In this series, I dig a little deeper into the meaning of psychology-related terms. This week’s term is the stress bucket model.
I first heard of the term stress bucket several months ago in a post by Caz at Mental Health 360º, but it’s been around for a while. It looks like it’s best known in the UK, and it doesn’t seem to have really made inroads in North America.
The bucket
The bucket represents your capacity for handling stressors. The greater your vulnerability, whether that’s because of mental illness or anything else, the smaller your bucket is. When you’re well, you’ve got a bigger bucket.
Stress pours in
The bucket gets stress added to it during the day, as water is poured into the top. As the bucket starts to fill, you might shift from calm and relaxed to normal everyday mode to mildly stressed all the way up to totally overwhelmed.
You can take steps to reduce the stress coming in, and that will help you later on, but it doesn’t do much about the full bucket you’ve got right now.
I find another useful way of conceptualizing stress in the context of mental illness is fork theory; there are only so many fork pokes (stressors) you can take before you reach your limit and need recovery time before you can take on more of what the world tries to throw at you.
Stress drains out
The bucket has spouts/drains/holes or whatever you’d like to call them towards the bottom. By using coping strategies, you can let some of the stress flow out of the bucket, leaving you with a lighter load. Some coping strategies might be really effective for you, releasing a gush of stress. Others might be so-so, only releasing a little dribble.
Then there are unhealthy, maladaptive coping strategies, like substance use or self-injury. It can feel like you’re letting some stress drain out, but it’s actually getting siphoned right back up into the top of the bucket. You feel a temporary sense of relief, but it actually perpetuates the problem.
Stress-vulnerability model
The stress bucket concept is also a good fit with the stress-vulnerability, also known as diathesis-stress, model of mental illness. According to that model, mental illness results when sufficient levels of environmental factors collide with pre-existing vulnerability. The lower the vulnerability, the more stress it would take to trigger the onset of illness. Getting back to the stress bucket, if you’ve got a dinky little bucket that’s so rusted that your drains don’t release stress properly, it doesn’t take much to completely overwhelm the system and wash your bucket away entirely in the raging river of mental illness.
Usefulness of the stress bucket model
I was actually looking recently for a good visual representation of the stress-vulnerability model, and I couldn’t find one. The stress bucket makes for a good stand-in, though.
What I think is most important about this model is that it captures that you can use both top-down and bottom-up approaches to stress management. You can work on controlling the stress going in, but you can also work on your coping strategies to release stress from the bottom of the bucket.
As for the bucket itself, that comes back to underlying vulnerabilities. Effectively treating illness, whether mental or physical, can help grow the bucket.
To add on another layer, maybe boosting resilience makes the bucket more flexible and elastic, which can temporarily give you a bit of extra capacity to work with.
How’s your bucket doing these days?
Resources
- Mental Health Foundation booklet on How to Manage and Reduce Stress
- Winter Dragonflies has a great resource that depicts balancing coping resources and stress.
- Worksheets:
You can find the rest of the what is… series on the Psychology Corner page. You may also be interested in the post What Is… Eustress vs. Distress.
The post Therapy Tools for Mental Health has more tools to support your mental health.
The Coping Toolkit page has a broad collection of resources to support mental health and well-being.
Ashley L. Peterson
BScPharm BSN MPN
Ashley is a former mental health nurse and pharmacist and the author of four books.
It’s very helpful to have a visualization of how stresses may come into the bucket or out. Thanks for sharing.
It definitely does!
Great post, it was understandable!
I an relate to the bucket, for me I would say it is seventy-five percent full. I need to find my release valve. 🙁
I hope you can find it!
Magical mystery bucket!
What a cool illustration for stress management! Reminds me a bit of the spoon theory that explains chronic illness so well.
Yes!
This sounds like a good model. It’s very relatable
Definitely.
I love it! Gotta punch some more holes in the bottom.
Yes!!!
My bucket is fairly full, and has been for years. I’m learning (slowly) about the coping methods you speak of, but it gets frustrating how slow that might be. I have a brand new therapist (whom I saw for the first time today), and am hopeful she might further my education about relieving my stress better, but we’ll see. She does suffer from some of the same issues as I do (fibromyalgia for one), so at least there’s common ground. It’s a work in progress isn’t it? I’d never heard of the bucket idea until I read your post either. So the idea hasn’t (apparently) ‘hit’ Utah yet..
II hope the new therapist helps with some bucket-emptying. There seem to be far too many people that seem to just want to dump more into the bucket…
I’ve never heard of the stress bucket before and it’s a good visual aid for understanding the stress/mental illness ‘dynamic’ that happens during the day- or indeed during a longer period such as a year. Thanks for sharing this Ashley. Love to you and the Piggies xo
Thanks! ❤️
This bucket makes us understand and remember better. It is also a good, supportive resource for us not to thinking about kicking the bucket when things get too bad. And it directs us to see the choices we can make like staying away from the stressors or doing something to drain out the fluid of stress. The fluidity of stress lets us see that nothing stressful is permanent(●’◡’●)
So true!
I think this is a great way to think about how we take care of ourselves and also recognise that we all have a breaking point if there’s too much stress and not enough self care – I usually talk about stress/resilience and coping but think it will be the bucket from now on! Xx
I was pretty thrilled when I learned about the bucket – it captures it so well!
When I was a teenager in the UK, to say you had a ‘large bucket’ meant something else entirely! 😂
I think it’s a good model, albeit a simple one, for visual representation purposes, which makes the idea easier to imagine. xx
Hmm, I haven’t heard of that kind of bucket, and I can’t tell whether it’s a good thing or a bad thing!
Great blog! I love how you broke the theory up, it really made it easy to follow. I hope you have a lovely day 🙂
Thank you!
Great visual post about stress. It really helps when we can visualise. Thanks for sharing!
I just came across it pretty recently, and I agree, it’s really useful.