My Stress-Reduction Strategies Are Stressing Me Out

My new year's goal for 2020 is to improve my health on eight different dimensions to prepare myself to survive the stress of a hideous ordeal that lies before me. With typical new year's zeal, I've leaped into tackling the many health-fostering projects I listed in my previous post.

But now I'm discovering the sad paradox that my very efforts to prepare me against looming stress are themselves stressful!

They cost money (and one of my eight dimensions of health is financial health).

They take time (and time is our most valuable non-renewable resource).

How am I ever going to find that money, and even more dire, find that time?

For example: I've pledged to try some new form of exercise to supplement my faithful hour-a-day of walking with my dog, Tanky. But I don't want to do this in the morning, as that's my prime work time. I don't want to do it in the afternoon, as that's when I go visit my husband in the care home. I don't want to do it in the evening, as that's when I want to put on my nightgown, curl up with a book, and be asleep by eight. So that leaves... well, it leaves no time at all.

Ditto for meditation. Who the heck has time to meditate?

Even reading... I want to read more books, and I just ordered up a big stack from the public library. But how on earth am I going to get all of them read, plus write my own books and articles, teach my classes, advise my mentees, and do everything else I need to do in my life?

I need to figure out how to deal with the inescapable fact that every single thing we do takes time that could be spent doing something else. And every dollar we spend on x is a dollar we can no longer spend on y. Economists call these "opportunity costs."

So, here are my current musings on how to do this.

1. Accept that everyone faces this exact same dilemma, so I might as well get used to it instead of complaining about it. As Arnold Bennett wrote in his splendid 1910 self-help manual How to Live on Twenty-Four Hours a Day: "You wake up in the morning, and lo! your purse is magically filled with twenty-four hours of the unmanufactured tissue of the universe of your life!  . . . Out of it you have to spin health, pleasure, money, content, respect, and the evolution of your immortal soul."

2. Remember that I'M the one who said I want to prioritize my health this year. Prioritizing something means making this a PRIORITY. If I'm going to make good on this new year's plan, I am going to have to commit to the exercise class and the meditation retreat and a bunch of other things on my health to-do list INSTEAD of doing something else.

3. What are some of the other things I'm going to have to give up to do this? Well, by deleting the Twitter app on my phone on New Year's Day (itself the single best thing I could possibly do for my health), I freed at least an additional hour a day. I sleep an extravagant amount: I'm blessed in being able to do this, but really, eight hours should be enough even for someone who loves to luxuriate under the covers as much as I do - nine hours, max! When I visit my husband, what he loves is just my quiet company by his side: I can take some work with me, and do it there. Actually, the main thing I'm going to have to give up is totally aimless time-wasting, and that is hardly a loss.

4.Heed the dictum: if you can't find time to stay healthy, how are you going to find time to be sick? Well, I'm never actually physically sick - another of my blessings - but I do have the occasional total mental/emotional collapse, and THIS IS TO BE AVOIDED. (Along these same lines: there's a book, which I haven't read, with the wonderful title, If You Haven't Got the Time to Do It Right, When Will You Find the Time to Do It Over?) Everyone I know who meditates, exercises, and eats more healthily swears that these things allow them to use the rest of their time more effectively and energetically. In the end, they SAVE more time than they expend.

5. Right now I'm in the groping, experimenting stage of this new health project. I'm spending considerable time researching options and trying them out. These are one-time expenditures of effort to locate resources that will then be in place for me to draw upon. So I shouldn't panic. This current stage of time-crampedness will pass!

6. Finally, it's actually FUN to care about my health for a while. I can't remember the last time I did this. All this fussing and fretting I'm doing is to provide an enormous benefit for ME. What a lovely thing I'm doing for myself! So I should savor every new thing I'm trying - and be glad that I'll have the fun of blogging about it, too.

So, dear ones: we ALL get 24 hours a day: no more, no less. How we decide to spend those hours will determine a lot about what this new year brings for each one of us.