Unrushing

How do you manage stress?

The first is meditation. I sit down, close my eyes, and spend several minutes on a guided mediation. Just follow the guided words and not think about much.  Nobody told me the goal was to become a monk. 
The second is journaling. Putting a worry on paper does something strange to it. In my head, a problem is a looming storm cloud with a dramatic soundtrack. On the page, it’s just a sentence, and it often looks a bit embarrassed to be there. Half my entries start as a crisis and end as “anyway, should probably drink more water.” The pen is very good at shrinking things. 
The third is upbeat music. I don’t say this lightly: it is very hard to stay tense while something with a good beat is playing. Try to panic about a deadline while a song makes your shoulders bounce. You can’t. Your body refuses to commit to the bit. I’ve washed dishes like I was headlining a stadium, and the dishes have never once complained. 
The fourth is walking with my dogs, who are the best stress consultants I’ve ever worked with. Their entire philosophy is that the next smell is the most important thing in the world, and honestly, who am I to argue? They don’t check their email. They don’t rehearse conversations that will never happen. They just stop dead at a patch of grass like it’s a museum exhibit. Ten minutes of that and my problems have lost their urgency, even if the dogs have not lost theirs. 
And then there’s the fifth habit, the one that holds the others up: I really don’t stress before anything happens. I know, I know. It sounds like advice from someone who has never had a Sunday evening. But think about what pre-stress actually is. It’s paying full price, in advance, for something that may never be delivered. Most of the disasters I’ve braced for showed up as a mild inconvenience, or didn’t show up at all. So I’ve stopped pre-paying. If the thing arrives, I’ll deal with it then, with a fresh mind, a decent playlist, and probably a dog at my feet. 
Is it foolproof? No. Some days the sandwich wins. But on the whole, I’ve found that calm isn’t something you find at the end of a stressful day. It’s something you practice in small, slightly silly ways, one walk at a time. View all responsesI would love to tell you I have a complicated system for stress. A color-coded binder, maybe. A cold plunge and a 4:30am routine. Instead, I have five small habits that work together, and the fifth one is basically cheating.