Silly Stress

Although life can be wonderful at times, it also has the habit of being incredibly messy and stressful. People get sick, hearts get broken and jobs end. Much of life is utterly uncontrollable and sometimes you just have to sit there in your little rubber life raft trying not to fall off while the waves keep on knocking you around and sometimes even crashing over your head.

However. There are some bits of life where stress can be avoided. Hey, sometimes we even go so far as to create the stress ourselves. I like to call this silly stress.

Recently I stumbled on two areas of this in my own life. I'll share them with you – even though it's somewhat weirdly personal (don't worry, it's not about underwear). Maybe it might help you to have a think, be your own expert, and see if there's any silly stress you can strip away from your own life.

There is some silly stress in my day-to-day life that I can't quite figure out an easy answer to. In this category falls my problem with mornings (see my post The Magical Life Of The Morning Person). I just know if I could get going earlier and be at my desk before 9 a.m., I'd be a much calmer sort of Snow White-singing-with-the-forest-animals sort of lady. But alas, I've worked hard on that one and it's still a work in progress.

But I've recently realized that opening my wallet to find it devoid of cash except for some pennies and a Croatian coin of some unknown value makes me really stressed. I know with debit cards (particularly with the PIN system in the UK) we don't really need much cash anymore. But having cash makes things easier. Whether it's trying to split a bill without waiting for 10 people to enter their PIN numbers at a restaurant, or taking a taxi home from central London late at night without having to face the rigmarole of asking the driver to find a cash machine while he looks at you with dagger eyes, it's just less stressful to have the cash on you. And there's always that situation where you are having your friend's parents over for dinner and the running water is turned off (due to some electricity outage in London) AND the minced beef you were going to use has turned a dark shade of brown. So you have to order out food from the Korean barbeque place instead. It's just nice to have the cash to pay for it so you don't have the embarrassment of borrowing the money from one of your guests. It's silly, I know, but it's still stress.

So now when I see my cash is running a bit low, I just go to a cash machine and take out more money than I think I actually need for the rest of the week or whatever. It makes me feel happy and prepared (I'm so sad, I know). Please don't come and rob me though, because in England it's harder to get a gun so I'd probably fight back. Because of my small size I could get you around the knees and knock you off your center of gravity.

The other thing I've noticed is that I cause myself no end of stress by deciding what to wear to parties, events, weekend barbeques, etc. only 30 minutes or so before it's time to leave.

Then, when I'm putting on the fabulous outfit I've assembled (in my mind of course), I suddenly I realize it has been eaten into rags by giant moths over the winter or it doesn't fit or it actually makes me look like a 12-year-old (I kid you not – a very unsuccessful H&M buy – I must have been running a fever that day).

These clothing try-on situations have been made even worse recently because of the unusually hot summer in England. Usually my clothing choices don't vary much from season to season here, but this year it's not been necessary to wear tights or scarves in the summer, so I've been thrown into a panic over all wardrobe choices, especially with all the impromptu barbeques people have been throwing.

A few weeks ago for one of these said barbeques, I decided to actually assemble my outfit shortly after I got up in the morning, when I was just putting my clothes on for the day. It involved just as much teeth gnashing and wailing, and I even got Future Hub involved in all the fun action, but when the decision had been made, I took the clothes off, folded them up and put them on the bed for later when I would get ready to go.

It was bliss. When I left the house, I was on time, relaxed and actually remembered everything I had to bring. A much better state of mind to arrive at a party, I must say.

So there you go, silly, but hopefully helpful in some way. I didn't really set out to change either of these things but for some reason the hardest part was actually recognizing that something was causing me stress. Fixing them was the easy part.