Youth workers are intimately acquainted with stress. After all, our jobs are about people; and people cause stress, especially when their problems and crises become ours. Though all of us live with constant stress, few of us know how to deal with it effectively. As a result, we suffer from a multitude of stress-induced physical ailments, emotional consequences and burnout.

To help us better understand stress and how to deal it, we consulted three experts: Larry Magnuson, Anne Jackson and Dr. Henry Cloud.

An ordained pastor in the Evangelical Covenant Church, Larry Magnuson understands the stress those in ministry face. As the CEO of SonScape Retreats, he is committed to providing those in vocational ministry with a place to go in order to address their hurts and struggles and find deeper intimacy with God.

As a pastor’s kid, now in ministry herself, Anne Jackson knows firsthand that stress can wreak havoc on families and physical health. She is the author of Mad Church Disease (Zondervan), which uses parallels between Mad Cow Disease and leadership trends in the church to explore the issues church leaders face and provide practical treatment plans for them.

A renowned clinical psychologist, Dr. Henry Cloud is author of many books, including Boundaries (Zondervan). His latest book, The One-Life Solution (Collins Business), explores something problematic for many youth workers—the breakdown of the boundaries necessary to maintain balance between work and one’s personal life.

YouthWorker Journal: People toss around terms such as stress and burnout. How do you define these terms?

Larry Magnuson: They’re when we cease to function at our best and begin to operate poorly as individuals—when we stop being the people God created us to be. Stress leads to burnout. Burnout always is related to stress.

Anne Jackson: There’s a huge difference between being stressed out and burned out. Seasons of stress come and go; but if we continually live in a high-stress season, it inevitably will lead to burnout. Burnout is the result of stress accumulated over time.

Dr. Henry Cloud: Stress is when there’s a demand put on the system. It’s not necessarily a bad thing. You need a certain amount of stress for your system to perform. The problem is, sometimes it’s a negative demand. Then other things in our biochemistry kick in. If someone’s under prolonged stress, that’s a bad thing. There’s only a certain amount of time you can do that before it leads to burnout.