Am I Stressed Out?

Let’s see:

I work full time, in fact I am looking for a new job, I am the president of my Toastmaster’s club, and I am attending school full time. Sadly, this was not enough for me so I enrolled in a class which also requires a good deal of physical training. This class also soon requires I come clean with my own inability to cope in a healthy way with a work issue. And, this week we are assigned to watch Stress: Portrait of aKiller and I got stressed watching it!

So, the short answer would be yes I am stressed out!

But let’s take another look. 

I chose all of these things and at different moments, each has brought me a sense of something to strive for, to shine in, and to step up to the plate and put my best foot forward.  Even though I am challenged by this balancing act and the demand to go inward to find my strength I know this cat-in-the-bag struggle is a gamble with rich rewards. So I keep working at it.

I am currently reading Resilience at Work: How to Succeed No Matter What Life Throws at You by Salvatore Maddi and Deborah Koshaba. I do not recommend it full flavor. While the book is rich with ideas it has proven burdensome to read (and I get funny looks on the metro). There is a mind numbing amount of repetition and pages and pages of questions. My advice: read a summary if you would like to learn the principles. 

The good thing is I have learned more about resiliency from this struggle with myself and find I apply it frequently throughout my day.  Right now I am overdoing it a bit, but until I feel confident in using the principles I will continue to practice, practice, practice. In the meantime I believe the better fortified my internal life is, the better I can handle external stressors. This has meant a lot of exhausting inner work for me. To actually sit down and list out all of my current stressors and go through the best and worst scenarios and laboriously identify solutions is not nearly as relieving as I thought it would be.  I guess if I wanted easy I would accept excuses.

Progress update: My last post was written thinking harsh thoughts about myself and where I am, progress-wise. One of the principles of developing resiliency is to broaden my perspective. After last week ended I realized I was beating myself up because I was exhausted from running. When I took a step back I realized that week the temperature ran above 60 percent humidity and in the upper 90’s. That is tough weather to run in.  I am trying to be gentler with myself—this is also helping me build my inner strength.

A great thing happened today. After an afternoon run I went to Whole Foods for a few items. The good news is as I winced and limped through the store my attention could not be held by the angel food cake, the bakery, or even those incredible vegan peanut butter cookies (if there are better vegan cookies out there PLEASE keep it to yourself!). Not only was it too much effort to limp over to them to browse, but I realized it is too much work to get the junk off my body. I was deeply satisfied by my dinner of salad and a sweet potato with coconut oil. 

The best thing I am incorporating into my life from all of this work is not that I need stress relief (come on, I laugh enough for that), but that stress does not have to affect me at all.