Stress could have been a useful measure of the viability of my then-current behavioural practises, but rather than flowing with the pressure it applied to teach me what was working and what definitely wasn't, I simply resisted it and tried to force my way through, dragging others after me through the storm. It left me exhausted and in emotional ruin, and others too. I treated it like something temporary and situational, something borne of the context of my present that would disappear once I advanced further. Bear with it, and I would be free eventually. But because it was the result of my own behaviour, taking the best things in my world for granted while I struggled vainly in vanity, I think we can all safely say it would have followed me no matter where I ran to if I didn't recognise it and correct my behaviour.
It's not like there weren't excellent signs. I suppose the signs all seemed a little muted to me in my condition. They lacked the force and the clarity of consequence to guide my perspective in the situation. I didn't attend to them carefully as I should have, like driving down a road, following your own GPS and ignoring the road signs that suggest danger, a cliff ahead. I should have read those signs posted by others carefully. I shouldn't have underestimated their gravity because they weren't in extra bold font or in bright red octagons. Their magnitude was subtle but visible.
So, it was a year and a week ago today that I finally broke, when the consequences and untenability of my reactions became increasingly apparent and I could finally see and understand what was going on around me in terms of my long term responses to stress.
My solution to the stress in my life, that I called the Ottawa approach, came in several parts:
- Devise a clear list of priorities in my life, and don't let lower ones trump higher ones, this to cure indecision stress
- Allocate time every week to do nothing but reflect, and save my mind from being overwhelmed from constant stimulation.
- Realise that if two options are sufficiently comparable in quality that it is hard to decide between them, then it doesn't matter which I choose, as I cannot predict the future: flip a coin and happily follow whichever (even for major life decisions) (I no longer need to flip a coin). This helped me overcome my requirement for meaningful causality in.
- If an endeavour in life is resulting in unreasonable amounts of stress, scale it down. I want to have controlled ambitions that aren't self-destructive or harmful to others, so achieving an 80% in a course is preferable over a 90% if I'm happier under the 80%. This helps challenge perfectionist tendencies.
So hello June, once a month for untempered celebration and now a sombre reminder of what matters and lessons hard learned. Welcome back, I suppose. Let's have a kinder time of it this year, and ever more.
No comments:
Post a Comment