of course these things really, really contribute, but we can't control most of these.
But if we can accurately identify some of these other things that are causing us these stress reactions, then we can start to eliminate these layers of unnecessary pressure that either is being put on us or we are putting on ourselves. And of course, the goal isn't to eliminate stress altogether. We really, really need those. Warning signs. And also that would make the job really, really boring if there was no excitement, right? If there was no meaning to what we do, if it didn't really matter.
Because we are designed for acute stress, we are designed to be able to respond to that, and that is often why we went into this job, why we went into medicine, 'cause we can deal with it. But when we ignore those really quiet, toxic stressor, everything else gets amplified. And then even the, the sort of, the good stress in our roles, the stress that we train for, that we quite enjoy, that then becomes unbearable.
So this is why it's really important to recognize not just those warning lights, but those backfiring moments, that funny noise in the engine or the moment when you are, you are losing power on the accelerator. It's not just insight for its own sake, but it'll make us feel a lot better and make us perform a lot better. 'Cause if you remember the stress curve, we'll be able to eliminate that extra pressure and move back into our performance zone. So let's bring it back to the new year.
In January, there's often quite a lot of pressure. It's New Year, what are your New Year's resolutions, all that sort of stuff. We start comparing ourselves. We might have had a bit of time over the holiday season to just examine our lives a little bit and think what am I actually doing with myself? And often some of those subtle stressors intensify. I definitely know they do for me when I'm hanging out with my family and my extended family a lot.
And often we ask ourselves in the new year, right, what am I going to achieve this year? What are my goals? What are my New Year's resolutions? But can I invite you to flip that and instead of asking that, ask yourself, what is it that I'm going to stop tolerating this year? What is it that I will not tolerate this year? For me, it's gonna be boring films and concerts, I will politely decline.
And in fact, some friends recently asked me to go to the ballet, something that I just didn't think I could sit through. But I've asked if I can go and meet them beforehand for brunch Win-win for everybody. I get to see them, they don't get to put up with me fidgeting and being restless the whole way through going, when is this gonna finish?
But it also means I'm gonna give myself permission not to go to that teaching or training that's not delivered very well, not to sit through, through those things that I just find really intolerable. I particularly find board games very, very intolerable. Now, I know that is an ADHD thing, but I need to explain that to my family or I just say, that's great guys. You play that game. I'm just gonna take myself off with a book. For me, it also means avoiding people that.
I do quite a lot of humble bragging, maybe staying off social media, so I'm not comparing myself to, to people all the time, and minimizing my contact with people that only talk about themselves. So I wonder what that looks like for you. What are you gonna choose not to tolerate this year, so that those micro stresses, those moments are gonna get much less for you? Now I can imagine a lot of you are just thinking, yeah, but Rachel, what if I can't avoid the situation?
What if I can't avoid that colleague, 'cause they're part of my consultant team? But yeah, and absolutely we can't avoid every single stressor, but we can stop losing ourselves inside of them. So if you are sort of trapped in a moment where you are suddenly feeling really depleted, or you're feeling really restless or irritable, then just name it. Ah. Okay, this is the car misfiring, or, oh, you know, I seem to have lost power here. That makes sense. Of course, I'm feeling like that.
What's the situation I'm coping with here? Just naming it can sue this and can shift us away from that shame spiral of, oh gosh, I'm not good enough, this is dreadful. Secondly, you can just do something to get you out of that state. You can just feel your fingertips. You can put your feet on the floor and take a couple of grounded breaths. Maybe you can relax your shoulders or take a sip of water or by yourself some time.
Or even just think to yourself about all the good that you do do in the world. And then thirdly, give yourself permission to feel like you're feeling. Okay, right, I recognize I'm feeling like this. This is my nervous system doing its job. Thank you. Nervous system. You know, I don't need to cope with this perfectly. It's okay to be feeling like this. And at that point you can give yourself permission to get out if you want to. Permission to leave this meeting.
Granted permission to leave the film granted. Permission to say no granted. So if you want to identify not just those obviously stressful moments, but those other things that are gradually depleting your energy or causing you to miss fire, then then try answering these three questions. Number one, what are your warning lies? What are the really obvious ways that that, that you feel stressed? For me, it's definitely heart beating really fast and feeling like I've got to act immediately.
But number two, what are your misfire moments? So when are you feeling sort of bored or restless when actually you are feeling very, very stressed? What does that feel like to you? And thirdly, what are the power loss moments? Where's the equivalent for you of feeling really depleted and lacking in energy, where you could be comparing yourself or going into a bit of shame spiral? Because if we are aware of what's going on, that gives us some power and that gives us some choice.
And no, you don't need to get a a fitness wearable like the Oura ring to start to notice these things, although I must say I really enjoyed using mine, and I'm gonna share some more insights with you on the next few quick dips. So next time you are feeling restless, agitated, irritated, depleted, see if you can name that stress, name the need underneath it, and make one tiny, tiny correction. So this year, decide what you are not going to tolerate anymore.
And that might mean saying no to a lot more things, or choosing to walk away from things even in the middle of them. And when you do find yourself experiencing some feelings that possibly could be due to stress, like boredom or irritation or depletion, then think to yourself what could be going on? Name that stress, name the unmet need underneath it, and make just one tiny correction.
Because remember, you are not a frog, And this is one thing that is in your control that you can use to start to turn the heat down. And if you want to join a group of people who get it, who are in exactly the same pan as you, then do, check out the links in the show notes. Join one of our communities. Join FrogXxtra or FrogXtra Gold to discover even more tools and more ways of turning the heat down. And I'll see you for the next quick dip.