Reality of Stress
It has never been a secret to myself that I am sensitive to the impacts that stress has on your body. When I am stressed my immune system plummets, I have difficulty sleeping and making time to relax, my appetite becomes inconsistent, my social life keels over and dies, and most recently I have noticed I have begun going grey at 25. Yay! So why do I let myself get so stressed? The simple answer is that I am just really awful at recognizing stress and really good at being hard on myself (particularly when it comes to school). As an online student I have to be extremely self-disciplined, but I think I have taken that to an all new level. It is true that I am my own worst critic. I’m down right mean.
Up until recently I guess I was in denial about stress. I figured hey, I am just not working hard enough! I gotta work harder! What an idiot... I couldn’t recognize that I was stressed because I was pushing myself TOO HARD. A few weeks ago I finally realized this, but I didn’t figure it out on my own. Previously I had been on my own during times of stress and allowed myself to push myself to extremes in order to excel in school and work, while neglecting my mental and physical well-being. For the first time I held a full-time job, attended school full-time online, raised a puppy and maintained a serious relationship simultaneously.
During my past quarter of classes, the stressed out, strung out version of me was fully exposed to my significant other. He stopped me from working on the paper I was writing, to point out that I needed to take a break. I recall staring at him in disbelief and trying to make an argument for why I needed to continue my work. To this he told me that I was being too hard on myself and that if I wouldn’t take a break for myself, would I take a break for him. Only then did I oblige his request. After walking away the source of my stress for thirty minutes I realized how absolutely stubborn I had been about the whole situation.
While I am still working on how best to manage my stress, I have made the first step: admitting I have a problem. I can’t really explain why I am so prone to pushing myself to the breaking point in work and school, maybe I am afraid of failure... but I don’t like being stressed! I think I will always be prone to pushing myself to succeed and neglecting my social life, it just can’t be helped, but I don’t think I need to punish my body and mind with stress.
So one of the things I am going to try in order to reduce my stress load, is write about everything that is on my mind (which is always a lot). My hope is that if I exorcise all the random thoughts taking up time and space in my mind, that I will be able to think clearer and have less stress when it comes to school and work. The second thing I have decided to try is treating my body a little better with meditation and exercise. I guess we will see how this goes.
