Stress ... what an ugly word!

I realized over the weekend that my stress level was way to high again. I decided to start working on it, to start managing it instead of letting it manage me. I joined Spark's "Official Stress Busting Challenge".
www.sparkpeople.com/mysp
ark/groups_individual.asp?
gid=42563

One of my tasks to do this first week is to write my goals for the challenge. I sat down to do that on Sunday. My mind was such a whirl that I couldn't make heads nor tails of the process. I wrote an entry in my journal and closed the book on it for the day.

Monday, I walked in the front door with the thought that I was going to sit down, relax, and work on those goals. I sniffed and smelled something horrid. One dog had had an accident in her crate. A load of laundry and a bath for that dog later, I wasn't writing goals for my challenge, I was cleaning up where the other dog had dropped his blood sugar and thrown up.

There are days when I really do think that stress is spelled L-I-F-E! Once the washer was going, the carpets, the bathroom, the sun room and the dog were all cleaned, I sat down with my laptop. I began to journal. Now, when I journal, I don't write anything that you'd want to read! It may not even make sense to me to go back to it later on, but that's not the purpose. My aim is to get the feelings out of me because when left in me, they eat at me and eventually I eat to stop the feelings. I really don't want THAT to happen! So, out poured the words on my heart.

And then, came the goals. At least what I think my challenge goals are. I'll re-read them each day for a couple of days and see if they are really my goals or if I need to tweak them a bit. But at the end of my writing, I felt so much better. My heart was lighter, one pup was cleaner, the other more settled. Life was on the mend! I could feel the stress meter decreasing! Woohoo!!! Life goes on!