30 Days of Boundaries Day 25: Stress Management
Photo by Nik Shuliahin on Unsplash
If you follow me here or on Twitter you'll realize that I talk a lot about stress, boundaries and burnout. Because they happened to me and created my "Year of Worst Case Scenarios" and I've rebounded from all of those losses and now live a life that I want to live. I'm doing the things that I want to do, spending time where I want to spend time, and working on the things that I want to work on, that I find important. You too can also get that way but you need to know where you're at, you need to find out where you stand on things and there's a lot of self-discovery and sometimes that can be quite traumatic for people.
For stress management, it's crucial for you to figure out what's causing you stress. You may not know, you just may feel burned out and stressed and you have no idea what it's cause is. What are your stresses? If you don't know, send me a message and we can work together to figure out what's causing you grief and we can narrow down what we can do.
I want to focus on the topic of mindfulness. Before we get all zen-like and I'm not going to tell you to go to yoga class or follow up a new religion that is different than the religion you follow, that's not where I'm going. It's a way to be more aware of your surroundings, both externally and internally. There are tons of apps that can help you do this. I'm a big fan of Calm. I'm have no affiliation, it's for free. Of course there's in app purchases through the app that can help you with specific needs.
One of the things I saw in an article is to name your stress. Now this is crazy, maybe that's not the right word to use here, but I've named my stress Bob. If your name is Bob, I don't have a problem with you, I know many Bobs and Bobbys and Roberts and Robs, nothing against any of those guys, I can't think of any Bob, quite frankly, that would really be the cause of my stress, but it's just a name that came up. Why? The movie Office Space. If you haven't seen it, go watch it. The Bobs. I'll leave it at that.
On my wall, in my office, I have a portrait of Peter Gibbons from that movie, Office Space. He was able to channel his inner zen and it changed everything for him. There's a lot of lessons in that movie and tons of laughs if you've ever worked in an office. I highly recommend it, it's one of my favorite movies of all time.
Getting back to stress management, you want to manage your stress. There's articles upon articles of what stress can do to your health. It can kill you, it nearly killed me. Thankfully I am here. It's important for you to figure out what you need to do to manage your stress and the key thing is to identify that you are stressed and come up with some ways to relieve the tension.
The takeaways from this: figure out your stress, give it a name, it doesn't have to be a person's name, it could be Pottery Plant or Candle or Twig, I don't care, whatever you want to name it, whatever connects to you, feel what you need to feel. Once you figure that out, then we can start working a little bit deeper into how to better manage it. Identify it. Can you eliminate stress? You can reduce stress and there's certain stressors in your life that, yes, you can eliminate based by changing the conditions that create it. Not saying you're going to live a stress free life, not possible, but the idea is how to deal with it and how to address it and how to work within it to get through it.
Think about what types of stress you're feeling. If you need help go to fill out the contact information on the front page and I'll be more than happy to walk you through.
Cheers.