Meet my stress

I could tell for the last week or so that I was really feeling a lot of stress. My body was letting me know in a couple of ways that it was not enjoying it.

Monday night I had a very strange dream though. And waking up I knew it was the result of stress. As I was telling a friend of mine about the dream and how I knew what had caused it, I ended up writing a 271 word run-on sentence about everything I’m stressing about right now. When I finished the sentence I almost started crying. Simply naming it all, putting words to it all, made it less scary, made it more manageable.

As I thought more about it, I realized that my stress right now could be classified in two different groups.

Meet Unknown and Anticipation.

And the more I looked at them, the more I realized I couldn’t do a thing about either one of them.

In the case of Unknown , all I can do is wait for questions to be answered. As soon as I have more information I can act. But right now, with the information I have currently, I can’t do anything. So I wait. And I try to stop worrying.

With Anticipation , I can prepare for what I know is coming, but I can’t solve the problem or cross it off my to-do list until the time is right. So I wait.

So rather than worrying and stressing, I should just stick with waiting. Waiting for questions to be answered. Waiting for information to come in. Waiting for the time to be right. Waiting.

But definitely not worrying (at least that’s what I’m trying to tell myself).