Accepting the stress

Hi

For a while, my goal was to keep my stress levels low. My experience of living in a big city taught me that stress has no limits and it can push and push down on you until you have no time to sleep. 

I call this stress unhealthy. It is powerful and it takes over your life. It is like a monster that is stronger than you and makes you work by sucking the life force out of you. 

It took me a while to get out of those habits. To not think of myself as needing to achieve an unreachable goal in a short amount of time all the time. This was done by first, trying to limit my stress levels during the day. By pulling myself away from work when things are stuck and drinking a cup of tea or some coffee. And in the second place, by becoming able to break the task into a number of stages instead of going for solving the problem right before the deadline. 

Instead of pushing myself close to the deadline, I start by imagining what the solution will look like and also by visualizing the problem in a drawing app. like draw.io. It helps later to write reports and also helps the mind to think. Thinking is not just in the head. Thinking can be done by writing thoughts. One time I had a meeting with myselves. I am saying myselves because there were three voices in my head. two were arguing with different opinions and one was organizing and judging their opinions. And I started writing it in 3 different colors. I am not saying this is the best way of doing things but it certainly helps to document and also think slowly. Sometimes our minds are faster than our hands and our tounges. This will make us think of ourselves as higher than what we can present. 

So there is a phase of documenting. For an example of the schematic diagram of a circuit, this phase can help with naming the nets and thinking of how things are interconnected from a higher level. Or for a code, the structure of the code and variable naming. The good thing about it is when you think loud and outside of your head, you can invite people in to join you and become aware of what you have in mind. Their opinions can shape your idea and the most important part is you can delegate work. It is very important to be able to make other people aware of the final solution so they can take part and work on it. It's very hard to make any noise with one hand.

Now by breaking down the stress of doing the job from a few days to a few weeks, I am helping myself to be involved with people and also live healthier and be able to split my day into work and my personal time. Too much stress makes it hard for the mind to change gears from work to self and it prefers to always be thinking of work. This is very important if you have a hobby that you are working on. You want to have a clear mind when you are busy with what is important to you.