Exercising Serenity
I met up with a friend for coffee this week. He asked me the following question…
‘How do you cope
with situations that are out of your control that are stress inducing?’
In my last blog post, I
talked about making a problem into an opportunity to ‘exercise patience’. In
this blog, you could say of any stress-inducing situation is an opportunity to ‘exercise carelessness’. Sometimes,
it helps not to give a rats ----!
Serenity
Prayer
God
grant me the serenity to accept the things I cannot change,
Courage
to change the things I can, and wisdom to know the difference.
Sometimes we can fall into
the trap of caring more about something than what is good for us. Apart from
getting addicted to worrying (which releases adrenaline and other chemicals
into our bloodstream, so we want more! More worry, please!) we need to find
ways to step back emotionally from situations that are out of our control.
This is a skill. Like any other,
the more you practice it, the better you get at it. There’s plenty of opportunity
to put this into practice. The situation at work that is looming over you. The
deadline for an exam or awaiting a result. What can you actually do about it?
If you can think of something you can do about it, by all means, do it. But, if
you can’t do anything about it, don’t worry about it! Find a better
perspective, zoom out a bit.
I like the phrase ‘storm in
a teacup’. You can feel yourself get carried away by the wind and rain swirling
around the teacup. When you gain a higher perspective (for me, that’s giving it
to God to worry about so I don’t have to) you see it’s not that bad when you’re
not in the thick of it. I also like the phrase ‘first world problems’, meaning
the things we get stressed and anxious about in our ‘high society’, those worse
off would kill to swap their real problems for the ‘problems’ we have, such as ‘someone
cut me up on the road!’
If I can’t sleep at night
because my mind is mulling over something big that happened that day and won’t
stop, I know the hard, disciplined thing to do is to get up and write out my thoughts. By getting them
on paper or computer, I can therefore think to myself “I’ve written all my
thoughts down now, so I don’t have to keep them in my head. My writing will
still be there in the morning.” By telling myself this, I manage to set myself free
from worrying any more about it. Writing it out, or journalling (same thing), helps
process things in your head because you’re having to put words to it. It’s just
like talking it through with someone, except the journal won’t answer back (not
always a bad thing!). If I go back to bed and have a new thought on the same
subject, I can write that down on a notepad I keep at my bedside to add to the
list in the morning. Eventually my brain gets bored then and I am free to fall
asleep.
I can compartmentalise in
my head that I don’t have to worry about it anymore. Men like to fix things, if
I find myself trying to solve an impossible situation, all I can do is resign
to doing whatever I can. When that is done, there’s nothing more I can do. So at
this point I try not to think about it by occupying myself/focusing on something
I can do. Such as write blogs, or wash up, or make sure my home environment is
clean and tidy. Doing this makes me feel good and is a good type of self-care
(doing something for me).
Hope you’ve found this helpful!
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