Tag Archives: stress

The Crash

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So often when a break in the school year comes my body crashes. Often I end up sick with a cold, because I’m too busy to let myself get sick, then the lull comes and my body lets go. Luckily that didn’t happen to end the year. But yesterday I was doing a leg workout and on my second goblet squat my right knee did a little buckle and I twinged a muscle in my mid back.

This morning I took a deep breath in and my back seized. It’s a brutal recognition of my age when breathing can be the trigger to pain. It has been several years since I’ve had a crash this bad, my whole back has seized to protect this one overstressed muscle.

The stress of the last 3 months got to me and now I’ve got to take it really easy. My Norwegian Protocol won’t happen on this Sunday, I’ll have to make it up next week. Today I stretch, hot tub, stretch, and rest. And hopefully my recovery is swift. I didn’t get sick, but my body still crashed.

Time off stress

It’s accumulating. The work I need to get done is compounding as I take some time off. I’ve been taking some high strength meds and my mind is not always clear. Meanwhile email and work accumulates.

I’ll have to spend time catching up today even though I won’t be going into work today. I’m adjusting to the meds, I’m feeling more discomfort than pain, and I hopefully won’t sleep away the day like I did yesterday.

It’s challenging missing work, and impossible to let work go enough to take a day off without thinking about what I’m missing and what I need to do. It sometimes feels like it’s more work to take time off than it is to go to work while not feeling my best. My body is getting the rest it needs, my mind is just getting stressed about everything I’ve got to get done at work… and the email just keeps coming faster than I can deal with.

It’s really hard to take sick days completely off, work adds too much stress to time off.

Taking the needed time

I took a sick day on Monday for my first cough in years, and it got worse later in the day. Yesterday (Tuesday) morning I retested myself and tested positive for covid. I avoided it for 2.5 years but here I am now in quarantine in our spare bedroom, only leaving to go to the bathroom. My cough is still bad, but this afternoon my sinuses feel clearer and the low grade but constant headache that developed Monday night has subsided with the aid of Advil. I know it’s not over but if that’s the worst of it, a typical sinus infection of yesteryear was more unpleasant (though didn’t sound as bad with this cough). Still, I have a good feeling that I’ll be in full form next week.

What was interesting these past few days was that the headache kept me from my computer and screens more than usual. I took naps and I listened to podcasts and a book to pass a bit of the boredom by, but it was very unusual for me to listen to my body and not just work from home all day. I did do a couple pressing things and answered some texts, but overall I really took sick days and didn’t just work from home while sick.

This was extremely unusual for me. It didn’t come without stress… I haven’t had this many unread emails in well over a year. I have things on my ‘to do’ list that kept creeping into my thoughts even when I tried to let them go. And, I felt guilty that I wasn’t working. That’s the crazy part, I’m home sick, and much of the day I’m thinking about work or feeling guilty for not doing work. I don’t think that’s what’s intended to be done on a sick day?

I’m glad I took the time I needed and I’m willing to bet that I wouldn’t feel as ‘good’ (well at least as ‘fair’) as I do now, had I not taken this time mostly off. And yet I already know that even though I am not going in to work tomorrow, I’m going to be spending at least a few hours catching up. I should probably take the full day off, but I won’t.

I’ll take this as a win for taking the time I needed the past three days. But after 55 years on this planet I still need to figure out that work/life balance thing a little better, so that I can take a guilt-free sick day… to be sick. I’ll probably retire before I really know how to do it right.

Let it go

When my youngest daughter gets stressed about something I will often start to sing ‘Let It Go’ from the movie Frozen. I’m an awful singer and she’ll roll her eyes at me. Sometimes she even beats me to the punchline, “…And don’t start singing Let It Go… please.”

If it’s a serious topic, I won’t start to sing, but when she is perseverating on a small issue, I let it rip, nice and loud, “Let it go, let it go!” Just that verse, I honestly don’t know the song that well and have always struggled remembering music lyrics.

What’s interesting though is that it’s always easy to give advice like that to others, but not so easy to feed the same advice to yourself.

There is the saying, ‘Death by a thousand paper cuts’ to suggest no one wound that is fatal but rather the accumulation of many wounds that finally leads to your demise. Sometimes stresses and challenges are like that. No one stressor is too big to handle, but not being able to let go of a thousand little stressors feels overwhelming. Or, life just gets busy with many many stressors then one or two slightly bigger stressors get added and it all seems too much. Just those couple issues on their own would be fine, but they add to an accumulation of things you didn’t let go of and suddenly these slightly bigger items seem gigantic.

It’s not easy to let even little things go when they are sitting on your brain. And sometimes you can’t let go of the problem or challenge, you actually have to face it… and that’s the thing that stresses you out. But the time and energy you spend worrying really doesn’t help. So be it a song, exercise, a quote, or even meditation, the trick is not to let the stressors live in your brain rent free. Stress as you deal with them or ‘let it go’ until you can deal with them. Just don’t think avoiding them altogether works. You aren’t actually letting them go, you’re just not letting them accumulate and consume your thinking when you aren’t dealing with them.

And if this was easy, there would be no reason to get this song stuck in your head.

Stuck in a loop

There is a theme to my dreams that I often get stuck in. In the dreams I am in a rush to get somewhere and everything is slowing me down. The entire dream is me unsuccessfully trying to get somewhere for something important.

The somewhere that I am going changes from dream to dream. So does the reason I’m in a hurry. So does my mode of transportation. So does the thing that slows me down. In this way the dream itself is not reoccurring, but the theme repeats… I’m in a terrible hurry, and no matter what I try, I can’t make progress to my final destination.

It’s a stressful kind of dream, and yet it doesn’t only happen when I’m stressed (or aware of stress). This kind of dream will happen just as often on a holiday break as when I’m busy at work. I’m in a rush and something prevents me from getting where I need to go.

I’m sure there is an unconscious message in the dream that I’m missing… Some unlearned lesson, moral, or reason that my dreams would be about me not getting where I need to go. But when I wake up from one of these dreams, unable to get where I needed to go, I will remember the things stopping me from being successful, but I never remember why I was rushing or where I was rushing to. Yet I’ll often go back to sleep and back to my dream to continue my lack of success.

Maybe it’s a message that the things I seek are unimportant. Maybe it’s a message to enjoy the journey no matter what life throws at me. Maybe I’m avoiding the things I think I am seeking. I have often thought of why this theme reoccurs in my dreams, but I don’t know the answer? I seem to be stuck in a loop and not making any progress, and although these are just dreams, I’m sure there is a lesson to be learned from them.

2 weeks left

This was part of a text conversation I had with a colleague a couple days ago:

Colleague: “… Generally speaking i feel so out of touch. Need some rest this summer I think.”

Me: “Me too! It’s like we are all in pandemic mode AND we have to do ‘normal’ mode on top of that… it doesn’t feel like a shift, it feels like yet another ‘add-on’. I feel like June started 5 weeks ago.”

Colleague: “Oh man – that’s exactly right.”

The two craziest months to be an educator are September and June. Some people (not in education) will ask, “Are thinks winding down as you head into summer?” They don’t realize that there are so many activities to organize, and that we don’t just coast into July. But this year has really been different. I feel like June mode started in the second week of May.

I’m used to sustaining this pace for 4-5 weeks but I’ve been going at it for 6 weeks already and my body is signalling that it’s time to crash for the summer. Right now 2 more weeks feels like an eternity… and simultaneously like not enough time to get everything done.

In the end, I will get everything done. Some things will get pushed to July, and that’s ok. But I’m going to be reflecting on how and why June mode started so early this year, and figure out how to shorten it next year, because I don’t want another year to end like this.

Two weeks. I’m not usually a count-down-the-days kind of person, but this year I think I’ll make an exception.

Stress dreams

I had a ridiculous dream last night. I was with a couple family members and we signed up to go on stage and play instruments in front of an audience. I can’t play an instrument if my life depended on it. Can’t read music, don’t know any notes. And I think it was a clarinet or a flute I was supposed to play. Such a stupid dream, to volunteer for something I’m incapable of doing.

A bad dream for sure, very stressful. But that wasn’t the problem, after all, it’s just a dream. The problem was that I woke up several times after the original dream, between 2:30 and 4:30am and each time I woke up I felt the stress of having to perform in front of a live audience not having a clue what I was doing. I’d realize it was a dream, be relieved it wasn’t real… then go right back into the stress of it all over again until I woke up again.

I finally woke up at a couple minutes to 5am, almost 20 minutes before my alarm and realized that I might as well get up rather than jumping into the dream again.

Does anybody else do this? And if you do, what strategy do you use to escape the dream? I ask because this pattern of re-entering a dream I didn’t like is one that I seem to repeat again and again, and it really doesn’t lead to a good night’s sleep.

I’m open to suggestions.

Hard to not think about it

I visited my parents for almost 2 weeks and during that time I responded to a few emails. Most of these started with some sort of, “Sorry to bother you, but…”

I responded to those because they were timely things that needed a response to move forward. But there are 70+ emails that I looked at and needed more time for me to respond and/or didn’t require immediate response. I plan on getting through these later today or tomorrow (edited, I wrote this part before I started cleaning out my garage).

It’s hard to balance truly having a holiday that feels like a holiday and also doing the work that doesn’t stop because you are on holiday. Yes, I have my ‘I’m away from the office’ auto reply on. Yes, it gives a phone number to contact for assistance. Still, I feel obligated to catch up and clear out my inbox ever since I’ve kind of let it go a bit while visiting my parents.

What’s a little unusual is how long I’ve left this over the past couple weeks. Part of it is the need to have a real holiday after the year that was. But I juggle this with wanting to deal with it before it becomes a huge task. And I’m also wanting to enjoy the holiday time ahead. That said, despite letting my email correspondence slip while away, I know the email is there. I’ve read the subject headings, and I’ve felt the pressure to get to it. It’s hard not to think about it and so it’s better to just get it done rather than let it fester in my head as something needing my attention.

Times like this, while on holiday, I sometimes wish for a 9-5 job that doesn’t require any work coming home. I’d probably have less holiday time, but that holiday time would be completely work and work email free. Then I remember the satisfaction I get at work helping students and teachers, and I know that I’d probably hate leaving this job for a 9-5’er.

By tomorrow afternoon I’ll have my un-dealt-with email count down, and I will think less about it for a while. But I don’t know how to turn it completely off, and I don’t know how to see it there and not let it bug me in some small but significant way. I think that I need to take at least a week this summer where I don’t look at email at all… but somehow although I did a couple weeks with no social media that went well, I don’t think it will be as stress free to do with email.

Work on the brain

Got an email from the district to send to parents about the new Covid-19 rules in effect when we return to school on Tuesday.

The big changes for our school bolded:

o All students Grades 4-12 are required to wear a mask inside schools both within and outside their learning group.

o All staff K-12 are required to wear a mask inside schools both within and outside their learning group.

Essentially, students and staff will be wearing masks all day, as opposed to having the option of removing them when at their own desks. This is important information, and as instructed, I’ll send it off to parents (and students and staff) tomorrow.

Since reading that email, my brain has been on work, and on the pandemic. Things to do, and things to be concerned about. Sometimes I can’t let things go. I can’t relax. Today feels like it was a work day, even though I didn’t go to work. It’s going to take a bit to get back into holiday mode. I want a few more days of holiday brain before work brain fully takes over.

Restless nights

Yesterday was a good day back to work. It was great to see staff and students, and it was a productive day. But the last two nights have been restless. Bizarre dreams and many times awake through both nights. It doesn’t feel like my usual insomnia that I’m prone to, but it is exhausting nonetheless.

I tend not to remember most dreams, but the ones I do remember are often stressful and include me waking up several times then stupidly going right back into the dream to continue them. Cognitively, I tell myself it’s just a dream, but I’m not awake enough to realize that I don’t need to maintain continuity and can just let the dream go.

I had one such dream that kept going and going last night, until I finally woke up to go to the bathroom. This is something I very rarely do, but last night it actually helped me get out of the restless dream cycle. Yet still my night continued to be broken.

I even tried meditation. I did 10 minutes timed with my meditation app to start the night, and I just focussed on my breathing to get myself back to sleep a couple more times. While these helped, meditation didn’t break the pattern of their uneasy dreams and many more wake ups.

I think I’ll try a hot tub before bed tonight. I’ll shut down my devices early. I’ll listen to some music without lyrics. Hopefully I can break the cycle and get a good night’s sleep. While I know I’ll be fine today, and I have a schedule that will prevent me from napping after work (which is a good thing), I know I’ve got to break my restless sleep schedule. It will lead to some very tiring days if I don’t.

I’m ready for some sweet dreams tonight.