I’m Not Feeling at all Flustered and Stressed – You’re Stressed!
Yeah, that’s a lie. I’m feeling flustered and stressed. But what comes next is on me.
Let’s talk about the great big elephant in the room. Feeling stressed.
Virtually everyone deals with stress from time to time. Deadlines, pressures to do things from within and without, expectations, and many other things can be stressors in our lives.
Even when you seek to carve your own path in life – it is not stress-free.
I don’t care who they are – nobody lives a completely stress-free life. Mostly stress-free, being less-stressed, and rare bouts with stressors I believe in. But stress-free? Not possible.
In many instances, we are told stress is good. And it can be. A little pressure can be the driving force for getting shit done. That pressure can be a kick-in-the-ass to make you move.
Whatever it looks like, good or bad – stress should not be ignored, denied, avoided, or otherwise dismissed. Because all of these do nothing but push stressors into the background – where they can be fed quietly and grow deep, deep roots.
Denying being stressed or displacing the stressors doesn’t address them. And if we don’t address the stress, we don’t work with, deal with, alleviate, or make use of it.
The first step is recognition and acknowledgment
It’s all too easy to pretend. I’m not feeling flustered and stressed – you’re flustered and stressed! Projection might seem funny – but the truth is that it is just as impotent as throwing around blame.
Like most things we experience in life – accountability is a key to working with them. Recognizing and acknowledging your life experiences – in the ways that they belong to you – is how you can work with them, alter them, change them, or whatnot.
If I don’t recognize or acknowledge what is stressing me out – I can’t work with it. That’s part of why it’s an elephant in the room – hard to ignore a giant like that right there in front of you.
It won’t go away if I turn away from it, close my eyes and pretend it’s not there. But if I recognize and acknowledge it – now I can lead it out of the damned room.
Displacing your stress, blaming others for it, and ignoring it leaves it right where it is – and doesn’t address it to get it out of there. Or work with beneficial elements of it that can help you choose your paths and work on directing life how you desire for it to go.
What is it I’m currently stressed over?
There are a couple of different things. And please note – I am NOT complaining here. Just recognizing and acknowledging what is stressing me.
- My wife’s wellbeing. She’s having some pain issues that I can do nothing about – and I am stressed on her behalf. I’m doing all I can to help how I can – but my concern for her is stressful.
- The part-time jobs. I love my freelance gigs. While both have some set meetings and needful times, both tend to pop up with urgencies that I desire to do my best to work with. But that can be stressful
- My writing career. I am behind on where I desired to be with my latest fiction work. Part of that is time-management working with the aforementioned jobs.
- Family. I love my family – but for multiple reasons, some of them have me feeling stressed. It is unnecessary to get into the details here – but I must acknowledge it.
These are my current many stressors. And I feel flustered because for the most part – what I can do is limited. Can’t make my wife’s pain go away, I can’t make my family do anything, and I am doing what I can regarding my jobs and career.
The stressors above are part of the cause – but what about the effect?
Recognizing and acknowledging the cause AND the effect
Why does recognizing and acknowledging the above matter? Because of the ways that they are impacting my life.
How?
- I am stress-eating. Food has always been a source of comfort. I get stressed – I make poor diet choices. Then that stresses me more – because I am not moving forward in my quest to get into better shape.
- Insufficient exercise. I went from walking at least twice a day to just getting on the exercise bike once a day and fencing once or twice a week. Winter could take some of the blame – but it’s really what I do and don’t choose.
- Not meditating. I know how good I feel after I meditate. Yet I am allowing my meditation practice to be disregarded for any number of reasons. It’s a good habit that had a net-positive impact I need to reclaim.
- I’m not journaling. Starting to journal daily has been cathartic. Like meditation, it’s not getting the attention it should.
- Insufficient fiction writing. This is the product of some less-than-stellar time management on my part. And it’s also a source of stress – as above. But writing fiction has always been a positive outlet – so getting back to it would be beneficial.
These are the elements of my life being impacted by me being flustered and stressed. If I didn’t recognize and acknowledge the cause and effect – I’d be allowing my self to be victimized by the stressors.
That, in turn, makes dealing with them unnecessarily complicated and difficult.
How do I deal with being flustered and stressed?
I know the cause and the effect. That knowledge tells me where I need to put focus.
To deal with this sense of being flustered and stressed, I need to be more mindful of how, what, where, and why I am in this moment. Here and now. And that is achieved via mindfulness.
Mindfulness is conscious awareness of my thoughts, feelings, actions, and intentions. That tells me the what and how of everything. From there, I can choose from several options.
I can ignore it and allow the overwhelm to unsettle me.
I can fight it and work on distractions and things that alleviate the stressors.
Or I can work with it/on it, and consciously, actively work on the above-mentioned effects of feeling flustered and stressed.
Thus, I can choose to be mindful about when, how, and what I eat. It’s up to me to get off my ass and exercise more. I am working on making the time to journal and meditate – and connecting them together for habit-building. Finally – I am striving to do even a slight amount of fiction writing every day to build up the mental, habitual muscle memory.
I recognize and acknowledge that, presently, I’m feeling flustered and stressed. But what comes next is on me. Knowing this – really knowing this – empowers me to actively choose what to do and where to go.
Do you recognize and acknowledge when you are feeling flustered and stressed?
This is the five-hundred and thirtieth exploration of my Pathwalking philosophy. These weekly essays are my ideas for – and experiences with – using mindfulness and positivity to walk along a chosen path of life to consciously create reality.
I share this journey as part of my desire to make a difference in this world and empower as many people as I can with conscious reality creation.
Thank you for joining me. Feel free to re-post and share this.
The first year of Pathwalking, including expanded ideas, is available here. Check out Amazon for my published fiction and nonfiction works.
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