Hey folks, I’m Dave Kydd, and this is the eighth episode of The I Am Podcast — where we build our Internal Art Museum one image at a time. Each week, we take a simple image from my psychotherapy practice and use it to make sense of everyday stress, emotions, and problems.

In this episode, we talk about stress — yours, mine, Lily’s, Charlie the dog’s (not Billy the cat, he’s fine) — and we picture it like a barrel. As stressors pour in, the barrel fills up, and when it overflows, coping stops.

We walk step by step through a practical way to understand and manage stress, using a familiar example: Ross from Friends. By breaking stress into pieces, we look at what’s filling the barrel, how full it really is, and what you can actually do about it.

You’ll learn:

• What stress really is and why it feels so heavy
• How to identify what’s actually filling your stress barrel
• Why you don’t need zero stress — just manageable stress
• How to reduce stress coming in
• How to increase stress going out using your own “taps”

As always, we add a new image to the Internal Art Museum — a drawing of me inside a stress barrel — to help make this idea easy to remember when life starts piling up.

Join me as we continue filling the walls of our internal art museum — one image at a time.

Check out the video version of this episode on Youtube.

Find us on Instagram and Tik Tok @the_iam_podcast

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