Saturday Musings - Dealing With Stress

Stress can be incredibley debilitating.

This past week has been pretty difficult for me. Business has been going incredibly well but a personal problem arose with an external social organisation that I needed to work through (not family or anything like that…they’re all awesome!).

Due to the emotions of the encounter with a number of individuals I found myself really stressed out and not getting to sleep until 4am each night for most of the week….which is a rare occurrence for me. I thought that I’d share with you how I dealt with the stress and what I did to get through to the other side of the problem.

The first night was a shocker. My mind seemed to swirl back and forth trying to wrestle with all the issues at hand. I found my brain replaying events on it's internal DVR over the previous 24 hours over and over again. Each time I would think of a witty riposte to a comment made and then the loop replayed again and again.

I must admit that I fell in the trap of PLOM’s disease. For those of you that don’t know, PLOMs is Poor Little Old Me…..it’s an absolutely pointless state of mind that doesn’t solve anything. If you stay in this mode of thinking then you’ll end up severely depressed (get some help if you are)….I made the decision that I wasn’t going to let that happen.

The second night was a lot more proactive as I did a brain dump of about six pages of notes about the situation. What I was trying to do was array the facts and leave the emotion out of things. This really helped calm the internal dialogue down and provided me with the necessary information for my mind to go searching for solutions.

Now that I had the facts, the third 4am night was all about piecing together why things got derailed and to gain an understanding of the circumstances. The facts allowed me to survey the issue from all sides rather than just my point of view. This was important as it was during this time that I had a bit of an epiphany that provided the key to unlocking a potential solution.

The next day I tested my solution with Roselyn and a couple of close friends….the logic all hung together and more than that the emotions on both sides of the personal conflict became more understandable. The old adage of “seek first to understand before being understood” is just so pertinent in these situations.

I think that too often we can fall into the trap of shooting from the hip prior to really thinking about what we are saying. The result is we may have won the argument but our relationships are shattered…so what’s the point?

Taking some time out has been really valuable to really begin to think. Thinking is so often an underrated behaviour compared to doing something. What’s the point in doing or saying something unless you’ve really thought about it?

So last night I put my head on the pillow and was instantly asleep. I understood the issues, had a course of action and had tested my hypothesis. There’s nothing like a good night’s sleep to transform your world into a better place.

You may be reading this and feeling a little lonely as you wrestle with your own situations. Despite everyone on Facebook telling you just how awesome their life is I can assure you that they’re all going through their own variation of something similar to yourself. I hope this very personal article has helped you in some small way in your own deliberations.

Have a great week!
Michael