How do you manage stress?
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To be completely honest, I am terrible at managing my stress. Stress often triggers a depressive episode within myself, which I am going through currently. My aunt just passed away a few days ago and I am functioning.
For me, it always feels like stress is actually one long train waiting for something to derail it. To give it the permission to pile up in one big, blazing heap. It often does in my life. I will painfully admit that I feel the weight of being late for an unimportant event the same way that I do with the possibility of losing everything. It’s a terrible, isolating feeling.
One of the few things that does bring me reprieve is how little I have control over most of these things, or how little they actually matter. At the end of the day, it’s either going to work out, or it won’t. I can do the best I can, but any worrying beyond that is pointless. My worrying and frustration isn’t going to help solve any of my problems. Do these feelings just magically disappear? Of course not. That’s not how that works. It does give me the opportunity to back up, take a deep breath, and actually assess what is going on.
I am fortunate enough to have a wonderful fiancée that I love spending time with. Being in her presence is one of the few things that give me a reprieve from my stress. Walking, bird-watching, wood carving, etc. also help bring relief, but I’m not actually managing stress. I’m just avoiding it with these activities.
Legitimately managing stress is a result of a two step process. The first is figuring out what the issue is that is actually stressing you out. The second is finding and enacting a solution. This can take a variety of different forms. For years I have felt an enormous amount of financial stress due to some terrible decisions that I made when I got my first real job. I racked up some pretty nasty credit card debt and got a loan to consolidate it. Then I racked up more debt and got another loan to consolidate that. Several cycles later, I found myself paying half of my paychecks each month to this debt cycle. The most recent loan that I had received was over 30% interest! Safe to say, the stress had been adding up.
This summer, I made the difficult decision to get a second job that I could directly use the income from to pay off my credit cards. After several months of hard work, I am back below 30% utilization and continuing to work down. I was also able to get my local credit union to take over my remaining loan balance at 9.75% interest. Safe to say, I got my breathing room back.
If I hadn’t taken that moment to actually assess my situation and figure out a path forward, I probably would be even worse off. The stress of working two jobs was a lot, but the freedom from the stress of my debt is so much sweeter.
All in all, you have to make an active decision to manage your stress instead of just suffering from it. Managing doesn’t mean watching from afar. It means to take control and steer in your desired direction. It’s not easy, but I never said that it was.
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