Why Stress Increases Gender Dysphoria and How to Cope!
Dr. Z shares why stress tends to exacerbate and increase gender dysphoria. To be clear, she's not talking about gender-related stress like experiencing being misgendered, hearing news about restrictions or bans preventing access to care, or fear of safety regarding gender—that type of gender-related stress undeniably and exponentially increases gender dysphoria, which a lot of you already know because you've experienced it. Dr. Z is talking about why other stressors in your life that have nothing to do with gender equally increase and exacerbate gender dysphoria.
Why does that tend to happen? As human beings, we have a reservoir—an assuring capacity within ourselves that depends on our resilience, experiences, mental health, psychology, and personality. That capacity has its own bandwidth, its own limits to which you can deal with stressful situations. This is why some people eventually break, have breakouts, fall apart, or can't even get out of bed because they've reached their limit. We all have our own limits.
When you're already struggling with gender dysphoria, that means out of your reservoir of coping abilities to cope with stress, you're already devoting an X amount of energy to deal with gender dysphoria and its effects in your daily life. If you also add other stressors—and the more non-gender-related stressors are added—the more you need that energetic capacity to deal with it. If you don't have anything else left in that reservoir and one day your gender dysphoria spikes (maybe you get misgendered or something happens), when you reach into your reservoir to cope with it, you won't have anything left because you've reached your limit.
Watch this video as Dr. Z addresses why we all have limits to how much energy we can allocate to stressful situations, why prolonged exposure to stress requires time to recharge your reservoir (a privilege many don't have), and what small things you can do to start adding back energy to help deal with both stress and increased dysphoria.
