Picture this. You’re running late today for a face-to-face meeting with the boss scheduled at 9am sharp. You know you don’t have the answers to what he’s going to ask you. Your Municipality supply of water at home has reduced to a trickle and you need to figure out why. En route to work, you get a call from the school your son goes to—you’re required to meet the principal today at 3 pm; it can’t be good. Your phone pings –it’s a reminder from the landlord that the rent is overdue. Your car is giving trouble and needs a major overhaul. Your spouse has been complaining of frequent headaches and needs to be taken to a doctor.
Pressure. So much to do, so little time? Well, you’re not alone.
Life is a pressure cooker. Unless you’re a Buddhist monk living in the Himalayas, you cannot escape the everyday pressures of life, be they financial, health, marital, situational…in all its myriad forms. There are generally two ways to deal with it. The first is a toxic response, where you just lose it and engage in destructive behaviour, which makes the situation worse and causes you more stress. In such case, be prepared for the consequences, which most likely will be bad for you. The second is a strategic response where you’re sort of prepared for it and have mitigated it in advance, or where you’ve given yourself the time to think calmly of the best way to deal with your situation. The second way is always better, isn’t it? As they say, ‘If you’re failing to prepare, you’re preparing to fail.’
There is good stress and bad stress. Eustress is a positive form of stress, having a beneficial effect on health, motivation, performance, and emotional well-being. You know, like a fun challenge, the anticipation of a first date, the first day at a new job or other exciting ‘firsts’. Eustress is what got Neeraj Chopra that gold medal at the Tokyo Olympics last year and Sachin Tendulkar a hundred international centuries. It is actually important for us to have some of that in our lives—something that excites us, something that pushes us to do better. Pressure can transform a lump of coal into diamonds. In the same way Eustress gives us diamonds from our coal. No pressure, no diamonds!
What we should be more concerned about is Distress. Distress is ‘bad stress’, the kind that we have to deal with and overcome in order to maintain our sanity and health. The kind that makes the blood pound in our heads, our palms sweaty and our stomachs churn with acid. If you’re human, at some point you’re going to get stressed out, because there’s no such thing as a stress-free life. However, I think you and I can become the ‘best stressed’ person in the room if we make an effort. How?
I do not claim to be a Management Guru with all the answers to Life’s questions. Far from it. But Life has shown me a few time-tested ways to reduce stress that work for me. I take this opportunity to share them. I do get stressed out occasionally despite the gyaan I’m going to give, but that happens only when I get too lazy to follow these simple guidelines myself. Try these in case you haven’t. These are not exactly remarkable revelations that you’ve never heard of before. Just plain old common sense, the flower that unfortunately does not grow in everyone’s garden.
The first paragraph was just an example of a typically bad day. Think of a particularly stressful day you’ve had in the recent past. Then ruminate. Could you have done things differently before that horrible day in terms of preparedness, so that most of the problems you’d encountered that day could have been mitigated? Maybe.
Here are a few suggestions from a senior citizen to deal with everyday pressures. Tried and tested.
Write it down. Carry a small notebook and pen with you at all times, or use the Notes section of your smartphone. Or a voice recorder. Whatever you need to do, big or small, write it down. Otherwise you may forget to do it—it’s just not possible to remember each and every task at the appropriate time. That is your List.
Every other day, settle down to take a look at the List. Don’t worry about the length—let it grow. Read each item and ask yourself, ‘Can this be acted upon?’ If yes, will the action take less than five minutes? Yes? Then go for it. Dentist appointment for daughter? Schedule it—mark the date and time on your phone calendar. Note to old school chum thanking him for dinner? Send it. Scratch out the jobs that are completed.
For those things that cannot be done in five minutes, put a system in place. Make notations in the margin to create categories for the jobs, like letters from the alphabet. E for ‘Errands’ can become a category for stuff to do while you are out and about (pick up pens, buy socks, give clothes to the dry cleaners etc.). H for ‘Home’ can become a category for stuff to do at home on a holiday (clear out workstation, call plumber, get AC serviced etc.) O for ‘Office’ for stuff to do at the office (project with looming deadline, pay bills online). Feel free to delegate tasks as necessary. F for ‘Future’ can be for long term projects and dreams (write a novel, buy cottage in the hills etc.) When at home and a little free, glance at the ‘H’ items and see what can be done that day. When in office, take a look at the ‘O’ items and see if some of the pending jobs can be completed. And so on. Strike though once completed. That’s it. The list will look smaller, with quite a few items scratched out. The idea is to ensure that every single thing is trashed, completed or put on a short, manageable list of things still to be done. Break up jobs that will take time into smaller jobs. Write these down separately. The same applies to big decisions. Break them into smaller ones.
Make the little notebook your friend. Make it a habit to look it up whenever you can. More jobs coming up? Write them down. From ‘get kabadiwala ’ to ‘call electrician’ to ‘teach son chess’ to ‘upload holiday photos on Facebook account’. Think harder. Things you have been avoiding for weeks—‘call brother’, ‘take PC for repair’, ‘buy new underwear’, ‘do Art Of Living course’…. Let all your lofty dreams and nagging chores rain down like confetti on this little notebook of yours.
Review the List every other day. See what tasks can be completed immediately, see which can be achieved partly. Once completed, strike them through. If partly done, strikethrough the original job and enter the remainder as a new task to tackle later. It’ll give you a sense of satisfaction and an annoying smirk to your countenance.
Perhaps I’ve made it sound too simple. I know that it isn’t. Because Life and Work will conspire and your pile of to-do things will once again rear their ugly heads to snarl at you. You’ll then need to clear the pile again in the same way. And again. C'est la vie…..
Stop hiding from your work. What you resist will persist. The task will not go away.
Do not worry about things that are beyond your control. That’s a pretty good formula for illness. Will your daughter be happy if she insists on marrying the guy she’s in love with? Will things get worse if a certain particular political party wins the next election? Will climate change cause sea levels to rise and kill us all one day? (Maybe not, but worrying surely will.)
Humbly Embrace Your Procrastinating Ways. Use them to your advantage. John Perry, Stanford philosophy professor and extreme procrastinator, concocted the ‘structured procrastination’ method—a way to do work while completely avoiding it. It is not doing nothing. It is just not doing a particular thing by doing something else. If you are not working on your project report, clean your study and pay your bills online. If you decide to watch TV, dump the laundry into the washing machine and start the cycle first. Something like that.
Take your Shut-Eye more seriously. The average 35 year old needs 7~8 hours of solid shut-eye. An octogenarian can get by on 4 to 5. A college student needs 8~9. Get enough sleep. Pick a bedtime and stick to it. Shut down your devices, switch off the lights.
File Away. Being called a ‘paper tiger’ at home does not bother me. I find filing a satisfying activity. It makes me feel productive without actually working. Begin filing every piece of work related paper that you cannot immediately deal with or throw away. The paper is always there to refer to if you need it later, but for the time being it is not cluttering your work space and therefore your mind.
Overcome perfectionism. You’re not perfect; nobody is. So don’t try for perfection. It’s a huge source of pressure.
Avoid comparing yourself to other people. Do not try to keep up with the Joneses or the Junejas. It’s not a competition. Nobody cares. If you're constantly trying to be someone you're not, you will feel stressed or burdened. Do not envy. Thou Shalt Not Covet Thy Neighbour’s Goods. Remind yourself that you have talents, skills and qualities that are unique to you.
Don’t nurse grudges. Learn to forgive and forget—yourself and others—for past transgressions. The gnawing heartburn caused by feelings of hate and revenge will just wear you down.
A healthy mind in a healthy body goes a long way for a relatively stress-free life. Regular exercise has been shown to reduce stress and make us feel good about ourselves. Meditation is beneficial too. I practise the Sudarshan Kriya patented by the Art of Living Foundation regularly, and I must admit it sort of energizes me to face the day; I’m not imagining it. Eat healthy—whole grains like brown rice, vegetables and fruit. Herbal tea is good. Less white sugar, less cookies, less alcohol, please.
Find your own stress buster. During my sailing days, I used to sing my heart out on karaoke every Saturday night at sea while pretending nobody was listening. It was a relief valve that would open to allow my bottled up tensions of the week to escape. Do whatever floats your boat—drawing, painting, music….the session will calm you.
Back up your drive. Losing unexpectedly all your hard work that you’d saved in your computer is a huge source of stress. Last year my hard drive crashed, taking a lot of my work with it. I was devastated, to put it mildly. Since then, I daily back up the work I’m currently doing on OneDrive, overwriting the previous file by replacing it. Once a week or fortnight, I back up all my documents and pictures on my portable hard drive.
Now go buy that little notebook, and have a good life.
Beetashok Chatterjee is the author of ‘Driftwood’, a collection of stories about Life at Sea and ‘The People Tree’, another collection of stories about ordinary people with extraordinary experiences. A retired merchant ship’s captain by profession, this old sea dog lives in New Delhi with his memories of living more than 40 years on the waves.
His books are available on Amazon. Click here.
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