The Management Of Stress, Burnout, Threat, Conflict and Misunderstandings In The Ministry by John Edmiston based on the material in his book Biblical EQ
The main sources of stress in Christian ministry can be grouped into four broad areas:
1. Doing too much or doing things that are too complex.
2. The perception of threat in some form – personal, relational, organizational or financial.
3. A major values conflict with the church or ministry that one belongs to.
4.The inability to handle “difficult conversations” -such as those involved in confronting or managing others.
This article will address each of these four areas in turn.
1. Stress and Burnout Due To Doing Too Much In the following section on Stress I am using the published work of Brisbane based Christian psychiatrist and stress researcher Dr. William Wilkie and in particular a chapter from his book “Understanding Psychiatry”.
Stress is the emotion we experience when our brain cannot cope with all the processing that is required of it. The physical brain is like you desktop computer and if you have too may programs running it can slow down or “hang”. There is “just so much” your brain can do at once. Dr Wilkie theorizes that this is due to the capacity of the reticular formation, an area at the back of the brain that filters incoming data and decides what will get attention and what will be discarded.
For instance you are driving along a pleasant country road in Australia, listening to the car radio and enjoying the view. Then a kangaroo jumps out in front of your car. Your reticular formation switches the focus of your attention in a split second, you no longer pay any attention to the radio or the view and every particle of your attention is focused on the kangaroo and how to avoid hitting it. Deciding what is urgent and important and of value for the brain to process is the job of the reticular formation and most of the time its automatic. You do not consciously think “‘I’d better stop listening to the radio and looking at the view, I think I’d better concentrate on the kangaroo.” That’s too slow. Most of the time the change in attention is lightning fast and automatic and not under a great deal of conscious control.
Now the problem comes if in addition to the kangaroo you have a truck coming in the opposite direction and a ditch on one side of the road and a large tree on the other. In this case you will probably hit the tree. Why? Because the reticular formation won’t cope with all the situations at once. It will process the huge oncoming truck and the sudden movement of the kangaroo and maybe even the yawning menacing ditch by the side of the road but the tree is just “part of the landscape” and there are lots of trees so you “won’t see it” and you may well hit it.
On a much less dramatic scale this happens to busy modern people every day. There is too much to do and “stuff falls off the plate”. There are some things that we know we should be paying attention to, that just don’t happen. We get that clogged up feeling in our head and we might even say “If I have to think about one more thing I’ll scream” Or “Stop the world I want to get off!”. That clogged up, “I cannot cope with all this” feeling is what we call stress. We feel stress when we have too many things, that are too urgent, too complicated or too important, to be all processed at once. In extreme case sit can lead to burn-out or stress breakdown.
Stress breakdown has three stages. Firstly our system fires warning bells about the overload we are experiencing and we feel stressed and anxious and uptight and tense. These uncomfortable feelings are trying to tell us that we are doing too much and it would be a good idea if we slowed down. They are saying “You are driving yourself too fast, back off.” Many people ignore these warning signals, they like “driving fast”, living on adrenalin and they have an image of wanting to do more than others. So they suppress the anxiety by an act of will and keep going. They then become in danger of second stage stress breakdown.
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