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July 3, 2007, Stress

A couple of years ago my family, at that time scattered across Canada, all met in Montego Bay, Jamaica for a family vacation. I had the time of my life, as it was the first time, in my adult life, that I took a vacation that wasn't visiting friends or relatives and was just about taking time to relax.

When it was time to leave and head back, I was living in Toronto at the time, I started to cry and couldn't stop. I didn't want to go back home. Thankfully I had a few hours on the plane to figure out what was going on with me.

Stress! I had just had a whole week without stress and I didn't want to go back to the stress. Up until that time I didn't even realize that I felt stressed in my daily life. I took some time and thought about how much of the stress I felt was self-imposed. The answer was frankly a lot. At that time I did my best to take some of the stress I imposed on myself out of my life.

Fast-forward to the past four weeks and moving. Stress has been my buzz-word for the past month. Again it's mostly been self-imposed. You see I make the rules in my life. It was me that made a list of things that had to be done and put a time limit on it that was almost impossible to meet. It was also me, who knows I am prone to procrastination, that didn't take that into consideration and got further stressed out when I did procrastinate. It was also me, who needs play time, that didn't schedule any in and then felt resentful that all I had been doing was working.

The funny thing is that most of the stress could have been avoided had I been honest with myself about my needs and taken them into consideration when I planned the move out. For that matter, when I saw things weren't working for me I could have stopped right there and been gentle on myself rather than telling myself that I needed to be very disciplined. The bottom line is that moving could have been a joyful experience, rather than the overly stressful experience I allowed it to be.

Do you create some of the stress in your life? If so, how would your life look if you took those factors out? In order to remove the stress factors you impose upon yourself you need to know what your needs are and then you need to be really honest with yourself.

If there is an area in your life causing you extreme stress then take a look at it and see if you are adding to it by imposing thoughts, attitudes, beliefs and/or rules that are counter productive.

Sometimes the hardest part is admitting that we're not Superman/Superwoman. The good news is that we still get to wear a colored cape and pretend cleaning the closet is fighting crime if we want to!

Tally-ho kiddies this is Wonder Vicki over and out for the week.



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