Seven: Experiment Seven

I didn't mean to miss the intro to the final experiment for my Seven year. October was my month to give up excess stress. Strangely, I went into the month knowing that it would be a HUGE challenge -- maybe my hardest one yet!

We knew several months ago that Allen was supposed to be on turn-around most of October. Since the little kids' birthday falls in October, and we had school commitments, and I'd be a not-quite-single-parent, we decided not to have parties for birthdays this year. We DID plan to celebrate, but not with a clean-the-house-all-week-for-company-and-worry-about-head-count-and-and-goody-bags kind of celebrations. I also told Will that we needed to focus on him getting through his afternoon at-home school work done in a reasonable amount of time before we would consider any extra-curricular activities AND that I wouldn't consider signing him up for anything other than scouts until November. Again, this was KNOWING I'd be going into a stressful month because of Allen's work schedule.

What we DIDN'T know until just before the turn-around started is that Allen would NOT be participating with the turn-around much. He ended up working mostly normal hours, and his work schedule didn't add any stress to our lives. But... by then we already had plans to not party or do extra-curricular activities. Nonetheless, it was still quite a challenge for me to chill out. I had my good days. I had my bad days. I had many runs of days that were so frustrating that I almost gave up trying for October, but I kept at it.

I started home schooling, and planned the days so that stress would be at a minimum. Knowing the things that stress me out, frustrate me, and make me angry makes it easier to plan to avoid those things. Overall, my strategy was to plan, prepare, but keep my plans flexible enough (and slightly under-planned when I knew it would be better to "go with the flow") that I would not get frustrated if things changed. I also tried to eat healthy foods and practiced saying "no" when others asked me to do things that would add to my stress unnecessarily.

Yes, I learned some things this month. One: reducing stress is harder for me than skipping sugar (January), skipping laundry (February), and getting rid of stuff (March). The other things I learned really pulled all the year's experiment results together though.

• Making healthy food choices greatly reduces stress. When I eat well, I have more energy and patience. This month, when I ate right, I didn't have the energy highs and lows that add to my stress levels.
• It is much less stressful when I have fewer choices of clothes to wear. It makes it easier to stay caught up on laundry.
• Stuff. Piles of stuff, drawers of stuff, everywhere stuff stress me out. I really like my desk clean and empty on top. I like nothing on my nightstand except one book and my alarm clock. I made time to clear away clutter from some of those spots, but it keeps coming back. (Part of the problem is that I'm usually reading half a dozen books at once.) That's an area I made a lot of progress on in March, but I still have a really long way to go.
• Media adds a lot of stress to my life. TV was pretty easy to minimize, but I did catch up on a couple episodes of Castle. Otherwise, I still skip most of it. The radio is sometimes on, but with my hearing issues, any other noise means I can't hear the music anyway. Emails I often need, but even my email account gets cluttered with ads I can do with out. I spent a bunch of time unsubscribing this month, but I think I only put a tiny dent in the pile. 
• Waste is still something we struggle with. We found great containers that mean we use hardly any baggies, so the ziplocks aren't taunting me each night when its time to wash them. But, the piles of recyclables in the garage continue to grow. I did take a carload to the recycle center finally, but ended up bringing all the glass back since they just quit taking glass. It is more effort to recycle now than to just put it in the trash, but feeling guilty about being wasteful adds stress.
• Spending -- ah, spending. Last month, Allen and I gave up all our disposable spending (is that the right term?). This month, we started home schooling three kids. We purchased desks, some book cases, our school curricula, and lots of books we would be using for school. Stressful? Spending that much at once can definitely can cause me some uneasiness, but not this time -- after all, we saved a bunch last month. 

It's been a semi-successful experiment. I did reduce a lot of stress, even if it wasn't as much as I had hoped. I did keep from over-booking an already busy month. I probably need to quit stressing about how much I stressed... but, unfortunately, that's me. Maybe the part of ME that I can work on in 2014.