Stress Is Relative
The concept of time is so tricky. Before kids, I thought I was busy and didn’t have a lot of free time. After one kid, I was like woah how did I think I was busy before. Now after 5 kids I literally can not even imagine what I would do with all my free time if I had no kids.
It was totally bizarre being in grad school with mostly people who did not have children and only had to take care of themselves. They were stressed about exams, experiments, graduating. I felt like we had similar stress levels, but how could that be? They were doing the same things as me but didn’t have kids to go take care of at night.
My theory on this is that it is all relative. If the most stress you have ever known is higher education, you will find that to be very stressful. When I had a ton of Army friends in Kansas who had never gone to college, they couldn’t understand the stress that college kids were under with assignments and papers and exams and deadlines. But that’s because Army friends are wondering if they will get shot at or their base will get bombed while they are sleeping. It is a different kind of stress.
Stress Grows With You
Once you have a child you have a new kind of stress. You have to keep that child alive. You have to provide for it. Often at the cost of your own time, money, space etc. Thus your scale for stress has now changed. You have a new baseline. Your new baseline is a happy healthy child.
The same can be said for any life changing event. Your new baseline could be a happy healthy marriage. When you buy a house your baseline may just to have a functional clean house.
My baseline is 5 happy healthy children, a happy marriage, a functional clean house. And we build from there. Then the stress becomes relative. I also had the stress of experiments, exams, and deadlines during my PhD. But at the same time, I had the stress of a sick child, or a broken AC system that I had to pay for. Suddenly, the stressors of grad school don’t become so challenging.
But you don’t know what you don’t know. If you don’t have kids or own a home or have a marriage you don’t know that stress. The stress of graduate school probably is the highest you have. You don’t know how much free time you have because this IS the busiest you have been. It’s why I never realized how much free time I had until I had 5 kids. If I had 5 more I would probably miss the free time I have NOW at this stage in my life.
It’s All Relative
To me graduate school was a job. I went to work. My work was in a lab. I designed how busy my days/weeks were. I focused on work when I was there. Then I came home to my kids and family. It’s no different than now. Now I go to work and I do a job and I come home.
I think part of the problem with my peers struggling to see how I could juggle it all was they allowed it to seep into their life. I HAD to have clear lines and keep my work and home life separate or else it would of all gone to one and not the other.
Plus, grad school stress just wasn’t that bad. Don’t get me wrong, I got pretty stressed about my comprehensive exam, that was a lot of work especially with my lack of background in the area. But besides that the every day stress of grad school was nothing compared with dealing with the medical needs of my oldest, or having a sick newborn. Things like that. A huge part of how I deal with stress is that when your baseline is keeping 5 kids healthy and happy, little things like a seminar presentation no longer feel that stressful.
Effectiveness of Time Management
I also am VERY good at time management. Turns out, no matter how many kids you have or how many things you scoop onto your plate, you still only have 24 hours in a day and you still need to spend about 7-9 of those hours sleeping (a total waste of time in my opinion, but unfortunately totally necessary).
To be good at time management, I have cut out a lot of time wasters. Apps like tik tok will suck you in and waste 30 minutes. I try to not let myself scroll unless I literally only have 5 minutes to spare, or I’m waiting for a doctors appointment, or things like that.
Its hard to get anything done in 5 minutes but 30 minutes is a different story. It seems like a lot of people are reluctant to start something if they have to be somewhere in 30 minutes. I disagree. I think it’s plenty of time. Pull up your email, accomplish some annoying admin work, schedule a doctors appointment. Instead of doom scrolling or walking out of my office to waste time, I choose something small that’s cluttering my to do list and knock it off.
More Tricks
I also pride myself on staying organized. Investing in a really good planner or figuring out a system that works for you is priceless. I know exactly what I want to accomplish each day as soon as I wake up because I have planned it out in the days and weeks prior. I’m focused all day because I know what’s happening and have very few surprises on my schedule.
Exercise is also key. It’s not a bunch of lies. Exercise or movement every day helps manage stress. I simply schedule this into my day. I know every day at 5:15 in the morning I’ll be exercising. If it is part of my schedule, it will be happening. If it happens regularly, I keep stress levels low. My stress levels rises when there is a lack of movement.
Outlets are also important. A spouse, a friend, your mom, the internet. This blog is a way for me to empty my brain and focus in on what’s important. My posts on Instagram allow me to organize my thoughts. Having these outlets are a huge part to stress management.
Look Forward to the Small Things
Enjoying life: I think the last key to stress management is to plan something every single day that you enjoy. It can be small like watching a 30 minute tv show, doing a 20 minute yoga session, eating a candy bar. Self-care doesn’t have to be an entire day alone in a bath (It could be!) but if you are like me and are barely fitting life into the confines of 24 hour days, hours in a bath are not feasible.
Instead practice self-care that is attainable. You should enjoy at least a tiny portion of every day. Life would be no fun if it was all stuff we HAD to do and nothing that we wanted to do. I don’t think self-care needs to be saved for the weekend or for a vacation. Those things are important too, but there should be something in every single day that you look forward to.
These are my tips for making life less stressful: Time management, better planning, organization, exercise, mental outlets, and short and sweet daily indulging. When you know what is coming in your day, and you have something to look forward to each day, somehow the stressful things don’t seem as bad.
And the person that seems like they are doing it all when you are just doing one part of their day… just remember it’s all relative. You don’t know what you don’t know. They might be coping with stress better because on their stress scale it’s a five and on yours it’s a nine. You wouldn’t expect someone that’s been through child birth to think a papercut is as painful as someone who has never broken a bone or twisted an ankle. Keep YOUR life in perspective, without comparing it to someone else’s baseline!