If anything is ubiquitous in the American lifestyle, it’s stress. We have work, school, and social life to juggle. Ironically, it seems like it’s the social life that takes the most out of you when you try to have fun after a long day at work. But you’ve got to have that social life, and you’ve got to have time to do nothing.
We live in a deadline driven society. There are projects and more projects and they all have to get done before it’s too late. The pressure can get pretty intense and sometimes it feels like you’re up against the wall. You can’t go any farther on the writing project but you feel too zonked to even switch gears and do some research on the other project.
When my brain is totally fried, I find the best thing is to dump everything out of my mind and walk away for a few minutes. If I spend 10-15 minutes just reading the newspaper or something else I’m not required to do, it refreshes me and leaves me ready to get back to work a little later.
Calling it quits at the end of the day is an extension of the same theory. Like a lot of people these days, I could work on long into the night if I let myself. There are always things to do, but sometimes it is actually less productive to try to slave on than to stop and unplug for a while. The concept’s not that hard to understand, but how do you stop when all the deadlines are piling up in the back of your mind?
Tiffany at Personal PR is trying a stress-fast. The idea is that you just refuse to let yourself be stressed by anything. Sometimes we treat stress as if it’s inescapable. I think it’s important to note that it’s not such an irresistible force as we like to think. It is possible to dismiss stress from your mind. Maybe this little trick is just what we need to help us make some time to wind-down every night.
How do you tell stress to buzz off? Let’s hear in the comments.
March 28, 2008 at 4:26 pm
I’m curious how everyone else will respond to this idea. I have to confess, it’s very, very tempting at times to indulge in stress and let it overtake me. It seems like I almost battle with my own sense of entitlement over being stressed. Like, it’s my life, I’ll be stressed if I want to! Glare at people who are jerks in traffic! Complain about my computer crashing all day at work! Stress!
Actively trying to dispell that myth of needing stress within my life has proven to be one of the most challenge things I’ve done, but it’s really rewarding. I’m hoping to turn it into a long-term commitment.
March 28, 2008 at 4:44 pm
Lol, I’ve never wanted stress. The problem for me is that I’m a bit of a perfectionist and driven to produce. So I spend too much time on projects or feel guilty that I’m not spending enough. I hate stress though, which is why I think your idea is such a good one.
March 31, 2008 at 8:44 pm
I tend to find stress helpful, it wipes out my distractions. It narrows my thinking down to the precise task in hand.
Admittedly i’m expecting grey hairs any day now.
March 31, 2008 at 9:58 pm
@Richard
The stress you’re thinking of must be a different kind than I’m thinking of.
While there’s nothing like a deadline to motivate you to get the job done, I still find stress problematic. Part of the reason for that is that stress is rarely limited to one particular task. Sometimes I have such a multitude of tasks and deadlines pressing that I feel less able to work on any one of them because I’m too stressed out about the quantity of things I have to get done.
So I guess the solution is to banish all unnecessary stress from your mind, and keep just enough in mind to get the most important job done.