stress-21-day-challenge

Stress Challenge Day 2: Commit

by

Today’s chapter was an interesting one. Obviously committing to the challenge is a must, but this really opened my eyes to what would happen if I did or didn’t work my way through. When things get hard later down the track, or I’m completely uncomfortable with the challenges I face, through working through this chapter I can help keep things in perspective.

The chapter asked four important questions, which I’ve documented below. I expect that I’m going to be re-reading this post quite a few times during the course of the month.

But first, my summary:

Stress level (rating of 1-10; 10 being worst)? 6
Notes: I returned back to work today so I actually expected to be a lot higher. I made an effort to focus on listing out the things that were stressing me and that I needed to think about later, “parked it”, and got back to the business at hand. I don’t think that’s a long-term strategy, but it got me through today. I ended up canning my plans for the evening (a meetup group) so I could spend the night relaxing at home, focusing on getting in some good work/life balance habits. So even though my list of stresses has grown, I’ve made a concentrated effort to leave it at the door, go home on time, and chill out – all of that resulted in a maintained level of 6.

Now to get down to business with the questions for the day!

Read more

Stress Challenge Day 1: Finding your stress hotspots

by

I decided today that I’ll start all my posts in this challenge with a bit of a summary of how I’m feeling, with any key notes from the day on how I went trying to manage my stress. It will be interesting to see how my ability to manage my stress levels change as the month … Read more

21-Day Stress challenge: The background

by

I know I’ve been a bit AWOL from my blog recently, and there’s a reason for that.

I’ve just been through one of the most stressful periods of my life, and in a nutshell it has affected my health physically. I got to the point where one day I was sitting in my car and didn’t want to get out. I wanted to go home, climb into my bed and put the covers over my head. I forced myself out, and got on with things. The next day I struggled to get out of bed. The day after that, I called in sick.

I spent the entire day lifeless on the couch, and it wasn’t until I looked at my fiancé that it clicked in my head: there were other people in my life being affected. My stress pushing me to the point of feeling sick physically wasn’t the only issue, it was also bringing other people down. On top of that, if I ever wanted a family (which obviously brings a lot of challenges and stress with it) I had to sort it out. On the plus side, while it was a serious problem, it wasn’t severe. Yet. I had to fix it before it got any worse.

Read more