Dr. Cherise Johnson greets the audience, introduces her role, and asks viewers to share their location and rate their week as a brief emotional check-in.
Dr. Cherise Johnson greets the audience, introduces her role, and asks viewers to share their location and rate their week as a brief emotional check-in.
She asks viewers to consider what stress they're carrying and differentiates between visible stressors and those that are hidden or unacknowledged, encouraging reflection on bodily signals.
Dr. Cherrise describes four 'stress buckets'—pressure, responsibility, emotions, and expectations—explaining each and prompting listeners to consider which apply to them.
What's up cadre? I hope everyone is doing well. This is a very different time than I would normally come, but it's always a great time to do a live stream. This is your first time here. Welcome to the Cadre Sphere. I'm Dr. Cherise Johnson. I'm a licensed clinical mental health professional, mindfulness practitioner and author. I come into the space at least once a week to talk about all things life and what does it mean to truly be well, right? What does that look like in your life? So typically we start a few different ways.
Hello, Mel. First, let me know where you are in the world. I am actually in Cadre headquarters in Minneapolis right now. And then rate your week, 1 to 10, just our way of checking in with a little emotional regulation. On a scale of 1 to 10, where are you? 1 meaning your week is working you. 10, you're doing the very best that you can given the context of your life. I want to take some time today as you're coming in, getting settled, saying hello, or even if you're watching this on a replay, and really have you consider ways to kind of pause.
What's up, New York? And consider what are you carrying in terms of any level of stress? And I want you to think about it in two different ways. I want you to think about the scene and unseen. Seen meaning the stress that feels very common to your life that people could probably notice, that you're willing to allow other people to see. And then unseen is what are the stressors that we know that we're carrying but we're not necessarily acknowledging, we're not potentially dealing with those things, but the body is probably letting us know there's something going on.
And so you might be experiencing things that are cluing you in to the fact that, you know, you might need to slow down for a moment and pay attention. And from that, I also want to give you kind of four different ways as you work to maintain awareness of what you're navigating, it can be really helpful to consider kind of where do I see these stress buckets coming from? Here's why that's important. When we can identify what we're carrying and how we're carrying it, it helps us match it to a tool or a support.
There's no such thing as any one way that will help every stress. So when you can say, oh, this is a this kind of stress or that kind of stress, here are the things that you've learned help you when you're dealing with X, Y, and Z versus A, B, and C. So I'll give you these four buckets. The first one would be pressure. Where are you carrying any level of seen or unseen pressure? And I want you to keep in mind that all pressure isn't bad sometimes. We experience good pressure. We're creating something, we're launching something, we're looking forward to something, and we're trying to get things done.
But any level of sustained pressure that is not being addressed can still fall into an unhealthy stress, okay? The second bucket would be responsibility. Where are you carrying, managing, navigating, seen versus unseen responsibility? I always think it's important to even consider, are you carrying responsibility right now that isn't really yours to carry, or you've been carrying it too long, or it's just not worth it? It's a responsibility that it would be ideal for you to release. Third bucket would be emotions.
Really consider what are the seen and unseen or unacknowledged emotions that you're carrying that really need more than just awareness. You need to kind of tend to them or work through them and how is the cost of carrying those emotions influencing your sleep behaviors, your physical activity, the way you're eating, your social behaviors, interpersonal behaviors, or even what you think about yourself. And then the last one would be expectations. And I feel like this is a big one. Expectations are challenging, right?
We all have different temperaments in terms of what we expect out of ourselves. Then we have the dynamic of what are the expectations that we feel like other people have of us. And what's that tug of war? Like I can resonate with that one in my own life right now. There feels like a tug of war between some of the expectations that I have for myself and some of the expectations that I feel like are coming from other places. And it's like when that tug of war happens, who's going to win? So again, what are you carrying in terms of seen and unseen?
And is it under the umbrella of pressure, responsibility, emotion, or expectation? Now you might think all of the above. I have all these things going on in my life right now. And if that's you, you're human. There's nothing wrong with that. As we continue throughout the weeks ahead, I will talk through different tools that you can utilize. Here's what I encourage you to do today. Right now, I just want you to name it. I want you to get it out of your head, out of your heart.
