Cooldown - 3/15/19

I didn’t even remember falling asleep. As I woke up, I realized a tightness in my face. I couldn’t open my mouth. I was experiencing so much stress that my jaw had literally clenched shut and refused to open. For almost three days, I couldn’t talk, couldn’t eat, and had to drink through a straw. I couldn’t even explain to people what was happening! I had lost control of my body.

And it scared me.

Stress has been a part of my life since I started receiving report cards. My first “break down” was in the 6th grade in front of my entire class. But I just kept pushing because that’s what I was taught. To “try harder” until you got that perfect score. For my entire educational life, I didn’t slow down and wouldn’t even know how to if I tried. It was at Art Center that my body finally hit the wall. I was sleeping one to two dozen hours a week on a polyphasic sleeping schedule, often two of those nights being all-nighters. My body ran on a rotating combination of Del Taco, Jack-in-the-Box, and vending machine cheeseburgers, each time washed down with a Rockstar energy drink, sometimes two. Fortunately, I wasn’t one of the few students that would crash their car into a tree heading up to school, an event so common in my department, some of us simply stopped driving home. I’ve been close to the edge many times, but this jaw clenching moment scared me because it was so unexpected and lasted for days. Since then, I’ve vowed to never tease that limit again and started to put my health in front of “grades.”

While not everyone knows what it is like to not sleep for 76 hours during finals week, most of you know what it’s like to lay down, go to bed, and not be able to sleep. Like a cruel joke in the world of Inception, you close your eyes to escape a world of work only to end back up in another.

We are able to shut down our computers and phones. But how do we shut down our minds?

Like with most things, fortune favors the prepared. The worst time to come up with one is while you are experiencing stress. Having a stress strategy is like having a jacket. You don’t know when wind or rain will come, but when it does, you are ready. Just put it on and go on with your life.

I’ve acquired many "jackets" over the years. Here are some of my recent favorites:

Visual

Candles or soft warm lighting

Screens to Dark Mode

Complete Screen Shutdown

Auditory

Say a de-stressing phrase ("I'm offline")

Soothing Music ("Deep Sleep" on Spotify)

White Noise

Gustatory

Dark chocolate

Favorite drink

Cannabis / Melatonin

Somatosensory

Stretching / Breathing

Hot Shower

Bubble Bath

Olfactory

Candles

Essential Oils

Incense

While these techniques may offer some quick solutions, having a stronger base mindset will help alleviate having to deploy these techniques in the first place. We often overestimate how much we (and others) can accomplish in a day. Managing your own expectations and time blocking schedules is the best preventative stress measurement, in my opinion. Instead of saying you should have gotten more done, say to yourself, “I did good today.” Relaxing is not de-stressing if it isn’t guilt-free. It’s necessary if you want to play the long game.

I will dig into each technique on this list moving forward, but feel free to try one or all.

If I had to pick one, I would start with, “I did good today.”

And that’s because you did.

Photo by Robson Hatsukami Morgan on Unsplash