The month of STRESS!!

So the glorious British summer has well and truly arrived and although on one hand I don’t really want to dampen the holiday mood, I’m going to wander off the story line this month and talk about …

STRESS!

Stress, stress and guess what?

More STRESS!!!!

So it has been a crazy month to say the least! Over the past few weeks a lot has happened in our (normally very mundane) little lives. A incompatible mix of events to include, blue lights to A & E at 2am, weddings, funerals, surgery, more weddings, car crash, kids birthday parties (Oh… don’t get me started about these!) more escapee guinea pigs…(who have yet to be recaptured), and the MOST annoying new neighbour who has just moved in, in the shape of a bird that sits in the tree next to my bedroom window mimicking a squeaking gate from 4:00am onwards, aye and not to mention my end of year EXAMS!!!

Seriously, it’s as if someone made a pick’n’mix of life events and just fired the bag at us! Which brings me to my first question, did I cope?

Actually wait, so what exactly is coping? Like seriously!?

Well according to the good folk at Oxford dictionaries it is; “The ability of a person to deal effectively with something difficult.” But then who determines whether you’re being effective or not?

So I began to give this whole thing some serious thought and started trying to figure out where I was on the scale of things. I reckon our innate instinct to compare ourselves to people around us (something we do so much we don’t even know we are doing it) causes us to get it wrong time and time again and as it unfolded from my perspective, using this scoring system was literally the WORST idea ever!

The folk in my study group reek of genius, my daughter is best friends with the child of a full time super-mum and my own close friends are childless, glamorous serial holiday goers! If I was scoring 4/10 in any of these categories it was at a push.

So after getting quite annoyed with myself and then with our traditional measuring system I had a sort of light bulb moment…

Constantly judging ourselves against those around us, whose lives we really only see the surface of means we are never going to get an accurate measurement of how we are doing.

Yes I know, none of this is anything new but actually figuring out that it is a completely flawed system and therefore will NEVER be able to give you a true result is actually quite liberating.

To draw a comparison, you don’t rush off to diagnosing a patient based on nothing but their temperature; you do it with all things considered, using a huge range of information quite literally down to what they ate for breakfast. So with this in mind using this system to judge anything let alone ourselves is borderline insanity!

Now back to the matter of stress, people ask me all the time how do you cope with three kids and studying? And if I’m honest I never really know how to answer, partly because I’m not quite sure that I really do?  Yeah ok, during the year our life functions fairly ‘normally’ but in the past month for example, I really don’t think I qualify for the ‘Oxford dictionary definition’.

Basically whilst I studied frantically for my exams and as previously mentioned all hell was breaking loose, the house got messier, the washing backlog was beyond a joke, I took one of my kids to a birthday party a day early, forgot about another (party, not child , thank goodness!), booked flights to London for a wedding that was in Ireland (and we live in LONDON!).  Forgot to pay my credit card bill, oh and to top it off I totally forgot about Fathers Day….ahhhh!

Ok I know, that’s pretty useless BUT….

Had all of these things happened last year, I have no doubt I would have packed up all our stuff and been on the first boat back to Ireland.

So what’s changed?  Well from an obvious perspective absolutely nothing! The exams were only going to get harder, the kids are still kids and life goes on. However there was one massive difference… ‘Frame of mind’.

I had to make a conscious decision that from now on, if I was to make it through the next few years alive I was going to need to learn to take some things on the chin!

Now this all sounds straight forward, but let me tell you it is NOT!

‘Taking it on the chin’ is in no way something that comes naturally to me.

I am that person that freaks out if someone puts the forks in the tray that the spoons are in, and that has to have all the yogurts facing the same way in the fridge. I know its pretty bad right, but I have come to the conclusion it may be some sort of random coping mechanism, you might have a weeks work of work to get through in a day and your laptop has just had a hissy fit BUT hey!

At least all the tins of sweet corn are in an orderly fashion!

So whilst one wave came crashing in after another I had to force myself to remain unruffled and remember that the storm was eventually going to pass. I had to prioritize within an inch of my life to get through what actually really needed to be done and if at all it could wait it had to.

Prioritising  - now this is an interesting one, when we have to do this during our working day we are great at it, but ask us to start prioritising our personal lives and it’s a whole different ball game. Letting people down, saying no to spending time with friends or family and sacrificing a bit of time to yourself , so whilst none of these things are ever ideal, sometimes they really are necessary. We talk a lot about getting a work life balance and yes I guess this is something we can aspire to, but the reality is that often our lives have to go off balance and actually as far as I can see, if it’s only for a little while it is okay. I used to get more stressed thinking I had to somehow maintain this unattainable ‘balance’ than I did about the things I should actually have been stressing about, however what is important is the ability to re balance as soon as you can.

So on that note and after thankfully surviving the last chaotic month, still married and with all my children in one piece if you need me I can be found on the deck chair in the back garden with some cheap but tasty Prosecco.

Louise xx