My Top 3 Ways to Cope with Stress

This month has been hectic.  More than the usual hectic.

And I discovered something useful about myself (Self discovery seems to be the bright side of all things exhausting).  I got to see my top 3 ways to cope with stress.  These are the strategies I seem to reach for first, and fortunately two out of three are accessible while I’m on the go, and they’re all healthy so I thought they’re worth sharing.

1.  Silence.  My number 1 way to cope with stress is to turn everything off.  Turn off the radio in the car.  Turn off the TV at home.  Turn off sound.  The less auditory stimuli, the better.  When I’m stressed my head is already noisy enough without adding any more noise from the outside.  Quiet outside, quiet inside.  Silence helps reduce my feeling of being overwhelmed.  It simplifies and limits what’s coming at me.

2. Clean.  When I feel stressed, I clean.  Getting the space around me organized makes me feel more organized inside.  When things are clean and orderly, it’s like I’ve made the environment quieter.  Environmental silence.  Messiness is a kind of noise.  At least it is for me.  It’s too distracting.  I don’t know, maybe that’s a little OCD, but it’s selective OCD — I can happily postpone cleaning most of the time.

3. Appreciating beauty.  This one, like silence, is really portable. You can do it anywhere.  This is not the kind of appreciation that happens when you try to be grateful.  It’s just spontaneous noticing of hidden treasures, happy little distractions from whatever it is that weighs on you.  I don’t go looking for them.  It almost seems like they look for me!  They jump out at me.  Grab my attention for just the instant it takes to switch background and foreground.  For that moment, the stress fades into background, as the beauty comes forward, more vivid, more real.  And I feel better.  A smiling baby in a grocery store.  The smell of ground coffee.  (I have to confess here that I sniff bulk coffee dispensers).  A cloud that’s an unusual color.  Overhearing a kind exchange between strangers.  The perfect word in a sentence –  now that’s a thing of beauty.