Coping With Stress in 2022

My profession comes with mountains of stress, the kind that never goes away. It is hard to measure or quantify. There are times when it feels greater and more debilitating than others, but it never ever leaves. When I was younger I seldom thought about stress. Of course back then I had fewer clients with far less invested. The stakes weren’t as high. As I have gotten older and the business has grown stress is much more front and center. I am consciously aware of it’s presence at all times. To cope with it I have developed strategies to manage the stress, most of them without even realizing what I was doing. It is only in retrospect that I have come to realize what these coping strategies are.

What are my symptoms? What does stress do to me? Lots of things actually. Over the years I have experienced debilitating headaches, dealt with migraines for several years. Thankfully, those days are largely behind me. I have had bouts of insomnia, still do at times. I’ve experienced digestive issues with no known physical cause. There are other physical symptoms that I will leave out of this discussion. On the psychological side of the equation, there are seasons of great doubt. I doubt my own skill and abilities, despite a 40 year record of relative success. There are occasional and thankfully brief periods of intense fear, some of it irrational. It always passes, but each episode leaves a mark. I have managed these stress related symptoms privately. I have always considered them as part of the price of admission for work in my chosen field of endeavor. While, as a younger man, I could shake it all off by listening to a motivational speaker or watching a ballgame, once I reached my late 50’s, none of the old tricks worked any longer.

It occurs to me that one of the coping mechanisms I developed was…Maine. While Pam and I have always gone to Maine for a week or so every summer for over 38 years, it was seven years ago when we began to go for four weeks at a time. In 2016 I made the unilateral decision to rent a house on Hobbs Pond for an entire month. Since that year we have stayed for even longer stretches of time during the summer and fall. In 2022, by the time we are finished, we will have spent eight weeks in Maine. Although I truly enjoy our time there, what I have come to realize is that a big part of me needs longer and longer stays. Time in Maine disconnected from the grind allows everything to heal. The tension built up over months and months slowly drains out of the system.

But even with eight weeks in Maine, that leaves the other 44 weeks. The single hardest thing about my work is that I find it nearly impossible to close everything down, to turn off the part of my brain that thinks and ponders and second guesses the decisions of the day. I said nearly impossible. There is one thing that I have found that works. there is one thing I can do which always sweeps work thoughts away.

Writing.

Over the past decade I have written over 2,650 posts on this blog. I have written over two dozen short stories, and as of a month ago, four novels. It isn’t my job. Although lots of people read this blog, only a handful of people have ever read any of my novels or short stories. So I must ask myself why I spend so much time writing. The answer should have been self evident to me long before now, but I suppose self-deception is the easiest kind. The reason I write so much is because when I’m writing, everything else gets blocked out. Work concerns vanish into thin air once your mind wraps itself around the creation of a story. So, for me, writing is an effective mental health therapy. Maine is an effective mental health therapy. Even though eight weeks in Maine is awfully pricey therapy, writing costs me nothing.