Finding Your Center: Using Values Clarification to Navigate Stress

Joseph Tan, PhD is a clinical psychologist and Director of Integrated Behavioral Health for UVA's Department of Family Medicine, where he oversees clinical services, education, and strategic development for the primary care behavioral health program. He also serves as Technical Advisor on Behavioral Health Integration to UVA Physicians Group and contributes to the Virginia Task Force on Primary Care's Integrated Behavioral Health Provider Technical Advisory Committee. His work focuses on improving care access through program development, interdisciplinary training, and clinical redesign.

Stress is an experience we all run into in our lives. We might experience it related to the pressures of work or school, as we navigate seasons of change in our lives, or while we balance competing demands for our time.

Typically when most people think about "stress management," they start with ways to reduce or avoid the stress-causing factors. But what if stress itself is the signal? What if it's our internal GPS alerting us that we've drifted from what truly matters? Clarifying our values and taking action to align with them can serve as a roadmap that helps us navigate the hazy clouds of stress that confuse our sense of direction in life.

The Stress-Values Connection

Stress isn't just about doing too much, it can also be worsened when we are unclear about the "why" of what we do. When our daily actions misalign with our core values, we experience chronic stress, that can build into a problem, even if it seems low-grade at first. If we can't articulate our values, then we can have difficulty prioritizing and saying "no," leading to running into more stressors than we need to. Stress awareness isn't just about identifying your stressors; it's about spotting where your daily life has drifted from your internal compass.

The Bullseye Exercise: A Practical Tool

Our best tool for identifying these values misalignments is an exercise called the Bullseye exercise. The Bullseye is a way of visualizing our values alignment across different life domains. This exercise comes from Acceptance and Commitment Therapy, an evidence-based treatment approach that we commonly use in our Primary Care Behavioral Health service in Family Medicine.

The Bullseye covers four life domains:

• Work/Education: e.g., pursuing meaningful projects, contributing to a field you care about
• Relationships: e.g., being fully present with loved ones, building trust
• Personal Growth/Health: e.g., honoring your body's needs, developing skills that matter to you
• Leisure/Recreation: e.g., protecting time for joy, creative expression

The Bullseye involves a two-step process:

Step 1: Identify Your Values

For each life domain, you'll identify what matters to you. This could be about what kind of person you want to be in each domain, or what personal qualities you want to show. If you get a stuck, a helpful prompt is "What would I want someone to say about me at my retirement party?"

Sometimes people confuse values and goals. Goals are tangible accomplishments that can be achieved, while values are broader life directions that we might try to move forward. For values, think cardinal direction, versus the destinations on a map that are goals.

Step 2: Rate Current Alignment

The second step is to rate your current alignment on each value you've identified on the Bullseye. The closer to the bullseye, the more aligned you are with the value, while being further from the center shows less alignment.

This gives us an immediate visual reference on the gaps between our values and our current behavior.

From Awareness to Action

Once you try the Bullseye, you'll likely notice gaps in multiple domains. Resist the urge to fix everything at once; that path leads to more overwhelm, not less.

Pick one domain where your mark is far away from the center of the bullseye. Think about one small action you can take in the next week that would move your mark closer towards the center. For example, to take action on a leisure/recreation value of "flexing my creative muscle more often," one might set their first goal as "visiting the library to learn about class offerings." That by itself might not move the mark all the way to the bullseye, but it is a step in the right direction.

Small actions to build alignment that are consistent are better than attempts at dramatic overhaul. Consistent action builds self-efficacy and can create a positive feedback loop that makes future values-aligning actions even more likely.

The Role of Primary Care Behavioral Health

This approach to values clarification is a key strategy we use in our Primary Care Behavioral Health service at UVA Family Medicine. In our service, we embed clinicians with behavioral health expertise in the primary care clinic.

Because stress often shows up as physical symptoms—headaches, sleep disruption, digestive issues—our integrated model helps catch values misalignment before it becomes a health crisis.

This approach makes us more effective in helping patients engage in stress awareness, prevention, and treatment for several reasons:

• Primary care's focus on continuity in care relationships means we see patients during important life transitions.
• Embedding within the primary care team reduces the stigma barrier that can interfere with referring to external behavioral health providers.
• Collaborating with medical providers helps us make connections between patients' physical symptoms and their stress/values misalignment.

Closing

While we can't avoid experiencing stress at some point in our lives, values provide a crucial source of navigation when we are stressed. We can prevent some of that stress impact by clarifying our values, and it's something you can try today https://academicsupport.uw.edu/site/assets/files/2367/values_exercise_bulls_eye.pdf.

Align your internal values GPS and you’ll be able to move through life more confidently in your direction.