Adventurous Mom

Wel­come back!  This is the 2^nd post of 3 in my Tips for Stress Reduc­tion.  I cre­ated these posts when I real­ized that Stress is the num­ber one epi­demic in our coun­try, which leads to many life-threatening med­ical con­di­tions such as car­dio­vas­cu­lar dis­ease, dia­betes, obe­sity etc…

Yet, as I have per­son­ally expe­ri­enced, doc­tors will diag­nose your con­di­tion as “stress related” but then just hand you a nice lit­tle pill to take.  I’m not dis­count­ing the neces­sity of med­ica­tions in cer­tain instances, hav­ing been in the health­care field for as long as I have, I com­pletely agree med­ica­tions in cer­tain patients are a neces­sity.  But what if your con­di­tion is cre­ated in your own real­ity? What if the lit­tle pill doesn’t cure the under­ly­ing problem?

This is the ques­tion you can ask yourself.

So in Part 1, the idea was to get you to iden­tify that you, as a par­ent, need to take care of your­self first.  We talked about iden­ti­fy­ing your energy lev­els, and slow­ing down your speeds.  Step 1 was to bring into your aware­ness WHEN you noticed that you were stressed out.

Now in Part 2, we iden­tify 3 Sim­ple Steps to get into action to reduce your stress.

Step 1 — Do Less

What? Do less? ….I can hear all of the “yeah but” com­ments now.  So let me clar­ify: Just Do Less.

This step in its sim­plic­ity can some­times be a dif­fi­cult step to rec­on­cile to your­self because you will argue for your stress.  Doing less is a sim­ple deci­sion you can make.  Let me ask you these ques­tions: Do you need to attend every birth­day party for every child in your son or daughter’s class?  Do you need to have your child enrolled in every extracur­ric­u­lar activ­ity leav­ing you run­ning from base­ball to bal­let to piano lessons?

Doing less can extend to spend­ing less money and pos­si­bly elim­i­nat­ing the need to work so much!  Sim­plic­ity is a very free­ing feel­ing. We were able to man­age as humans in a sim­ple world before there was money, can we not man­age now?  Leo Babuta writes a beau­ti­ful blog at www.ZenHabits.net that focuses on sim­plic­ity.  Check it out, you may learn that there exists another real­ity about a sim­ple life.

Doing less can also mean instead of hav­ing to take the fam­ily to the lake, or ski­ing, or on activ­i­ties to feel like that is what proper fam­i­lies should do when spend­ing time together.  Doing less can sim­ply mean, stay at home, read books, have mean­ing­ful con­ver­sa­tions, be still and enjoy your time together.

Step 2 – When you have a lot to do, then con­sider Batching

Per­haps you’ve heard of batch­ing as some­thing that peo­ple do when they send out large amounts of mail.  At least that’s what I think of when I think of batch­ing.  I first learned about batch­ing from Tim Fer­ris, author and Lifestyle designer.  I have been employ­ing the idea of batch­ing for a while now.  It is some­what against what my mother taught me grow­ing up, but it allows me to focus my atten­tion and my time on pro­duc­tiv­ity rather than menial tasks all day long.

Here are some exam­ples of how you can employ batch­ing in your life today:

1. Laun­dry – The dreaded laun­dry!  My mother always used to say that it was eas­ier if I did a lit­tle bit every day, but hav­ing to think about laun­dry every­day was a men­tal drain, and a time drain.  Instead we batch our laun­dry once or twice a week.
2. Bill Pay­ing – If you don’t already have a great sys­tem set up, per­haps bill pay­ing can be batched weekly or bi-weekly.
3. Gro­cery Shop­ping – Mak­ing daily trips to the gro­cery store not only drains your energy and your time, but can inevitably drain your pock­et­book as you are more likely to spend over your bud­get with fre­quent trips.  Instead batch your gro­cery shop­ping into a weekly task.

I am sure you can come up with other ideas for batch­ing.  The con­cept is that you get to allow your­self to tem­porar­ily for­get about a task know­ing that you’ll get back to it at a pre-determined time. You are not ignor­ing the task; you are just defer­ring it and instead putting your atten­tion to get­ting other things done.

Stress is some­times a prod­uct of multi-tasking.  New research on this phe­nom­e­non shows that peo­ple are most effec­tive when they can UNI-task, and their stress lev­els are lower.  So focus on ONE thing at a time.  Other, more mun­dane tasks can wait!  So batch on!!

Step 3 – Elicit Teamwork!

I was recently coach­ing an over­worked an over­stressed mom that had 3 teenage boys at home!  She says, I’m so tired when I get home, but there’s so much to be done!  We came up with a plan to elicit team­work from her fam­ily so that she does not feel that all of the work needs to fall on her shoulders.

I owe this solu­tion to my dad, a per­fec­tion­ist with house­work, retired Navy and raised Navy brat, he was a stick­ler for a clean house.  When I was 9, he sat my sis­ters and I down, and asked us to out­line every sin­gle chore that had to be done in the house.  When we were done, we divided the chores into 3 areas.  One was kitchen/dishes, then there was the bath­room and linens, lastly was the liv­ing area.  We were then each respon­si­ble for our areas each week, and we rotated once per week.  It was easy for my dad to keep track of who’s area of respon­si­bil­ity it was that week, and then he was able to be the house­hold man­ager, instead of the custodian.

Can you pull together your team?  Who is your team? Your fam­ily, kids, grand­par­ents?  As the man­ager and leader of your house­hold, you can elicit their team­work.  Gain their inter­est, ask for their involve­ment, and get their feed­back.  It is eas­i­est to get buy-in for chores and duties when it is THEIR idea, not yours.  But they will want to be a part of this great team.  Team mem­bers as young as 2 can also take part in con­tribut­ing to the house!!

Thank you for fol­low­ing along!  Please feel free to post any ques­tions or com­ments below!  I’d love to hear how you get into action to get out of Stress!! ~Makenzie