Stress Leave 3 – This seems odd

Why do things seem to be worse?

Today is day 7 of stress leave, i.e. not even a full week. I find myself wondering why things aren’t better and wondering even more (wondering harder?) why do things seem to be worse? I’ve seen what appears to be a paradox of rest before. I was talking to one of my brothers and he reminisced about vacations in the past, the take-three-weeks-and-go-somewhere-camping kind of vacations and mentioned how he was “always” sick for the first week. I have noticed similar occurrences with me and as I have asked around I have had lots of anecdotal evidence of the validity of this as a thing that happens. I don’t know if it is a real thing or an imagined thing.

I had been thinking “maybe if it is a real thing, I have it.” And then I looked back over the past seven days and realized the only alleviation of day-to-day stress has been not going to work. None of the other issues have reduced and one of the biggest ones ramped up a LOT. Throw in an extremely stressful one-off meeting and a nasty looking but minor injury to a grand kid and when I really look at where things are I am no longer surprised I feel the way I feel.

Perhaps a better measure of how things are improving is when my sleep improves . . . and so far there is no difference. I am still bolting awake at least once a night and taking anywhere from 20 minutes to an hour and a half to get back to sleep.

I am frustratingly jumpy. For most of my life I have been one of those people who does not startle easily. I “jump”* when someone drops something, my phone tells me I have a  text, a loud car revs up, sometimes when someone moves into my field of vision from an unexpected angle. Maybe there’s a better measure than sleep, when I stop jumping at things I’ll know I have stopped dropping and can start climbing back to normal.

Disclaimer: not sure if this is actually a disclaimer or not but if you would prefer to only get notification when a sermon is posted, let me know and I’ll see if I can figure out some way to make that happen. Your alternative is to make a rule in your email app to delete anything from me that has “Stress Leave – ” in the title which should accomplish the same thing.

*Even with this I don’t physically react all the time but the internal “jump” is just as annoying and out of character.