Stress

Stress.

It makes you do the strangest things.

When I'm stressed some of my least favorable personal traits appear.

For some reason I often stress, doing things quickly, so that I have time to relax.  Like doing the dishes, or fixing my so called dinner. So that I can sit on my couch and watch one of my many TV series, while eating. But I hardly ever sit there until I have actually finished chewing, I always take the last bite on the go. Because I can't stand having an empty plate infront of me. This is something I do even when I'm not stressed. When stressed I also have to do the dishes right away, then I can sit down and relax. Until there's something new I have to get, organize or rearrange...  My inner perfectionist becomes a monster that makes it virtually impossible for me to relax. 

I can get very stressed if I know that I won't have "enough" time on the couch before going to bed. I need plenty of time to unwind from my busy job. Constantly being surrounded by people who want my attention,  and all the incessant noice that comes with being surrounded by teenagers. 

Sleeping gets hard because thoughts are flashing through my mind. I'm very bad at turning them off. I easily obsess over something I've said or haven't said. I have this obsession with telling the truth and if I for some reason don't, lie by omission, which are both very rare, or just forget to say something I feel like I should have, my conscience can prevent me from sleeping for days. I need to get my thoughts out into the éther or I can't let them go. 

When I was writing my Masters, and probably sometimes while being swamped at work, I woke up in the middle of the night because I had ideas that needed to be written down. I couldn't go back to sleep before I had. A friend of mine used to sleep with a notepad in her bed. For the longest time I had my phone by the bed, but it has since been banished from my bedroom.  

It is interesting how much stress can affect us physically as well as mentally. Through the years it's messed up my jaws, my teeth have crumbled under the pressure of me pressing my jaws together. It's messed up my back, given me headaches, and it sure doesn't help my Crohns either. It's given me anxiety, breathing problems due to the anxiety, and of course prevented me from sleeping.

Stress also makes things seem so much bigger and more time consuming than they are. Hindsight is a bitch, but had I only started my break by doing my homework it wouldn't have hung over me, tighten a grip around my chest, making it impossible for me to relax. It took me half a day to do most of it, and now it's over. Now I can more or less drop it and don't have to fret about it anymore.  But then again what I needed was to realax and unwind,  not work more... It's a catch 22. But then seriously, what would happen if I didn't do my homework? I am doing this for me, because I want to, not because I need another grade or another degree, I already have a double Masters... I do it because I love the feeling of using my brain in a different way than usual, being challenged, discussing texts, having to write them. The same goes for my Yin yoga teacher courses, which I probably shouldn't have done at the same time... I'm not doing it because I need another yoga teacher degree, I'm doing it because I wanted to reconnect with myself and a different more tranquil form of yoga. A type of yoga that is more focused on meditation, letting go, being in the present and not focusing on preformance, which is hard sometimes for an overachiever like me. Letting go and being in the present is sometimes the hardest thing there is. So I don't really need to do the homework. Because I don't need the degree. I need to reconnect.

In this age, when everything is at our doorstep, all we need to do is grab it, we suffer from FOMO, because YOLO... There's so much out there that I want to do and I only have this one life to do it in. So many places I want to see, so many people I want to meet and I need to be challenged. But all of these tremendously amazing experiences adds to the stress. If you have too much to do it doesn't always matter if it's something you love doing or not, sometimes too much is just too much. Strangely enough you can actually have too much fun. This constant feeling of always having to plan a new trip, is the same. It's amazing and I love it, but it does add to the feeling of having to do everything in this very short life of mine. 

So what is my problem? 

Well it's just that, living in the present, not always thinking 10 steps ahead.  I suck at it. "If I do this then I can relax", "only after I've done that am I allowed to really truly unwind".. 

Maybe it's the perfectionist in me, or the feeling of being rewarded with TV. My cigarettes are long gone, but they have been replaced with an obsessive consumption of TV series..  

Instead of seeing the ultimate form of relaxation as sitting on my couch turning off the problems of the world, while being fed with, many times,  senseless, although entertaining, crap I would like to be mindful enough to see the organizing of my basement as the catharsis it is, while doing it. Not just something that has to be done before I can go and relax infront of the TV. 

Today I watched the morning news, but then my TV has been off all day. Instead I've read 6 texts for school and written a first draft of my own, then finally finished my dad's book.  It's been very nice and quiet. I need to do this more often.

This too shall pass, but I do hope that one day I will be able to better resist or deal with the stress when it comes. I'm so much better today than I was ten years ago. I guess it's part of life. We learn from all our mistakes and sometimes we are fortunate enough to listen to ourselves and are able to prevent the stress from ever entering our consciousness. With all the yoga, meditation, tai chi, qigon, working out that I've done and through all of my experiences I have gotten better at handling it, but it would be nice with a life completely stressfree. A life where I'm able to put all of my knowledge to practice…