Stress Relief

Over the years I have been a victim of stress sometimes and while I still occasionally confront the demon stress-monster, these days I can usually vanquish him with casual and relaxing punch in the face.

Most of my stress comes from my job, something I think is true the world over. It amazes me that we as a society can allow ourselves to wind ourselves up at work to the point where it actually causes physical symptoms. You often feel like you really have been in a fight with a monster.

Something like this happened to me about seventeen years ago and I vowed that I would declare war on the beast that threatens to destabilize my life. These days we spar intermittently with me almost always coming out on top.

I have a few techniques that work for me to deal with stress. Some are obvious, others may seem rather unorthodox. They work for me and usually manage to keep me in control of the demonic beast at both a professional and a personal level. Here they are:

Hypnosis

Before you slap a label on me as a crackpot, let me explain. In a previous post, I started out attacking hypnotism as a mystical load of old bollocks for gullible people. That is until I tried it, in the name of research. 

You can read about it here.

What I discovered was that if you lie back in a darkened room and listen to a hypnosis tape for a while, you actually do start to de-stress. I would never pay money to go for hypnotherapy and on a couple of occasions I have tried it to relax with a lot of success. Try it - YouTube is full of them.

I am still sceptical about it – particularly when people start talking about past life regression and nonsense like that. I can’t imagine for a second that I have lived before, let alone suddenly find that under a hypnotic trance that I weirdly have access to these past lives. That is plain ridiculous.

Beer With Friends

Some foreigners may think that the British tradition of sitting in a pub with friends and/or family at the end of a hard work is a bit strange. The truth is that there is no better way of unwinding with good company, good ale and a bellyful of laughs. The stress monster is never invited to such shindigs.

Listen To Chill Out Music

Music is very therapeutic and it is a very important part of my life. There are numerous songs in my collection that are gentle, peaceful and soothing and usually invoke a special memory like lying on a beach in the sun with the waves kissing the beach and Mrs PM next to me as we sip a cold drink. 

Here is an example of a stress melter:

Playing With Cats

I have three cats, all of which have different personalities. They are getting on a bit at the moment yet I can entertain myself with each one of them, either gently stroking them, or baiting them with string, toy mice or my own hand (which is risky, particularly with the hellcat who has the capability and the will to induce more stress; having to go to hospital can be quite stressful itself).

Ask Yourself “What’s the worst that can happen?”

I am afraid of public speaking and the first time I had to really face my fear was when I was asked to travel to America to give a course. Beforehand, I spent about a month beating myself up about it to the point where I actually decided that I was going to just refuse to go. However, I am professional and I decided to take the bull by the horns and go for it. I asked myself “What is the worst that can happen?” and I answered my own question. Nothing, even the sack, would matter – I would bounce back even from that. In the end, I was nervous but I completed the course. And since then I have given courses in Russia, Switzerland, China and South Africa. I still hate it it but I don’t allow myself to get stressed about it.

Go for a Long Walk

My days are generally split into two when working. I endure the morning period and then at around 12:30, I pick up my iPod, leave the building and embark upon a walk of just over two miles with my music as a soundtrack. Not only does this get me away from my desk, it also allows me free thinking time where I can drift into my own imagination and even reignite my creativity. And of course, my mind wonders away from the pressure of work for half an hour or so.

Go on Holiday

Whenever work starts to grind me down, I look at my calendar and remind myself of my travel plans. Sadly, I don’t get enough holiday to travel anywhere near as much as I want to, which is frustrating but at the same time makes the trips I take very special. At the moment, I have two holidays to Europe booked and a weekend break next week in Barcelona. The stress is fading just thinking about it.

Play a Video Game

You may think that I am a little too old to indulge in childish pursuits such as playing games on a console. And the truth is that I am. Yet when I decide to pick up the joystick and play a football game or become a nightmarish villain in a surreal city or even fight zombies and monsters in a scary labyrinth, my imagination runs amok and once again I have a victory over worries and tension.

Read and Write

I may not be a good writer, but putting down my thoughts on paper is a fantastic way of winding down. Whenever I put myself at the mercy of my imagination, I usually have fun, even if it’s writing a simple blog post, a plan for one of the many books in my head or just my thoughts. Whether anybody reads my words is totally irrelevant – it’s great to just get them down.

Alternatively, there are few things more enjoyable than immersing yourself in a decent book. Stories are wonderful things and I always imagine myself as the constant companion of the heroes of the story, watching them as they struggle, lose and ultimately triumph (though not always). It’s a great way to forget about your own woes.

Listen to Hard and Heavy Rock Music

This may sound a bit weird, but when I allow myself to totally succumb to stress, which does happen, albeit infrequently these days, I simply blast away the negativity with a good dose of noise. It may seem wrong to unleash loud and heavy music when in a mood like that but for me at least it totally works. At the end of a heavy tune I feel a lot better – something like this:



R.I.P Lemmy

Spend Time With Family

Letting off steam to Mrs PM and family generally can be therapeutic because ultimately they will listen to you and offer words of encouragement. Of course, simply chilling out with family is equally good. There are few things I like better than spending time with Mrs PM and/or my two lads.

And Finally …

Over to you, dear reader.

How do you cope with stress?

What techniques have you for winding down and beating back the stress demon?

The Importance Of Being Lazy

We live in a world where we’re urged get up and then hit turbo charge and attack each day as if it is the last day of our lives. From the moment my crusty eyes open after a night’s sleep I am on the bloody move. I look at my clock and think “Crap! I’m going to be late!!”

So I get up, rush to get to the bathroom before Mrs PM, race downstairs, get hassled by the cats, prepare their breakfast, make my lunch, rush out, hit the rush hour, curse because I’ve forgotten to eat breakfast myself, curse again because I’m in such a rush that I forgot my lunch and finally after seemingly eons in the car I get to work,

When I arrive, I am urged to fall into line and spend an adrenalin-fuelled day meeting deadlines and being virtually ordered to be a dynamic robot, seeking excellence in everything I do. My entire day is usually a tiring stress-filled period of trauma where I have several people bothering me constantly:

“Have you done this?”

“Have you done that?”

Emails fly in, the phone rings, I’m asked question after question. I attend meeting after meeting. I barely have time to breath.

At the end of the day, I am a shredded nervous wreck. The greatest feeling in the world is driving out through the gates at the end of the day knowing that I can relax at least a little. But then there’s the drive home through the rush hour traffic to rekindle the stress-monster within.

When I finally arrive home I am shattered and want nothing more than to vegetate in front of the TV. My brain is quite literally fried, drained of all emotion and thought. My imagination is a distant memory and I find myself trying to fill the void with inane garbage on the TV. I sit there like a dribbling half-wit as boring drivel somehow gets past my mental firewall filling my mind with utter nonsense. Eventually my firewall somehow reboots and I am able to focus on more interesting stuff but then I realise that it is time to go to bed. My final thought before sleep claims me is:“Oh no! Back to work tomorrow!”

The cycle is inexorable and all-consuming, mentally draining and physically sickening.

And it doesn’t matter what you do or who you work for. I speak to friends and colleagues from all walks of life with all sorts of careers. It is the same for them.

Recently I’ve been asking myself, who the bloody hell decided that I should spend my entire life racing through days like a rocket powered Formula One car? What elite group of psychotic arses decided that everybody should run around like blue-arsed flies for their entire working lives? I’ve come to the conclusion that the whole world is run by a bunch of these people. I would like to call them "agitators”.

So, what is an agitator? It is a person who is driven to work, work, work until they are fit to drop and expects everybody else to fall in line. Such is their devotion to life in the fast lane that they drag the rest of us along with them. They regard idleness as a sin; they regard relaxation as a crime; they have no imagination; they want to rise as quickly as possible up the corporate ladder and will do anything to achieve their goals.

Agitators seem to think that it is somehow good for the rest of us to be overly productive, mentally alert, and run ourselves into the ground day in day out for the best years of our lives. We have been told that we must “GO, GO, GO!” constantly and inexorably. And if we do “GO GO GO” they tell us that we should “GO FASTER FASTER FASTER ”. We are not allowed to stop. We are expected to put in supreme effort and drain ourselves almost to an oblivious void. These people have somehow brainwashed everybody into thinking that we have to drive ourselves into the ground every single day.

We are good, they ask to be better.

We improve and become better, they ask to reach excellence.

We achieve excellence, we are asked to become perfect.

We reach perfection and that is still not enough. We have to become super-perfect. These are the kind of people who, when told “I will give you 100%”, dismiss that with a wave of their hands and say “100%? I WANT 200%!!!”

There’s no time even to be ill. If you ARE ill you have to personally phone up work; it’s as if nobody believes that you can be so ill that work is impossible. There are commercials on the TV for maximum über-strength cold and flu remedies that enable you to get to work and do your job even though you are in the grip of the worst flu imaginable. The agitators tell us “Life doesn’t stop just because you are sick and dying”.

I have an ambition to write a novel or at least some kind of book. I know that I will never do that unless something changes. When I arrive home from yet another day’s hard work, together with millions of people worldwide, my brain is about as useful as a chocolate teapot. My vivid imagination has been replaced by a nebulous cloud. I could not stimulate my mind if I applied a million volt electric shock (you may actually struggle to believe I hadn’t already done that if you’ve ever seen my hair on a bad day).

My mind becomes a void that can only be filled with trash.

If you read the job pages of a British broadsheet, you see that the demands on people are phenomenal. The job commercials demand qualities that even Superman would struggle to fulfil. Here are some examples I picked up recently from a broadsheet:

“Capable of thriving under pressure”

“Must be deadline oriented”

“Must be absolutely flexible”

“Must be able to solve any problem”

We are expected to hit the ground running and to stay there, burning ourselves out. Friends and colleagues in all walks of life and in many careers feel exactly the same. We are driven to dedicate our entire lives to this unending mind-destroying rat race.

We can’t relax, even at home or on holiday. Some people are driven to work all the hours they can and are not satisfied even when they achieve great things. I am astounded that people can go on holiday and take their work with them. They have to “GO GO GO GO GO” all of the time and if they are go-go-going at their fastest rate they are urged to slip into overdrive by the agitators.

I think we have forgotten about life and are gradually leaving it behind. In my twenty five years in the rat race, things have become far worse and I can only see things deteriorating rapidly. Stress is causing illness amongst the population of the world; demands are made through the management chain and by the time it reaches the bottom, everybody in the chain has suffered varying degrees of pressure. Even if you are not an agitator yet have some degree of success, the agitators will pile even more work and burdens upon you to make sure your stress levels are so high that you can be even more productive.

Okay, so we need to work to be able to live comfortably, but the agitators, the drivers of this fast paced life, have us by the short and curlies. We have to work and they know it, so their demands become greater while resources and time becomes scarcer. Even agitators have demands thrust upon them by competitors, customers and über-agitators higher up the food chain, whose requirements are becoming more absurd as time progresses. It’s a vicious circle of mayhem; we are all part of it and cannot escape.

Why should agitators ruin it for those who wish to be creative? Agitators are driven by a work ethic that is becoming increasingly all-consuming in all walks of life. Ultimately I see the human race becoming almost robotic. Longer working hours will mean that we have less free time to become relaxed and ponder the beauty of the world; we should be working shorter hours and using spare time to expand our minds. Agitators, who seem to be in charge, have forgotten how to do this and are driven solely by a meaningless ambition. They pat themselves on the back for their success.

Except they don’t have success do they, if we’re honest about it?

A large proportion of them set themselves and others increasingly absurd and unachievable deadlines and targets that they and the people who work for them can’t even dream of reaching. Just take a look at the crazy rush to build the new Wembley Stadium as a prime example of the failure of agitators. Look at the panic that ensues when other large building contracts and projects finish way over budget and years too late. It is a worldwide phenomenon and yet we sit there and continue to let the agitators dictate to us.

I ask myself whether it is time to fight back. Should we improve our quality of life by spending more time relaxing?

Agitators pour scorn on such rebellious thoughts by making out that this leads to idleness and sloth. You are lazy and therefore a total burden to society.

But I ask myself, what the hell is wrong with being idle?

My mind is normally active and, when not under pressure at work, I am constantly thinking about new stuff. My imagination tends to run amok if I am relaxed, particularly if fuelled by something strange I see in the news, or something weird I read in newspapers and magazines. Even something as mundane as watching a film can trigger a bizarre journey into the sick, sordid and wacky universe that is my imagination.

Yet the work ethic that is forced upon me by agitators is slowly killing that world. Even if I change my job to do something else I will be at the mercy of these people. Agitators call us lazy and the rest of society frowns upon us as a result. I can just imagine an agitator watching me at the moment and the thoughts that may go through his head.

“Why are you sitting there at a computer typing a blog post when you could be working? Your blog is meaningless. You don’t get paid for it – why bother? You may as well knuckle down and start thinking about how you are going to tackle your next week’s work.”

It shouldn’t have to be that way.

Staying in bed for an extra hour at the weekend is frowned upon and criticised by agitators.

Well, maybe it is time for me to make a stand. Maybe I shouldn’t allow agitators to dictate the roads I take. Okay, I have to work, but outside that work I should not be pushed around and accused of being unproductive just because I am refusing to tow society’s line of constantly running and living on an adrenalin-fuelled rollercoaster.

I think I will embrace idleness. Laziness will be my guide. Indolence will fuel my imagination and help me fuel my ambitions.

No more burning the midnight oil for me; no more worrying about work when I am at home. I will no longer allow agitators to accuse me of idleness just because I decide to spend my days strolling through the park, allowing my imagination to run free.

There is a world out there and being idle occasionally allows us to focus on it. Ignore the agitators; join me and we can derail this obsession with fast-paced, stress-inducing, agitator-driven rat race that we all have to endure.

Life is good – relax and enjoy it.