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“The greatest weapon we have against stress is our ability to choose one thought over another ” – William James
Do you believe we can truly choose one thought over another? On this Monday (almost Tuesday), I’m really not sure. Personally, I think it takes a lot of effort to control what you think, when.
Usually, I wouldn’t say I’m overly stressed. I love my highly active, highly energetic life – but others would say I am.
The truth is, I did spend the whole weekend working non-stop, putting the finishing touches on my new marketing and productivity course for English teachers that launched this morning.
Then, something happened as soon as I was about ready to upload today’s blog post after teaching tonight. An upstream server connected to my host was down, causing my site to go offline for a bit. Now that’s blogger stress.
In reality, it was about 35 minutes, 20 of which I actually noticed – but it felt like forever.
Eeeek. So I guess you can be stressed doing something you love, especially when some parts are out of your control.
Can Stress Be Good? Can We Measure Stress?
So, maybe it’s possible to be stressed without knowing it! As you may know, I recently purchased my Garmin Vivosport, which I absolutely love. It’s great for tracking sleep, workouts, activity levels and even syncs with My Fitness Pal for calorie tracking.
While it’s true that you can’t do everything, I always feel so motivated when I’m working on projects I love (like my course, or this blog) that I don’t think I’m stressed.
But…
What Does Garmin Say?
What Does Garmin Say?My beautiful Garmin watch begs to differ. In fact, while I can’t quite figure out how the “stress scores” work, it does seem to line up quite nicely with how I feel. When I feel more stressed overall, the ratings go up. DC Rainmaker, a blogger who has a comprehensive review on the Vivosport also finds it to be quite accurate.
Apparently, it uses technology from a company called Firstbeat, and your heart rate, to determine stress. It uses a scale of 1 to 100, which I suppose is basically a percentage. Mine was between 86 and 93 all day today. Despite my type of workout, hours of sleep, workload, or general to-do-list in a day, what scares me is that the daily stress summaries.
They only tell me one of two things:
It’s either “I’m going to exhaust myself” or “I haven’t had a single moment of relaxation time today and need to slow down and be careful”. Every. Single. Day.
So, despite all the medical tests telling me I’m super healthy, I wonder why the watch says what it does!
Stress Relief Strategies To Try 
I’ll be the first to admit that I am not the expert on this one. Here are a few suggestions people have given me, though I’m trying my best to implement them. I read an interesting article from Thought Catalog the other day that basically explained why having chocolate and hot baths once in a while just doesn’t cut it.
1. Exercise – Well, that’s no problem for me at all! I’m super active, love training and trying new sports (even though I’m terrible at them ;). While it is true that exercise burns off some of the stress temporarily, I’m starting to think it’s not a long-term solution on its own.
2. Sleep and Meditate – The former I’m doing my best on, but the latter? Have you meditated before? It’s actually one of the items that is on my long-term goals list to see if it works.
3. Breathing and Yoga – Now, I suppose they mean a calm sort of yoga, and not the intense Bikram Yoga I used to go to. I have a really tough time staying still. In fact, I once had to walk out of a 90 minute Yin Yoga class (half-way through), because I just couldn’t handle it!
I’ll be completely honest and tell you that my Garmin Vivosport stress readings scare the hell out of me, so I’m looking to make some changes.
What stress relief strategies work best for you? I’d love to hear from you in the comments! (This time, it’s not just because I’m curious – I’m collecting a bunch of strategies to try myself 😉
Have a lovely and productive Monday (and week)!
P.S. The photo for today’s post (and poster) is one I took in the mountains in Geneva at New Year’s last year.
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My thoughts….:
1) Exercise is great. At a certain point, though, exercise can become a stressor in itself. Struggling to fit in all of your training in a week, the schedule juggling, the rushing to and from? That’s stressFULL, not stress busting.
2) FYI – meditation is a long term commitment, and isn’t something you would evaluate after a few sessions. You can have what feels like a miserable meditation session (being distracted all the time) and still be successful. Why? Because you continually catch yourself and bring your attention back. That is the meditation. Don’t tell yourself the story that you can’t do it because you’re a high energy person.
3) I disagree that intense yoga can’t be relaxing. You are burning off a lot of energy and capitalize on the meditative aspect once you learn how to manage the small breaks and work with your mind in a more constructive and mindful way. The entire session can be meditative.
Perhaps you’re telling yourself a story about what stress is, and what you can and can’t do. For example, walking out of a 90 minute yin class. If you’re deep in a posture, it can be pretty damn tough not to let your mind race away. Managing that is tough. It has its own intensity that you can learn to appreciate if you shift your perspective. I feel like you may be telling yourself that it’s lazy unmotivating yoga. That’s not to say that you’re obligated to love it. Just check your expectations.
View CommentThanks for your thoughts, Sean! Here are my answers:
1) Actually, I don’t find that I “struggle” to schedule in workouts at all or rush to them. I love working out.If I’m exhausted and have to miss a cardio or strength session in my calendar, I simply do that and am honest about it. Both my trainers and I are okay with that flexibility, and reporting it to them keeps me accountable.
2) Yes, I understand meditation would be a long term commitment and I think it’d be a challenge, but I love challenges. So, I will add it to my goals list!
3) No, I don’t think relaxing yoga is lazy at all; it’s simply a flexibility and balance exercise (instead of strength, cardio or endurance), which I’d like to get better at. I wasn’t relaxed a single time in 5 years of doing 90 mins of Bikram every Sunday. I’m going to swap one of my optional workouts out for a slower yoga to see what effect that has on stress.
View CommentI was curious if you ever considered changing the page layout of
View Commentyour site? Its very well written; I love what youve got
to say. But maybe you could a little more in the way of content so people could
connect with it better. Youve got an awful lot of text for only having 1
or 2 images. Maybe you could space it out better?
Thanks for your feedback – I’ll take that into consideration. I’ll be posting more video-based content in blog posts in the near future. Thanks for reading!
View Comment