I was talking with a client last week and she was wanted to focus our coaching session on stress. She didn’t think she had any reason to stress and then we spent the next 45 minutes talking about all the stress in her life. As a working parent, it is hard not to have stress…there is so much to do and not enough time in the day. It reminded me of why I left the corporate world in the first place…there was too much stress in my life and for our family and it landed me in the hospital. Now it won’t land everyone in the hospital, but it still affects your health. In thinking about this issues, I was looking back at old blog posts from Hope Post Kids and found this one that I wrote about stress. It applied 3 years ago and applies today, especially with the holidays coming up and stress naturally increasing during this busy time period.
Excerpted from October 11, 2016 hopepostkids.com blog post….
From looking at me you wouldn’t know that I almost died six months ago; that I could barely walk up a flight of stairs or even pick up our one year old. I am generally a healthy person. I am a vegetarian who eats fish, exercise a couple of times a week, and aside from eating too much chocolate, don’t have any majorly bad habits. I am healthy, or so I thought.
Back in January I came down with the flu. No big deal, right? Rest, take some Dayquil, drink your fluids, get better, and go on about your business. Well, wrong. I got the flu on a family trip to Disneyworld. I struggled through our trip, trying to make the best of it, taking the maximum recommended amount of Dayquil and even visiting urgent care and getting a prescription for Tamiflu to help me through. We finished our trip, had a generally good time, considering the circumstances, and flew home.
When we got home, I still had the flu, but genuinely felt like I was on the upswing. By then it had been four days and the worst of the flu had taken its course. That night though, something was still wrong, it hurt to breath. After a couple of hours of this, I told Mr. H that I was going to the emergency room. I drove myself there, they took an x-ray and let me know I had pneumonia, and I should go home and rest. “What about the pain?” I asked. “Take some Advil.” Okay, noted, I was a wimp. I went home and spent the night not sleeping until the morning.
In the morning it still really hurt to breath, so we dropped the kids at school and Mr. H took me to the ER. While the triage nurse was taking my vitals and asking me what was wrong, the room started to spin and I went into sepsis (ie. my blood pressure dropped, they had to get me on oxygen). They quickly admitted me to the hospital, did more extensive scans of my chest cavity and discovered that I had an empyema (my chest cavity was filled with pus, which was putting pressure on my lungs and thus I couldn’t breath).
“Was I a smoker?” they asked. “Had I been having other health issues?” No, no. Everyone was confused why an otherwise very healthy 30-something year old could get such a raging infection that would ultimately end up killing part of my lung (no joke the surgeon drew me a big picture of my lung with a big red X over the dead part) and landing me in a “step down unit” (ie. one step down from the ICU) for TWO WEEKS. The only answer that anyone can come up with is stress.
I am not one of those people who always talks about being stressed, in fact I haven’t ever really been a big believer in how stress affects your health. I was so “not stressed” in fact, that at my previous job people called me “easy-going”. Sure, stress existed in my life, just like anyone else, but it didn’t seem to be affecting me in big ways. I didn’t have any out-of the-ordinary stress that was weighing on me. Only after being hospitalized did I realized I was totally wrong.
Shortly after I was hospitalized I gave notice at my job. The hospitalization had been the final nail in the coffin. I had already been thinking about leaving my job and the sickness clinched it. We were a dual working family with two aggressive careers and two kids and it was too much. Mr. H and I would have daily text frenzies at 5PM to see who could pick up the kids “I’m in a meeting” “me too”. Sound familiar?
The minute I gave my notice I felt the stress leave my body. I hadn’t known it was there, but I felt so much lighter and happier. I went through this, so you don’t have to, here is what I learned:
For Yourself
Stress is Real: I was not a big believer in stress affecting health before, but now I am. Read more here and here on how stress can cause illness. Take a good look at your life and figure out what kind of role stress has in it and what (if anything) you should do about it.
Give Yourself Credit: Working fulltime, balancing family life and work life is hard and yes, it is stressful. Recognize how much you are doing and don’t beat yourself up about whatever you are not doing. You are doing a great job! Make sure you are recognizing how much you do every day and its OK if the laundry doesn’t get done of the toys don’t get put away today.
Take a Break: At my previous job sick days and vacation days were all in the same pool, so I never took a sick day. Why would I waste a vacation day being sick?! The reality is that you need those sick days for your body to recover. Even when I wasn’t sick, our vacations were not super relaxing (traveling with kids is often not). But its important to take time to relax and do things that rejuvenate your soul.
Accept Help: In two weeks in the hospital, I lost 20 pounds, primarily muscle mass. I could barely walk up the stairs to our house, much less pick up Tater Tot. The day after I came home from the hospital, my mom came over (amazing woman, but no spring chicken herself) and did our grocery shopping and laundry. Families from our pre-schools made homemade dinners for us. The support from our friends and family was amazing and totally instrumental in my recovery when just getting showered and dressed felt like climbing Everest. Then and still now, I need to constantly remind myself that it is OK to ask for help, you don’t have to do it all. Raising children does take a village.
Adding to my advice from a couple of years ago, I would also include:
Rejuvenate: Life will get stressful. Not only do you need to identify the stressors in your life and try to tackle them, but you also need to identify what energizes you. Is it time with friends that gives you energy? Time alone to read? A good workout? Whatever it is that feeds your body and soul, when the stress creeps up, make sure that you are taking enough time for these activities that refuel you.
You are not alone in your stress. We all have it and sometimes just naming it and talking about it can help. You can go all the way and do a coaching session focused on it or just grab coffee with a friend and ask if you can dump out your stress for a few minutes. Whatever your strategy don’t ignore it and assume it will go away. Take charge of it! Don’t wait until tomorrow, live your best life today.