Foolproof plan to manage stress

Trust me, I am an expert.

Stress is unavoidable for most. Me included. Although I did know that I was under stress, clinically with higher end of cortisol, I really wasn't sure because I didn't remember the last time I was sweating or panicking. I guess the ways in which I felt stress had changed significantly in the last few years.

Restlessness, lack of quality & consistent sleep, racing thoughts, digestive problems are often accompanied with stress was what I had read about. But that's just me 365 days a year.

I also realized that my coping mechanisms had shifted: eating sugary foods, drinking more, and becoming easily irritable.

I asked my closest friends and family if they thought I was stressed. The closer they were, the quicker they responded with a resounding yes. One even shared my same confusion - that I handle situations well externally but may be struggling internally (eternally).

So far, what I have gathered from all these findings (inner and external) is that I definitely have stress and I can handle majority of them well. And when I couldn't handle it well I had worse sleeping habits, indulged a bit more & was more grumpy than usual.

The first step to fixing anything is knowing the problem. The next step is solutioning.

While I may have had some mechanisms to handle stress, perhaps from years of just living, I decided to come up with a more mechanical solution to my problem.

I came across a meme which was very apt on how I handle stress and not surprisingly very stoic.

What it meant was - if I had control over a situation, I could fix it. If I don't have control over a situation, I can't fix it and thus there was no reason for me to stress over it.

While this became the premise of how I thought of issues. What I also had going was an active note inside Evernote. I had a list of all the problems I was currently undergoing, what led to the problem and what my actions were going to be to fix those. When I started this exercise, I thought I'd end up having a big laundry list of issues in a month. But I was pleasantly surprised that every time I was on the note adding a new problem, the existing ones all disappeared, solved themselves over time, underscoring that most problems are manageable.

That's when I had a big brain realization - hardly anything is catastrophic & unfixable.

In terms of my existential stress I have simply bottled them into two buckets - independence & companionship. And post thinking it through, I know what I have to do.