Stress

Yep, Everything is Fine

September 6, 2018 by Elizabeth Drake

Totally fine.

Remember that kitchen remodel I was dreading? Well, it didn’t happen. Why, you ask? Because the contractor never showed up, and he won’t return our calls or texts.

Yeah. I have an empty kitchen and a house full of materials for a remodel we now have to start over with finding a contractor to do.

Deep breath.

It means by the time they start, I won’t have a kitchen for Thanksgiving or Christmas. After waiting months for it to even start. With a torn apart kitchen in the meantime.

*Deep Breath*

I am struggling with this, especially with two small children. I’m having trouble sleeping, and my eating habits are not doing well. I’m also about to start busy season at work.

*Grabs paper bag* *breaths deeply*

Yeah, things are going fine. Perfectly fine.

I Made a Mistake.

August 28, 2018 by Elizabeth Drake

It’s called a kitchen remodel.

If I could go back to April and tell myself what I know now so I would avoid this additional stress. So I’d never start this project.

We hired a designer thinking that would help. And while it has, it’s still stressful. Very stressful.

First, our budget is completely blown. At this point, we are literally double what we’d planned. And construction hasn’t yet started. Yes, I did some research ahead of time. You know me. I even made a detailed list of what I thought needed doing and the cost of each. I thought I was estimating high. I was so wrong. So very wrong.

Second, they lost six of our cabinets. SIX. How do you lose six cabinets?!? It appears as if an entire pallet walked out of the warehouse. They are still searching for it. We’re considering putting up wanted ads.

Third, I was wrong about the start date. I thought we were setting it after the cabinets arrived… Which led to a frantic rush to get the rest of the materials purchased.

None of which are coming in on time.

Agggggh!

Why yes, I am a little stressed.

But I’m still writing.

5 Reasons Why Things Are Stressful and Crazy

July 31, 2018 by Elizabeth Drake

I am beside myself these days, and it’s killing my creativity. Here are five stressors I am trying to control.

Got My Edits Back

I am still new to working with freelance editors. I have in my mind what I think will happen, but so far, it has not been the case. I got the edits back on Seducing the Ice Queen. The editor made some good points, though I wish she would’ve also provided a path to fixing the issues she identified. Simply telling me something is broken is not the same as using experience to give me a nudge into what it would take to fix it. I could also tell she was not as experienced with the romance genre as I would have liked.

At first, the comments were crushing, and I put the novel away for a week. I’ve pondered them a bit more, thinking about some of the areas where she found issue. While I’m not going to change my purple prose, there are some things I can do to make the work better. I doubt I will use this editor again as I think finding a true romance editor would be the best way for me to learn and improve my writing.

2. Girls’ Rooms

They are done! I took us a while, especially the last little bits like getting black out blinds made and installed, but their rooms look terrific. Now, to keep them that way.

3. House Move

We had talked about moving to a larger home, then decided against it. Not only is a smaller mortgage and lower taxes a nice thing (our property taxes as a % of value of our home are some of the highest in the country), but we quickly discovered that finding a home in the school districts we wanted with trees and a bit of a yard was all but impossible. After seeing what was out there, and the price tags attached, we decided to stay in our current house.

4. Fitting Comfortably Into Our House

I know, right? Such troubles, but real enough for us. It’s amazing how much stuff you collect living in the same place for over a decade. Longest time I’ve lived in one place.

So once we decided to stay in our house, we committed to “fitting” into this house. We are going through closets, desks, dressers, the basement, etc. and attempting to do a hard purge. My question to myself and my spouse is, “Would we have paid to move it?”. If the answer is no, it goes in the Goodwill pile. We’ve been very good supporters of Goodwill these days.

5. Kitchen Remodel

*ducks*

Yes, you’d think the chaos of fixing up the girls’ rooms would’ve cured me, but I’ve hated out kitchen since we moved into the house. We did a partial remodel 12 years ago, and the company that did it did an awful job. So bad that tile flooring that should last 50 years is already pulling up. Yeah. Bad. That and our cabinets are vintage 1970s. They are not in great shape, and the blind corners make half of the cabinet space unusable. We’ve hired a designer who has put together a lovely plan. Now, we interview contractors… Wish me luck!!

5 Reasons Science Says We Should Consume Less News

April 19, 2018 by Elizabeth Drake

What Common Household Item is Killing Your Children? We’ll tell you, tonight at eight.

Except, if it really is killing my children, shouldn’t I get a news flash across my phone telling me what it is and how to get rid of it, much like an Amber Alert?

localnewsmeme — If they were honest, this would be the news in my area.

Here are six reasons why research says you should consider changing your news consumption habits.

1. News Outlets are Here to Make Money, Not Inform

With the wave of “fake” news lately, this hardly needs explanation. But we need to remember that news doesn’t usually cover what’s important anyway. They’re looking for the “human” element, the element that sucks you in and gets you to keep watching or clicking.

If it bleeds it leads.

If a building burns to the ground, what do you think the media is going to focus on? The building. The people in the building. Injuries. Fatalities. All of which is relatively inexpensive to produce. They don’t actually have to dig to get to the guts of the story. Do they ever tell you why the building burned? Changes to the fire code that should be enacted to save those lives?

No, because that doesn’t get clicks.

With this emphasis on the dramatic, we focus on the wrong things, and those things are then overblown in our minds. We all fear terrorism, but no one thinks too much about chronic stress. Total US deaths, worldwide, due to terrorism from 2004-2014 was 112. Think about that for a moment. 112 people in the Unites States died from terrorism over ten years. That’s 11.2 people, on average, per year.

How much news did it get?

But how many people die each year of heart attack? Stroke? Cancer? Yet, how much emphasis has any of this gotten?

Stress affects 143M Americans, and 81M are under extreme stress. The causal connection between chronic disease and stress is growing .

So why don’t we hear more about this? Reducing stress is something we might actually have control over, and it can have a direct impact on our lives. Imagine if reducing stress could reduce the number of people with heart disease or cancer by 10% or even 1%.

The news doesn’t cover this because it doesn’t get clicks.

News is a for-profit organization. They are not here to inform. They are here to make money.

2. Doesn’t Really Matter to You

How many news stories have you watched or read in the last year? The last month? What did you do because you read or watched it? What decision did it help you to make, particularly about anything of consequence? Did you become a better parent? A better spouse? Did you make a serious financial decision? Do something to improve your career?

I ask this is all seriousness. If it is meant to inform you, it should be doing so in a meaningful way. We’ve already established that it’s not really informing you. Rather, it’s telling you things to get you to tune in, and we should be challenging the value of tuning in.

I can honestly say consuming news did little to engender action from me. News stories didn’t even help me make a decision on the candidates I voted for. I got that from their stated positions on their websites.

3. Teaches You Not to Think Too Hard

This article really says it all. News programming is designed to make you think you’re seeing both sides of a story and getting the low-down, but you’re not. Most of what we get are news bites, little pieces of information meant to fit into an allotted amount of time. Deep, complex subjects require time to digest. Truly difficult concepts can’t be understood in the five minutes they get.

We’ve all heard “climate change”, but how many of us have actually taken the time to understand what it is and why it’s happening? What are the macro effects? What does it truly mean to the planet and to us? (Give you a hint, the planet doesn’t care. It’s already survived numerous mass extinctions.) What are we really sacrificing by not dealing with it, and what would it really take to reverse it?

You see this superficiality with a lot of “news” reports. They are interested in giving you bite-sized pieces, but nothing too meaty. They don’t make money informing, remember? They make money on you tuning in or clicking.

Yet, without this deeper level of understanding, you lose sight of the bigger picture. Events become singular and contained instead of part of the broader view. Hard to make truly informed decisions when you see a very small piece of the whole issue.

4. Seek Conforming Opinions

With the sheer volume of news out there, we no longer have to expose ourselves to ideas that don’t conform to ours. If we don’t want to believe in climate change, we can find plenty of articles denying it to fill our screen.

As Warren Buffet said, “What the human being is best at doing is interpreting all new information so that their prior conclusions remain intact.”

If this is true, then we’re really not seeking information or enlightenment. We simply want to be told that everyone already agrees with us. That we’re right. That’s called confirmation bias, and it’s very detrimental.

It means you never hear the other side, you never have the chance to understand their way of thinking. You can’t find a compromise because why would you compromise when “everyone agrees with you?”

But what if we’re wrong? Even Albert Einstein was wrong on occasion.

5. Induces Stress

News, particularly what’s splashed across our networks, triggers our fight or flight response. The same stories that get clicks activate this center.

When you hear about a family dying in a fire, you have a very different reaction than if you’re hearing about alternate routes to avoid a fire. That’s why so many of us felt panicked and twitchy after all of the 9/11 stories, particularly as we watched people, human beings, plummet from those upper stories.

That’s one image I will never, ever forget.

The “human” side of these stories releases glucocorticoid which has a whole slew of effects on your body. It’s the fight or flight response. And what does this constant fight or flight response bring? Remember that stress we were talking about and how we know it contributes to heart disease, stroke and cancer? Yeah, that.

It’s like being constantly told there’s a monster under your bed, and knowing there is nothing you can do about it.

6. Crushes Creativity

I’m not sure if news in general does this, or just bad news. I won’t say this is an unbiased or researched article, because I couldn’t find any with hard facts, but it states what I’ve seen myself.

The more news I consume, the less creative I am. Or, perhaps, the less time I have for creativity.

Not sure, but I do know that switching off the news, even for a week, made it much easier to focus on my novel. I felt more relaxed and able to bring more of myself to my writing.

Why?

Not sure, but I figure the reduced fight-or-flight response is part of it. As is not allowing the news to snatch at my already divided attention. Kids, spouse and day job already get most of it, I’m not letting things I can’t impact take more.

Of course, tuning out the world burning may not be ideal, but there is very little I, personally, can do for the issues of the day.

Yet, despite the science that says to ignore it, we keep coming back to the news. Makes me think they’re in the same camp as social media. They’ve figured out how our brains work and how to keep us coming back for more. How to suck our precious time from us for profit.

I am done.

I will continue to read the Economist, and I will never know what household item is slowly killing my children until they send me an Amber Alert to my phone.

How about you? Do you watch the news? Do you get anything out of it? Does it inform your decisions? Has it ever affected your sleep or given you nightmares?

Specter of Change Haunts Again

April 3, 2018 by Elizabeth Drake

Change is not something humans tend to love. I mean, Harvard can’t be wrong.

But more seriously, change is difficult. Change is stressful. There’s a reason why some of the most traumatic things in life involve change: death, new job, relocation, etc.

For those of you who have been following me for a while, you know I have two small children. For those who are new (hi! glad to see you!), I have two small children and a demanding day job.

For better or worse, I am the primary income in our house, and after trying being a stay-at-home dad during his paternity leave, my husband was so ready to go back to work. That meant we had to find quality childcare.

It’s insanely expensive (basically another mortgage payment per child you have in daycare), but we figured there is little more important to us than our kids, even our retirement, so we grumble and pay it. Yes, it’s meant having a smaller house and older cars, but it really didn’t feel like a choice.

We searched, found a really good daycare center, and our oldest child thrived there. She taught herself to read before she started 4K. She loved the other kids and the socialization. She loved showing off her skills and the praise it earned her. It made her work even harder. It was the perfect place for her.

But, the center had some turnover. Some of the teachers we loved have gone on to do other things. Our second child is not nearly as outgoing or self-motivated as her sister. Unless you give her a nudge, she’s happy playing by herself. She sort of cares if you’re happy with her, but she is much more concerned with pleasing herself.

Yes, the teenage years for both are going to be quite the challenge for us!

Thing is, my youngest wasn’t getting the nudge she needed (okay, full on shove sometimes).

I started doing a little bit of research back at Christmas to find a new center, but then some other things came up concerning her. While everything turned out okay, it convinced me this was not the right place for her.

I discussed what was happening this with a couple of people who have a master’s degrees in teaching, and they all made me feel much better about my decision to change day care centers. Still, it’s a big decision, even if I think it’s the right one.

Now, for the huge undertaking to find a place that will be a better fit for our little one!

How about you? Ever have to make a decision like this? Or something similar? How did you know you needed a change? How did you go about deciding how to make that change?

Understanding Stress

March 15, 2018 by Elizabeth Drake

I may have been in a bit of mood the other day when I wrote this post.

But, if I put away my skeptic, I can admit that I think it’s important to manage stress. But to manage it, I need to understand what stress is. And I do want to better deal with it, especially as stress kills creativity. Hard to write Romance with dead creativity.

So, I did some research.

In a nutshell, stress is a physical response. Your body thinks it’s under attack and goes into fight or flight mode. Your body releases a whole bunch of hormones preparing you for physical action.

Despite what we’ve been told, this isn’t necessarily a bad thing. During our hunter-gatherer days, this helped us escape from predators or defend ourselves and our tribes.

Where the issue comes is that our bodies haven’t adapted to modern life.

A boss with an impossible deadline triggers the same fight or flight mode as a lion trying to eat you. With a lion, we need the physical response to either flee or fight back. But this is not the best reaction in a modern environment. Here, we’d be better served if we our physical response was focused calm so we can at least try to make the deadline.

So, in addition to our evolutionary response not helping us in this situation, it also means we don’t have the opportunity to burn off those stress hormones. Not a lot of running while trying to piece together that report the boss wants. This is what causes the jittery feelings and racing heartbeat.

So, how do we deal with it?

The one thing that’s helped me the most is learning that the racing heartbeat and other aspects of stress are frequently caused by a physical hormonal response. These hormones need to be burned off, and I’ve started doing that by walking.

I try for at least a 30 minute walk at lunch, and this has helped tremendously. I burn off all my pent up stress hormones and come back to the afternoon more focused.

Sometimes, this isn’t enough, and I take a brisk walk through the halls. Other times, I’ll walk out to the lunchroom and back. Something, anything, to get me up, get me moving, and burn those stress hormones.

Now that I know stress is physiological in nature, it helps me deal with it.

My bigger issue is when I don’t have an outlet. While we are now in daylight savings time again, it’s dark when I get up in the morning, it’s dark by the time I get dinner on the table at night.

Better though than two months ago when I seldom saw the sun.

This means walking before work or in the evenings is a no-go at the moment.

I’m still trying to figure something out, especially with the kids. I have a treadmill and an elliptical in our finished basement, but it’s an act of Congress to get down there. Including the negotiating, pleading, and filibustering.

But I am working on it. I started making a play space for them downstairs so that they have something to do other than pester me while I’m trying to listen to an audiobook and burn some stress.

What do you do to deal with stress? Do you find it easier to cope with stress with physical activity?