So here's my not-at-all official analysis of things to NOT let freak you out when you're otherwise overwhelmed, plus some ideas on how to put your life back together a bit when you can.
1. Eating perfectly. Let's be honest - if time and money were no object, most people would eat organic fruits/veg/meat all or most of the time. We'd have homemade meals 3 x a day or even more if possible - because we could pay someone else to do it. That isn't to say we wouldn't all splurge some on pizza or other comfort foods, but still. When you're overwhelmed with life though, you might be struggling just to remember to eat, much less worry about what it is you're putting in your system. That's OK - kinda. As long as you don't let it go on for too long. Don't beat yourself up over not having the energy to cook if you realize you haven't managed a full nights sleep in weeks - that's just being unfair.
2. Getting all of your exercise plans in. Again, if time & money didn't affect this it'd be easy to get in 5 workouts a week, and each one would focus on a different muscle group or goal and you'd be perfectly toned. Well, maybe. At the very least you could have a custom fitness plan made by a personal trainer just for YOU and you would have time to get your workouts in plus eating, sleeping, working, relaxing, and taking care of your family and/or social needs. Sometimes though, you need to realize that if you have been on your feet all day for several days in a row - you probably don't actually need a full workout schedule - or your extra physical activity for that week should be stretching or something else low impact. You can't expect your joints to love you for pounding the pavement if you've been standing on concrete for 50 of the last 90 hours.
3. Keeping the house immaculate (or even mostly clean). I am the first person to admit that while I hate most housekeeping duties, I do LOVE a clean house. I find it very satisfying to come home after a long day and have a clean home. At the same time, if I have to make the choice of whether to take 30 min for myself for the first time that week or to scrub the kitchen, well screw cleanliness! There's a bright side to having a dog, and that's to help you keep the floor clean - at least of crumbs/food. I mean, in my opinion a certain amount of housework strictly has to be done to keep a house functioning - if you don't have any clean dishes, towels, or underwear life gets very difficult. But sometimes those are the only things that truly get taken of due to pressures/stress - and that's OK too.
Now, that's not to say that it's helpful or healthy to throw all of this to the wayside at the same time or for months on end. Of course, if your current life suddenly involves taking care of a sick relative or any other life shattering event - sometimes you just have to get by however you can manage. Assuming that isn't the case, you can put some plans in place to try to keep some parts of your life on track and to eventually get it all back there.
For me, I have two basic strategies I use to either keep my life from falling completely off track or to help rein it back in.
For the first one, it's more of a give-and-take approach. I take a few minutes before my week starts and try to map out how it's going to go, and figure out when I can make what concessions. The idea is that some days housework is being laughed at, or maybe a few days are spent sitting on your ass as much as possible, and yet other days turn into junk food marathons. The trick is to make sure not more than one of these is happening at once, insofar as you are able of course.
For instance, last week I knew I had a day where I was going to spend most of my day on the go, unable to eat leftovers and likely to have to surrender to whatever food I could get my hands on the easiest. BUT, I knew I would have the chance to get in a decent amount of walking around. So I made sure that morning to at least get a couple dishes done and the trash taken out before I left so that housework wasn't COMPLETELY thrown away with my diet. Another day, I knew I was mounded underneath piles and piles and piles of laundry. Who knew that brand new cloth diapers had to be run through the wash 4+ times to get absorbent? Don't even get me started on the sanitizing procedures for used diapers... So that day I knew I was going to be a slave to my washing machine and dryer and spend much too much time folding baby clothes to. So that day, I dedicated to mostly the house, but made sure to take the time while clothes were drying to get decent food made.
This plan is all about compromising daily so that your total week outlook doesn't look/feel horrible on the health front. Make sure to try to take one day too where you have at least some time to yourself so that your emotional health doesn't fall apart.
I use this method mostly to get on track as best as I can during times of ridiculous stress. Once I feel like things are settling down - or at least working their way into the new norm - I tend to switch to my second phase plan.
Plan B
But it's not the morning after pill, even though it can feel like it, when you finally get to "wake up" from the fog of ohmygodwhatdidIdolastnight (week/month/whatever) and realize you have to fix at least something in order to get your life back, you get to my Plan B. Maybe you just finally finished unpacking your house (guilty) or thank god your kid's school just started up again...you have a chance to catch your breath and get back on track. So you can graduate from the above "getting through" plan and start making the conscious decision to put your health up front again.
The plan: you use the give-and-take approach as a backdrop, but slowly make ONE aspect (food, exercise, or house) your primary goal. So for instance on a given week you make the effort to not let more than one aspect fall behind a day but you also make sure that you have a primary aspect that isn't ever thrown to the dogs. I usually do this in a specific order. I put food first, then exercise, then getting the house in order. There's a reason for this: food is the fuel for your exercise, so you can't workout if you aren't fueled correctly.
So I go through probably 2-3 weeks where maybe housework still falls apart or gets ignored a bit, and maybe I'm only getting sufficient physical activity once or twice a week, but I'm back to my healthy eating habits 5-6 days. Because it all honesty not only is that as good as it ever gets, but I feel like as long as I'm not a professional athlete or physical trainer in some way, it's as good as it ever needs to be. After I have managed this idea for a few weeks, then I add in workouts as my secondary focus. So maybe for another couple of weeks housework is still only barely get done enough (like the dishes are done and you have enough clean underwear and the toilet and fridge aren't actively growing anything), but you make sure still to have healthful food 5-6 days a week and get your workouts back up to 4-5 days a week - because honestly that's about as much as I feel is NECESSARY for most people. If you work really hard on 4 days, you can have 3 rest days as long as you aren't completely sedentary on all of them.
Finally, after at least a month of getting back on track, then I add in my more regular housekeeping schedule. This refers to the more "deep cleaning" aspects, ya know what happens when you get beyond the 2 min counter/table wipe and the picking up of the absolute essentials from the floor.. The one nice thing about house work is that even when you're in the thick of things, if you can find 15 min every day to do light maintenance, most things don't get totally out of hand. This is of course excluding dishes and/or laundry which sometimes get overwhelming. But if you can do just a smidgen even when you're exhausted - but stay away from the trap of deep cleaning anything - you can usually keep afloat. I try to make sure to get a quick shower/toilet cleaning in every two weeks so that I can avoid spending time truly scrubbing it. Or at least I can for now. We'll see how that thought changes when we have kids. But if I get totally overwhelmed at that point, then I'm relying on my dear husband to step it up and make sure the bathroom isn't growing stuff.
That being said, sometimes you have to take a sanity break from all of it. Stress can do crazy things to everyone and everyone manages stress differently. To those of you in the thick of disaster, you do what you need to to keep on keeping on today. Whether that's a gallon of ice cream, a telenovela marathon, or refusing to get out of your pjs...or in my case sometimes all three. But don't take too long of a break, because your life won't wait for you indefinitely. Just make sure to tell anyone who gives you grief for your time out....
For me, I have two basic strategies I use to either keep my life from falling completely off track or to help rein it back in.
For the first one, it's more of a give-and-take approach. I take a few minutes before my week starts and try to map out how it's going to go, and figure out when I can make what concessions. The idea is that some days housework is being laughed at, or maybe a few days are spent sitting on your ass as much as possible, and yet other days turn into junk food marathons. The trick is to make sure not more than one of these is happening at once, insofar as you are able of course.
For instance, last week I knew I had a day where I was going to spend most of my day on the go, unable to eat leftovers and likely to have to surrender to whatever food I could get my hands on the easiest. BUT, I knew I would have the chance to get in a decent amount of walking around. So I made sure that morning to at least get a couple dishes done and the trash taken out before I left so that housework wasn't COMPLETELY thrown away with my diet. Another day, I knew I was mounded underneath piles and piles and piles of laundry. Who knew that brand new cloth diapers had to be run through the wash 4+ times to get absorbent? Don't even get me started on the sanitizing procedures for used diapers... So that day I knew I was going to be a slave to my washing machine and dryer and spend much too much time folding baby clothes to. So that day, I dedicated to mostly the house, but made sure to take the time while clothes were drying to get decent food made.
This plan is all about compromising daily so that your total week outlook doesn't look/feel horrible on the health front. Make sure to try to take one day too where you have at least some time to yourself so that your emotional health doesn't fall apart.
I use this method mostly to get on track as best as I can during times of ridiculous stress. Once I feel like things are settling down - or at least working their way into the new norm - I tend to switch to my second phase plan.
Plan B
But it's not the morning after pill, even though it can feel like it, when you finally get to "wake up" from the fog of ohmygodwhatdidIdolastnight (week/month/whatever) and realize you have to fix at least something in order to get your life back, you get to my Plan B. Maybe you just finally finished unpacking your house (guilty) or thank god your kid's school just started up again...you have a chance to catch your breath and get back on track. So you can graduate from the above "getting through" plan and start making the conscious decision to put your health up front again.
The plan: you use the give-and-take approach as a backdrop, but slowly make ONE aspect (food, exercise, or house) your primary goal. So for instance on a given week you make the effort to not let more than one aspect fall behind a day but you also make sure that you have a primary aspect that isn't ever thrown to the dogs. I usually do this in a specific order. I put food first, then exercise, then getting the house in order. There's a reason for this: food is the fuel for your exercise, so you can't workout if you aren't fueled correctly.
So I go through probably 2-3 weeks where maybe housework still falls apart or gets ignored a bit, and maybe I'm only getting sufficient physical activity once or twice a week, but I'm back to my healthy eating habits 5-6 days. Because it all honesty not only is that as good as it ever gets, but I feel like as long as I'm not a professional athlete or physical trainer in some way, it's as good as it ever needs to be. After I have managed this idea for a few weeks, then I add in workouts as my secondary focus. So maybe for another couple of weeks housework is still only barely get done enough (like the dishes are done and you have enough clean underwear and the toilet and fridge aren't actively growing anything), but you make sure still to have healthful food 5-6 days a week and get your workouts back up to 4-5 days a week - because honestly that's about as much as I feel is NECESSARY for most people. If you work really hard on 4 days, you can have 3 rest days as long as you aren't completely sedentary on all of them.
Finally, after at least a month of getting back on track, then I add in my more regular housekeeping schedule. This refers to the more "deep cleaning" aspects, ya know what happens when you get beyond the 2 min counter/table wipe and the picking up of the absolute essentials from the floor.. The one nice thing about house work is that even when you're in the thick of things, if you can find 15 min every day to do light maintenance, most things don't get totally out of hand. This is of course excluding dishes and/or laundry which sometimes get overwhelming. But if you can do just a smidgen even when you're exhausted - but stay away from the trap of deep cleaning anything - you can usually keep afloat. I try to make sure to get a quick shower/toilet cleaning in every two weeks so that I can avoid spending time truly scrubbing it. Or at least I can for now. We'll see how that thought changes when we have kids. But if I get totally overwhelmed at that point, then I'm relying on my dear husband to step it up and make sure the bathroom isn't growing stuff.
That being said, sometimes you have to take a sanity break from all of it. Stress can do crazy things to everyone and everyone manages stress differently. To those of you in the thick of disaster, you do what you need to to keep on keeping on today. Whether that's a gallon of ice cream, a telenovela marathon, or refusing to get out of your pjs...or in my case sometimes all three. But don't take too long of a break, because your life won't wait for you indefinitely. Just make sure to tell anyone who gives you grief for your time out....
What was your last big stressing event/circumstance that led you to take a break from healthy living?
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