stress

I’ve been noticing something interesting lately. I’ve been starting out my days on a high vibration, fiercely grateful, mindfully approaching every task with presence, joy… All ooey-gooey and overflowing with love. And I move through my day, completing tasks. Or not. Bouncing around from one priority to another. One diversion to another.

And then, at some point, BAM. I crash. I don’t just crash. I plummet. My mood shifts dramatically. I go from “joyous bearer of light” to “bitch on wheels”. Just like that. Or so it seems.

I look at my sweet Facebook posts from the morning and roll my eyes at myself. I think bad thoughts. I make careless mistakes. I’m stressed and tired and off-kilter.

All that overflowing, ooey-gooey love has coagulated and turned into something much less appetizing, viscous and dry. I am hard and closed and cranky. I dislike. I complain. I judge. I worry. I feel overwhelmed and feral. Not fit for human interaction.

What is this shift? Why does it happen? So suddenly it seems, yet maybe if I look closely, not so sudden at all.

For a while I thought it was a sugar crash. Or a hormonal imbalance. Or demon possession.  But today, I’m realizing it’s something way more subtle and insidious. And really, quite simple…

I haven’t checked in with myself.

All tangled up in the doing, going, creating, replying, forwarding, posting, planning, I’ve wandered away from myself.

It makes perfect sense. I start my day with ritual. I make my coffee. I light candles. I journal. I read. I pray. It’s no wonder I’m full of love and light!

And then, little by little, I disconnect from myself, from Source. I forget to check in. I ignore the desire to stretch. I hold my pee for ridiculous lengths of time.

I’ve decided here and now to take up a new daily practice. A simple practice called stopping. Remember lunch hours? I used to have them in corporate America. I kinda miss those.

I will check in. Ask myself what I want, feel and need. I will tune in, jump off the grid for a few minutes. Refuel.  Start my midday the way I start my morning. Wow. What a concept. And why not?  I heard a woman say to another woman who was complaining about her back-breaking busy schedule… “Wow… Who on earth is responsible for treating you that way? Who’s the tyrant that manages your schedule?” Yes, it was sarcastic. In a loving sort of way.

“You get out of balance because you aren’t listening to your inner life, because you aren’t meeting your challenges of your life with any input from the inside. you haven’t given yourself enough time
to know what you think or feel.”
– Jennifer Louden, “Comfort Secrets for Busy Women”

I’m ready to try something new. To restore my balance midday in order to experience more joy.  And this epiphany I am gifted with when I stop to check in with myself.

What shifts or changes are you ready to make? What truth is waiting for you, if you simply check in with yourself?

What if during your next mood swing, you took it as a message from your soul to check in with yourself, to step aside, stop, recalibrate, reset, turn inward?

I’m off to restore and renew now… See you on the other side of my day. Most likely, in a much better mood.

 

 

My name is Lisa and I am a recovering adrenaline junkie. I have spent a lifetime, decades, in a rush toward the ever-changing finish line, overloading, overextending, overwhelmed. That’s just the way I did life. I think I even made myself slightly late to everything so that I could get that rush, that rush that came from rushing.

When my daughter was a little kid, watching everything I modeled, as kids unfortunately do, she was playing pretend with an old day planner I had given her. She sat at her “desk” filling in each date with pretend obligations, at one point saying something like “I still have to fill up all the empty ones…” Damn.

Yep. By the age of seven she had learned that a loaded calendar was somehow desirable, that it proved something, but what? That was a question I asked myself for years.

I had reoccurring dreams of being at a buffet and loading my plate up so much that food was falling off the sides, and then, I’d see the real buffet, the one I really wanted, but it was too late. Because buffet managers hate it when you waste. (True story: I once saw an owner loudly bitch out a mortified customer… “This is all you can eat, not all you can waste!”)

This was my normal: being completely stretched thin, tapped out, running late, rushing everywhere, overbooked, overextended, harried, frenzied, surviving on adrenaline.

Everything suffered, especially the things that mattered most, like relationships, health and sanity, yet I was too caught up in my busy-ness to notice. My busy-ness had become an addiction. A disease.

Getting out of this cycle took a good couple of years, a commitment to a different way of living, a reevaluation (or two, or twenty) of who I really was, what I really wanted, and what I was willing to let go of to get there.

It wasn’t about doing more, I finally realized. It was about letting go.

I’ve made a lot of changes in 2015. One of the biggest ones was shifting my business around dramatically, and basically handing over my largest piece of business to a new director to open up energetic space and lots and lots of time. I’ve also changed the way I eat. The way I start my day. The way I end it. I’ve changed the amount of commitments I put on my calendar. I now pay for a couple new services and tools to make my admin tasks and household chores easier, money very, very well spent. And I have a puppy, who (mostly) brings more sweetness into my days with lots of spontaneous cuddle breaks.

If I were to count, there have probably been 100 choices or more I have made this year so that I could love my life better, feel better, do better, be better.

And surprisingly to me, the stress dissolved.

I no longer live with stress and overwhelm as my baseline.

I no longer measure my worth by the amount of to-dos on my list or unopened emails in my inbox.

My new baseline is calm. Relaxed.

And dare I say it? Easy.

I didn’t even realize this shift until I felt stressed recently and realized what a “foreign” feeling it was. It was appropriate stress, not just my normal day to day adrenaline fix. And it felt weird. So much so, that I stopped, looked at my life and realized all of the changes I have made recently have cumulatively eliminated stress from my life.

Of course life will throw its curve balls. I’m no dummy. Things speed up, they slow down. Life gets crazy, I know this. And I’m ready for that when it happens. But I know that in my day-to-day existence, I am no longer committed to stress and overwhelm as normal ways of being. In fact, I’m even getting stubborn and refusing to let myself feel the anxious, overwhelmed, heart-pounding, adrenalin-pumping feeling that used to be my normal. I just can’t live like that anymore. Well, I “could”. But I choose not to.

You can have this too. No, really.

There are countless reasons why this is important to shift. Stress kills, how about that as reason enough?

If you’re ready to shift into a virtually stress-free life, it’s important to get really honest with yourself about what changes need to be made.

Here are some questions to get you started…

• What in my current life used to bring me joy, but no longer does?
• Who are the people in my life who add stress and overwhelm and what can I request of them to help make a shift?
• What time consumers take more than they add to my life?
• What is stress and overwhelm costing me?
• What do I love to do that I’m not doing?
• Where am I saying yes when I secretly wish I was saying no?
• What commitments do I have that do not come from my heart?
• What can I delegate?
• What can I let go of that will instantly lower my stress levels?
• What secret pay-offs am I getting from living in a constant state of overwhelm?
• What inner stuff do I get to avoid by being constantly stressed or overwhelmed?

Yeah, I saved the hardest two for the end.

If you’re committed to creating a stress-free life in 2016, I applaud you. I salute you. support you. And I’m waiting, with open arms, for your arrival. It is possible. I’m living proof. Yep, me, the retired Queen of Overwhelm. Who’d a thunk it?

 

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Making the changes required for reducing stress in your life can be daunting. I can help. How about a complimentary Discovery Session?