Dealing With The Stress And Anxiety Of Life

It is very easy to get thrown off our routine or schedule.  Events occur that can derail us, increase our stress, and perhaps cause anxiety.  These events at times can cause us to fall out of our routines, lose motivation for training, and contribute to our eating habits going astray. 

With everything going on in the world right now, it seems like even more people than usual are struggling with maintaining their routines, maintaining their training, and perhaps forgetting to take that necessary time for themselves…even though life has allowed us to have so much more time for ourselves right now. 

I admit, I let my morning routine and midday routine get away from me for a couple days with everything going on.  Ok, I was taking advantage of my ability to sleep a little later, which then messed up my entire day.  So, back to waking up at 3AM and sticking with my morning routine. 

Talking with people and gaining an understanding to how they are holding up and what actions they are taking during these times brings to mind the idea of ‘React vs Respond.’  Whether you react or respond to any given situation will change not only what you do but also how you feel and think. 

I want to share with you an excerpt that comes to mind from my book, Own Your Day, Own your Life: 

“Mindset. Mindfulness. Awareness. All words that come to mind when I think about how someone goes through their day, how someone interacts with others, and how they interact with their world. These interactions can be very positive, or they can be very negative.  The difference can be based on how you are being in those situations, or the difference can be how you perceive the situation.  So many factors play into this. 

I like to use the words react and respond when talking about dealing with situations and people in our daily lives.  I use react as the instinctual things that happen in any given situation.  Many times, these reactions are negative: anger because of what someone did or said, raising your voice at someone due to their action (or maybe inaction), getting frustrated with someone not doing their job or holding up their end of an agreement.  The list could go on and on. 

Respond, on the other hand, is what YOU do.  This is you making a conscious decision on how you are acting or being in the situation.  This requires awareness, patience, mental processing.  This requires you to function on a higher level.  This requires practice and repetition. It is something that is difficult, but it gets easier and quicker with time.  It is something I continue to work on daily.” 

If you are someone who is dealing with anxiety, stress, lack of motivation, and feeling like everything is out of control, I don’t expect that to go away with the flip of a switch.  That is now how it works.  There are some things you can do, though, to begin to get that switch to flip – even if it is just a little bit. 

I invite you to find some time for yourself, away from the family, away from noise, away from distraction.  Take time to sit, be still, and just breathe.  Something as simple as that can begin to reset your system and take your body out of the stressed and tense state it is in and allow it to be more relaxed and allow you to feel calmer.  Even if it is just 5 minutes, it will help.  My guess is if you take an assessment of what your body is feeling before compared to after that time, you will notice a positive change. 

I also invite you to check out and take advantage of the guided meditations on The Mosaic Life Podcast.  The meditations have been really helpful for me and I think they will be for you as well.