One of my focuses is reducing my levels of stress so that I can enjoy a simple life. I think we’ve all read stories about people changing careers to work in a low stress environment. We’ve probably seen someone saddled down with stress like an overloaded workhorse. Perhaps we have seen or heard about someone struggling with their bills and the stress and sheer terror that bills can bring. Shortly put, we’ve all been in a high stress situation, are in a high stress situation, or will be in a high stress situation at some point.
It is impossible to avoid stress, which brings me to my next point. If you can’t avoid stress, how do you learn to deal with stress to minimize the impact of it on your newly simplified life? What steps can you make to reduce the damage to your existence and to lower the level of disruption that stress can bring? Unlike the pillar sitters of early Christian monasticism we can’t just plop our behinds down on a stone pillar and watch life go by.
Even in a simplified existence we must accept that events will occur that force us to deal with them. The avoidance of stress in all areas of our life strikes me as stressful in itself. Turning our backs on stressful situations by citing a philosophical stance or religious point of view as a means of rapidly disengaging from stressful problems sort of looks much like we are isolating ourselves from everyone and everything. You can’t avoid stressful problems through biblical quotes or Marxist rhetoric. There is one thing that I do to help myself deal with stress when it pops up in my life like an unwanted wart.
I try to not deal with the stressful problem immediately. Some problems you have to sort out right then and right there, but often I’ve found that I can allow myself to wait. I then try to view stressful situations as a problem to be pondered before acting. I ask myself questions to determine the size of the problem, the source of the problem, and the best way to resolve the problem to ensure that in the long run the same problem will not come from the same person. I have never seen much of a point in resolving a problem in the short term if I know there is a chance the problem will back in the future.
It’s better to clear the mess up for the long term even if it raises your stress level in the short term. When I fix a problem I want it dead and buried. Now to be honest I figure I’m batting less than a stellar average with this aim as problems have a tendency to go around and around whether I like it or not. A stressful problem does not rely on my permission to be a pain in the bum. People do not arrange their lives in accordance to my needs (damn them). When the dust settles and the problem is resolved, well at least I often hope it is resolved, I keep one thing in mind about the nature of problems; problems come and go as they damn well please so get used to it cupcake.
That’s right folks, get used to it, get used to solving problems, and take advantage of the many small problems life throws at us to keep our problem solving skills well honed and ready to go. Your life will be much simpler if you have a well developed set of problem solving skills. Your life will be far worst if you think hiding behind your ideology, philosophy, or religion is the best means of escaping a stressful situation. Well, that’s my take on it all, I’m sure other people disagree with me and that is not a problem, it’s a genuinely welcome state of affairs to have people disagree with me.
Providing they don’t disagree by littering my blog with lemonparty porn, because that’s a problem.