https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=njyJl1hlf1o

Welcome to the Jameson Files

Carrie Webber:

Welcome to the Jameson Files. I'm Carrie Webber, and I'm your host. Thank you so much for joining us once again for another episode. We're thrilled. If you're here joining us live on Facebook, thank you for popping in and being a part of our live stream. If you're following us on our podcast channels and listening to this through iTunes, Google Play, or Spotify, thank you for being a part of our Jameson Files community. We would encourage you to please subscribe if you haven't already to follow when we get updates, and invite your dental peers to join the community as well. We want to provide content and information that is helpful for you and your continuous growth as a dental professional. So thank you for joining us and for spreading the word. I am so excited to have with us today Jameson's founder and my mother, Cathy Jameson.

And I asked Cathy to join us today because what we have all gone through—as a community, as a society, as a whole—over the past months has been nothing less than extraordinarily stressful, both in our personal lives and in our professional lives. We’ve experienced a great deal, even continuing today, and whether we realize it or not, the results of extensive stress in our lives have a long-term impact. A lot of things that people, practices, teams, groups are experiencing now are the results of long-term experience with stress.

And for those of you that may not know Cathy, Mom has spent the majority of our lives studying stress and how to control stress. And we're very fortunate that she chose dentistry as her point of focus on how to manage stress and control stress in our daily lives. And so I asked you to be a part of today's episode so that we could speak of your lifelong study on stress and talk about not only what we are seeing happening in our dental realm, but also talk about some ways that we as individuals and as teams could do some work, manage it more effectively to get it under control. So let's start with what stress is and share with everyone, if you could, what you've learned in terms of how we could start to identify what stress is and how we may be experiencing it in our lives.

Learn to Identify and Manage Stress

Cathy Jameson:

Great. It's a great place to start. Stress. We often use the term "stress" and the whole, "I'm so stressed; this is so stressful." And so it is important to start with what is stress. Stress is a person's response, either physiologically or psychologically to anything that's impacting them from the outside. And an interesting point about stress is that each individual responds to different stimuli in different ways. Your response may be totally different than my response when we face the same thing. There's nothing good or bad about that. It's just that because we are different different people and we're individuals, we're going to have a different response. And so one of the first things that each of us needs to do is to stop and identify what causes stress for us.

Identify the Source

Now you would do this individually, but you would also do this as a practice. If you're having problems in practice. If you're having discomfort in the practice, just stop and say, “What is causing this discomfort? What's causing the commotion? What's causing the disharmony?” Because the first step in problem solving is to identify what is the problem in the first place. That's the first step in stress management to identify what is it that causes stress in the first place. Once you've identified what's causing stress, the next step is finding ways to resolve that. 

So why is so-and-so upset? Not to judge that person, but to realize that each person's going to respond differently. That doesn't make them good or bad, strong or weak. We're just different.

Types of Stress Responses

And so now let me also make one other point.