Just sweat it out (stress that is)!

Between the two graduations, the boys' birthday party, teaching, paperwork, and trying to squeeze in time to finish my book, I have been really stressed out.  Throw in lack of sleep and I was in a particulary foul mood yesterday.  Then I felt like people were taking advantage of my niceness and I almost erupted, but managed to stay calm, but thoroughly frustrated.  Then I went home and everything seemed to dwindle down. Family always makes things better.  After a delicious dinner of soba with these really good noodles (House Ramen) that my husband found at the grocery store, we combined the boys' birthday money with the yard sale money from a couple of weeks ago and went on a small shopping spree for the family.  Our Wii (which we've had since 2006 when it first came out) suddenly stopped working and (after numerous attempts to fix it) we figured it was time for a new one, especially since we use it so much.   Our older son wanted to use his birthday/tooth fairy money for skylanders giants, so along with that we ended up getting a Wii U.  It's all set up and I can't wait to try it out later this evening!  The retail therapy definitely helped improve my mood, along with a little red wine.

This morning on the way to work, the tension started to appear again, but while driving I thought about this blog post I read last week.  It was so good that I actually ordered the book for my kids from Amazon.  Read the blog post here: http://freespiritpublishingblog.com/2013/05/06/guest-post-flying-frustrations-on-a-spring-evening/

The key steps to stress management provided by the children's book in the post are: name it (the problem), tame it (a solution to the problem), and reframe it (find something positive from the problem).  I went through these steps in my head and they actually worked.  This got me to thinking about the Native approach to stress management.  One interesting thing that I found was about sweat lodge ceremonies.  They were introduced as a way for Natives to re-purify themselves.  This reminded me of my life before my day job (which I started in December) when I went to the gym with one of my friends every day during lunch time and we sat in the sauna after our workouts.  We talked about; relationships, jobs, future plans, kids, shopping, etc. and the steam (plus the girl talk) always seemed to leave us refreshed, as if it had cleansed all of the stress and carried it away. 

Read about sweat lodge ceremonies here: http://www.barefootsworld.net/sweatlodge.html


Thought of the day: How do you stay stress-free?  My favorites are retail therapy (even something as simple as going to the grocery store for dinner items or a magazine), reading, writing (which is why I'm able to update this blog so much), and looking at random fashion stuff online, check out this video about scarves from Coach (so cute!):