It’s Tuesday evening. You’ve just wrapped a day at work. Lots of meetings, you didn’t get everything done that you wanted to, but hey, that’s how it goes on Tuesdays. You tell yourself tomorrow will be better because you only have meetings in the afternoon. You arrive home to a sinkful of dishes, laundry piled up, and the inescapable feeling that you’re forgetting something.
Your intelligent and precocious daughter bounds into the room and gives you a big hug. “Are you excited for my school event tonight?”
There it is.
You smoothly cover it up, assuring her you’re excited while discreetly checking your phone, swearing there was nothing on the calendar. But sure enough, it’s right there. A school event at 6pm.
This evening is now dramatically different from the evening you had planned on your drive home from work. You change your clothes, throw something together for dinner, and head to the school. The event is a lot of fun and you feel yourself starting to relax. You did it. You made it through the day and you can picture yourself sitting on the couch in a comfy pair of sweatpants.
You return home and feel like the house is a bit cold. You check the thermostat and it reads 62 degrees. Well below the comfortable 70 degrees you have it set to.
“Yeah. That feels about right” you say quietly to yourself.
Your daughter tells you it’s cold in the house as you search your phone for an HVAC repair company. You brace yourself for a long and sleepless night reading online reviews. You know you have to call your boss in the morning to tell them you won’t be in.
Everything is always happening all the time.
Why does it feel like this? Is it cognitive dissonance? Is it a glitch in the Matrix?
I don’t know the answer. I know that’s frustrating because I’m sure you were hoping for something more profound. While I don’t know the reason life can sometimes feel like one swift kick in the nuts after another, I do know there are things you can do when it feels like this.
Evaluate. The days lost to meetings, forgotten important events, and real crises are all very real things. What has to be addressed right now and what can wait? Crisis management is all about prioritizing the most important things. In our story it might seem like it’s the furnace.
But is it?
Is the forecast predicting cold weather or is it warm enough where you could get by? Do you have options like space heaters? Maybe the sleepless night of review-scrolling can be avoided. Can you take the night and regroup in the morning? Do you have to take the day off work? This extra time might help you in more ways than you realize right away. Is there someone that can come to your house while the repair person is there so you don’t have to miss work?
We treat so many crises as emergencies because so often they are. Taking a little time to evaluate (especially if your day already has you primed) your options might make a bad situation a little easier to deal with.
Take stock. It might feel like everything is the worst, but it probably isn’t. Take stock of what’s going well, what’s making you happy, and what is abundant in your life. I’ve never been the type of person to tell someone that someone always has it worse, but reminding yourself of the good in your life can take some of the sting out of a seemingly never ending series of events.
Work the problem. We’ve all heard the famous quote from longtime NASA flight director Gene Kranz, memorialized in 1995’s Apollo 13; “failure is not an option.” Gene Kranz was trying to save the lives of three astronauts, hurtling through space in a crippled spacecraft following an explosion on their way to the moon. For Kranz, failure meant the deaths of three people and the possible shutdown of the entire Apollo space program.
Talk about pressure.
Perhaps what you’re dealing with is a matter of life or death. One set of problems is no worse nor better than another. A common human fallacy is placing levels of importance on problems. A problem is a problem and how we react and deal with those problems are entirely personal to us. It depends entirely on our individual life experience. Don’t waste time trying to decide if your problem is “worth” feeling stressed over. It is. There you go.
Now that you know your problem, work it. What is the outcome you need? Where are you now? How do you get from point A to point B with the resources at your disposal?
We know it’s going to feel like everything is happening all the time. We also know that it isn’t always going to feel that way.
How do you handle it when everything is happening all the time? Comment below and let’s talk.
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