I was listening to a podcast earlier today about how to be “unstressed”. The general gist of it was that you are always going to have stress, so it’s not necessarily about eliminating stress from your life but that stress isn’t what happens to you; it’s how you handle what happens to you. 

I’ve had my own notion of that for many years–stress can be transformed to something positive through a change of perspective. How you handle things that happen to you can be greatly altered through your perception of it.

I am constantly aware of stress. For years I had let stress control many aspects of my life, my emotions, and my body. It’s scientific fact that certain forms of stress are very detrimental to health. At one point in time, I was one of those business owners who wore working long hours like some badge of honor. That’s not to mention other life’s stressors that were happening on top of it (including Mario’s alcoholism).

It absolutely did take its toll on me and my health was suffering. I struggled for awhile to try to find a balance without feeling like everything was falling apart. What was even worse was that my stress would stress Mario out too. Neither of us really knew what to do about it at points and it was a bumpy ride until I figured out that incorporating downtime daily was a requirement.

Something I still work with a lot however, is prioritizing. There is absolutely a psychological aspect to prioritizing. Checking off to-do’s, completing a task, accomplishing a goal comes with a little dopamine hit. Us humans like that. The problem is, hard work, motivation, and many other little variables come into play. When I’m more motivated, something is easier to do. When I perceive that something is hard work and will take a long time to accomplish, it’s harder to do. What I’ve often noticed happening with myself is that I’ll take the quick wins, the low hanging fruit–but it’s not often what I should be prioritizing.

There is also prioritizing work stuff versus personal stuff. I think it was Dolly Parton who said, “Don’t get so busy making a living that you forget to make a life”. It’s so true. And for me, striving for some sort of mythic 50/50 balance is a fool’s quest. Actually, striving for some specific percentage at all, at least for me, just doesn’t work. My compass is how I feel, and if I pay attention to it, it’s never really wrong.

I’ve also learned two big things about downtime: (1) you have to explore what that actually means to you and what is effective for you, and (2) even the smallest amounts of downtime can be helpful. I revisit this regularly and happen to be doing so again since I seem to be going through another period of time where I feel like I’m not prioritizing certain things properly and instead, procrastinating more.

One of my goals is to get to bed by 10:30pm, which also means getting off the computer and winding down well before that. It’s 11:36pm as I’m finishing writing this post. I have another goal to eat dinner by 6pm and ate dinner at 8:45pm today. Still one more goal is to be able to get my work done in the early part of the day, but I realize that between my work and how things may come up in my day, that might be difficult.

I just have to remember that things aren’t totally off the rails. I’m much better than what I once was when it comes to incorporating downtime and even realizing when I need more of it. So that in itself is an accomplishment. That’s what perspective has really taught me. Even though I’m not killing it when it comes to productivity lately, it’s something that I can acknowledge and work with, rather than getting worked up about.

Oh, and I also have the first little camping trip of the season coming up in two and half weeks, so having something like that to look forward to also helps!