Ever have one of those moments when the sky is collapsing on your head at the same time your cat, your dog, your boss, each of your friends, your family members, your banker, a lawyer or two, three doctors, and various functionaries of the police force would like your undivided attention? It’s been kind of like that around here. Every stupid little thing that needs to be tended to plus a number of irrational forces decided to come into play during the week Mrs. Micah and I chose to move my blog and all its bizarre code to a new server. Stress? Let me tell you about stress!
I’ve had all of two full nights’ sleep in something over ten days, and those have come about through liberal doses of Benadryl. Quit dropping a couple of antihistamines before bed-time, and the mental alarm clock goes off at 3:00 a.m. sharp. The internal stress alarm clock has taken to ringing so loud that often pills don’t shut it off. And I’ve now become so sensitized to stress that the most minor hassle has me vibrating like a gong.
Nevertheless, I cling to my theory that pills are not good for you, and that it’s gotta be possible to get a grip without drugging yourself. It worked before, and it’ll work again. So, today I made up my mind to pursue a few fairly simple strategies.
1. Focus on a single challenge or nagging job, deal with it, and get it out of your way.
Select one that’s large enough to make you feel you’ve accomplished something, but not so huge or impossible that you can’t deal with it in a week or so.
Larger bugabears should be broken down into parts, so that you can address them (to the extent possible) one step at a time. But there’s usually something pestering you that you can get out of the way fairly promptly.
My choice for this weekend is a vast article on the arcane doings of some fourteenth-century French aristocrats, replete with Middle French and medieval Latin: 108 pages of narrative and something over 230 footnotes, many of them archival references. Because I was working on another large, ditzy, and annoying project, I passed it for first edits to our research associate, a young man with a Ph.D. in English who ought to be competent to handle the job. In the wee hours of Saturday morning, our assistant editor in charge of the journal in question sent it back to me, saying the guy had announced he wouldn’t do the job.
No joke! Quoth he:
I had planned on editing it tonight, but I wasn’t expecting it to be a monograph. It is not even double-spaced. The author set some customized line spacing in this text that looks more like one-and-a-half spacing. Given all the tiny footnotes, this thing is as long as a book.
I have to admit that I dread editing this thing. Would you take a look at it and tell me if it’s normal. I don’t want to be a whiner or slacker, but this thing looks like the copyeditor’s equivalent of water-boarding.
If I wasn’t already enjoying the 4:00 a.m. ambience, that did the job. So we agreed that I would edit the first 50 pages and then she (assistant editor) would pass it back to Our Intrepid Hero to read the remaining 57 pages, much of which consists of Latin that he needn’t look at.
A project like this entails a fair number of global search-&-replace operations, plus you have to pull out the graphics and tables, rewrite the tables so they’re not constructed with hard tabs and spaces, format them to accord with Chicago style, and prepare them for the compositor. Well, of course…since you do that at the start of the job, this will reduce our friend’s workload significantly. Assuming he survives the encounter he will have with me tomorrow morning.
At any rate: this was a big job. It wasn’t what I wanted to spend the weekend doing, but getting it off my desk makes me feel somewhat better. One headache out of the way = (1 zillion headaches – 1).
2. Try to engineer a break.
Leave the kiddies and the pets with a babysitter and go somewhere else. Ideally, give yourself a weekend (or more) away from the stressful situation. Go to a local hotel or B&B (leave the cell phones at home), go camping, go visit friends in some other town or state. Flee!
Luckily for me, I rarely go on vacation, and so vast numbers of use-it-or-lose-it hours have accrued to my credit. All told, by the end of the year, when I’m to be laid off, I’ll have 32.85 days that must be used or forfeited.
So, this afternoon I decided to give myself a little vacation from the salt mine. I have to go out to the office tomorrow, partly to throttle a certain research associate but also to wrap up a few other tasks. My associate editor can take over the job of riding herd on our crew for a week or two. I have a furlough day next Friday, and so with eight of those vacation days, I can engineer thirteen consecutive days away from the place, during which I intend never to check the e-mail or answer the phone.
This is big. Just staying away from the campus and filtering out everything that has to do with the various hassles and annoyances associated with the job will help a great deal.
3. Spend some time with friends who have nothing to do with the source of your stress.
Don’t discuss your problems with them. Have a good time.
Yesterday SDXB and I did exactly that, driving halfway—no, make that all the way across the Valley to their peaceful, lovely house beneath the White Tank Mountains, where we enjoyed good company, idle talk, and several restful hours. Good thing to do.
Go to church, volunteer, invite friends over, go to a movie with someone new: find ways to be around people who have something else to talk about but your troubles.
4. Exercise
Take the dog for a walk. If you don’t have a dog, go for a walk with a neighbor, a friend, or all by your self. Learn some basic yoga and do a half-hour yoga routine in the mornings and evenings. Join a gym, if you enjoy that sort of thing. Join a softball team. Play some tennis or golf. Run!
5. Get off the caffeine and the booze.
It’s amazing how much caffeine wires you up. We tend to be unaware of this until we shuck off the stuff and notice the difference in the way we feel. Review what you drink and eat (some chocolates contain caffeine), and change your habits to get rid of the sources of caffeine. This includes soft drinks and tea as well as coffee; decaf, BTW, is not completely free of caffeine. Substitute juices, uncaffeinated soft drinks (read the label!), water, herbal teas.
Kicking a caffeine habit can give you a roaring headache. Try to ease your way around this by switching from coffee and colas to tea for a few days, and then from tea to uncaffeinated drinks.
I find I sleep better after I’ve quit drinking my favorite potable, French-press espresso-roast coffee.
Alcohol has a kick-back effect that can keep you awake. Don’t have a nightcap or a glass of wine thinking it will help you sleep through the night! Because it’s a depressant, alcohol may make you feel like dozing off at first. But a few hours later—along about one or two in the morning—it’s likely to set off that old internal alarm clock. So when you’re feeling too stressed to sleep, get yourself off that stuff, too.
Do indulge yourself in something else: good food. Fix your favorite comfort food; prepare a fine meal; if you can afford it, go out to eat. The better you eat, the better you’ll feel.
There are many other strategies, of course, such as meditation, prayer, and mindful relaxation during panic attacks. If things are really complicated, it helps to brainstorm a list of everything that could possibly be bugging you, assess the results to decide which are important and which really are nothing to worry about, and then write up a strategy for dealing with each of the real issues in a meaningful way. One at a time.