Scheduling my stress

There are plenty of things in life to stress about.  I won't list them all here, because that would just add more stress to see them all written down in one place.  This past month, I rediscovered one way for me to deal with that stress.  I say rediscovered, because this is something I use in personal finance instruction but forget to apply to the rest of my life. 

With 3 weeks left in tax season and a new baby, I was feeling more than a little bit overwhelmed.  Something had to give. There was no way I could get everything done.  I made a conscious decision to not exercise or worry about going to bed on time for those 3 weeks.  This was different than just not doing those things for 3 weeks.  If I had just not exercised, I would have felt guilty that I was supposed to be exercising and it was just one more thing I didn't have time to do.  I decided to just not stress about it.  I knew I would start up again after the deadline with exercising and trying to get to bed at a reasonable hour, but I wouldn't schedule to do it until then.  It was such a stress relief to not even worry about exercising when I woke up tired in the morning. For a lot of people, I know that probably seems like a basic principle, but for me it was kind of eye opening. 

In advising people in their personal finances, I will talk to people about setting up a debt reduction plan.  This involves putting a schedule in place to pay off debts one at a time.  It's a long road to pay off those debts sometimes, but if you're following a plan, you don't worry as much about the large sum and how it should be paid off today.  Instead, you know you're dealing with it and you have a schedule in place for when it will eventually happen. You can deal  with making this month's payments, rather than the full payoff. The same thing can apply to other personal stresses.

My husband is much better at scheduling his stress than I am.  I create task lists that show everything I need to get done for work.  Sometimes I look at that list and wonder how in the world I'll get all of those items done in the day.  My husband will instead schedule specific tasks to get done each day. He won't stress about the other tasks, because he knows he's scheduled them to get done on a different day. Let's hope I can keep relearning this principle and scheduling which things I will stress about on a given day instead of letting myself get overwhelmed with trying to accomplish everything all at once.