I disappeared on my blog for a while for various reasons. First, my beautiful and amazing Katzi had a terrible infection. The symptoms of the infection weren’t actually that bad, but we had to try out three different pills and she reacted badly to all of them. We finally picked a pill that was a little less worse than the others. She stayed on that pill for a month and we monitored her closely. To say that we were constantly on edge and stressed is an understatement.
This isn’t the first time something like this happened. For Jake and I, times get really hard when an illness hits one of us, usually me. A few years ago I was having heart palpitations and dealt with test after test after test for about a month. It was stress the whole time simply because I didn’t know what was going on. So this isn’t the first time our present moment has been filled with stress and it won’t be the last as unfortunate as that is.
I started to consider what to do when the present moment is stressful and you just want some calm. When a lot of your stress comes from the future or from the past, you can always take yourself back to the present and be mindful. However, when the present is currently filled with stress, I found myself constantly looking to the future when times would be better. It was like reverse mindfulness. So today I want to talk about feeling stressed about a particular situation that you’re currently going through as well as ways that may help you handle it. At least they helped me and I hope to help you too. So let’s get started.
Life is Stressful…Breathe Through It
I have a love hate relationship with the calm and meditation trends in our culture today. Don’t get me wrong, we could all use chill vibes and we could all use calm in our lives. Of that, I have no doubt. However, It seems as though we may be stuck in a cycle of the perfect idea of a calm mind and life. I check my Instagram feed and I see all of these pictures that portray a generally perfect life of calm and happiness. Life is not always calm and happy. I would love it to always be calm and happy, but it’s simply not realistic.
We’re constantly told how to handle stress and how to be calm and how to remain non-reactive. These are all excellent things to learn, but when perfectionism comes into play, it becomes unhealthy. You guilt yourself for feeling stressed because you should feel calm. You can get frustrated with yourself believing that there’s a stress-free way to live and that’s the right way to live. These images and posts of the perfect calm can suck you into this idea that this is what the world should be or is for many people. I could probably go on and on and on about many unrealistic posts on social media, but that’s not what this is about. So I’ll try to cap it here.
The point is, it is okay to be stressed. It is expected to be stressed. Stress is our body’s natural response to a potential threat and it’s not something we can just brush off or get rid of. Sometimes we find ourselves in stressful situations and we need to deal with them. Meditating and being mindful helps us to deal with the stress, but they don’t guarantee a stress-free life. Part of why I wrote this blog is to pass on these mental wellness tools that I’ve learned to anyone who wants to use them because I do believe that the more tools we have available to us, the happier our lives will be. So if you’re feeling stressed, it’s totally fine. Life comes with stress and anyone who disagrees must be magic.
What To Do When Your Present Moment is Pure Stress
So during the month where I was constantly tense, not getting much sleep, and was alert all the time watching Katzi’s health closely, I felt like I was going crazy. I found a few tools to help me during this time. When a loved one is really sick, it can be extremely difficult to think about anything else or have any mental space for anything else. This was my biggest issue. I had to accept that I wasn’t going to have the mental space that I did before she was sick. A good portion of my thoughts were always with my kitty. However, I had to make sure not to obsess over her. Meditating did help because it allowed me to clear my mind more. Well my mind was clear, I was better able to make decisions when we had to.
Another big issue I dealt with was overthinking. I know we’ve all been there. We overthink a problem trying to come at it from every angle possible. While Katzi was sick, we had a lot of decisions to make about her medicine and treatments, about what food to try to give her, about ways to make her feel better during this time. It felt never ending. It felt like every other day there was a decision that we needed to make regarding her health. Every decision had its pros and cons and no decision ever felt like the right one. Finally, we had to tell ourselves that we’re doing our best and we cannot predict the future. By continually telling ourselves that we are trying our best, decisions for more easily made.
Also, along the lines of overthinking, one thing we needed to do was to cut ourselves off from talking about Katzi’s health constantly. We could spend all night talking about her health and none of the information was new. It’s not like we had any new insights to share. It’s like our brains were just a broken record constantly repeating the same things over and over. It didn’t help anything and just added to the stress. When we noticed we were doing it, we cut ourselves off and stopped talking about it. We reminded ourselves that we were doing what we could during this stressful time, and that constantly focusing on it and constantly talking about it would not change anything. Making sure that we cut ourselves off from talking about it helped a lot.
in order to stay positive, I had to look toward the future. It was terrifying seeing our cat’s weight drop as much as it did. While she was on these antibiotics, she could barely eat anything. We had to keep telling ourselves that it would get better and we would discuss what it would look like when it did get better. We talked about what we would do and how things would be when Katzi was infection-free and off medicine. This positive outlook for the future really encouraged us and helped us stay positive.
Even with the stress relief tools that I used during this time, it was still stress city. It was truly a terrible month and I am so glad that we have moved past it. We are super happy to tell everyone that Katzi is doing way better now that she’s off the antibiotics. She no longer has an infection and she’s getting back to her kitty life of snuggles, snoozies, and play time!
If you’re going through a stressful time in your life, whether it’s financial, a health crisis, an employment crisis, or something else, I wish you all the luck and hope things turn around quickly for you. I hope that the tools that I used during the stressful time also help you. Just remember you’re not alone living in stress city!