Preventing Stress By Cleaning and Organizing

How Do You React to Stress? We all have stress. In fact, stress was designed by nature to help us cope effectively with life threatening situations. I’m sure you’ve heard of “Fight or Flight” as a response to stress. But less well know are other reactions to stress. I like to call one of them “Deer in the Headlights”. There are people who don’t fight or flee. They are transfixed, like that proverbial deer that stands and gets hit by the car. That’s an important point, because not taking action, or lack of reaction, is a choice too! Procrastination doesn’t result in an effective way of ridding yourself of stress! It actually is just another sign that you are stuck in stress and not getting closer to your goals. A New Stress Reduction Technique Did you know that Fight or Flight research was originally tested on a population of men only? It turns out that women have more coping mechanisms. Women, researchers found, use cleaning as a stress reduction technique. It makes perfect sense to me! When my desk is covered with paper, old half finished coffee cups, tissues, CDs, pens, unopened mail, etc., I feel like a mess inside as well as exte ally! I know the stress reduction technique that will work the best for me is CLEAN and organize my desk! Stress relief can actually be preventative! It turns out that organizing one’s life can be an excellent stress relief technique. In fact, developing good habits can prevent stress from affecting you in the first place! That’s right; the best way to reduce stress is to prevent it! Keeping a calendar up to date in a visible place can relieve stress as well. Details of deadlines, meetings, and other important events won’t creep up on you and leave you scrambling to finish things under enormous pressure. Using that calendar can also prevent you from having to make excuses and apologies for the things you missed, or didn’t get done in time. It’s always harder getting back into something that out of it in the first place. So often we create more work for ourselves because we don’t do the job the right way from the beginning. For example, you take your dirty dish and put it in the sink. It sits there waiting until you have time to come back and finish cleaning it and putting it away. If you had fish it becomes smelly; if you had cheese, it gets hard on the dish. The bottom line is, you now have to get the odor out of the air, or use extra effort to scrape the dish before it will get clean. If you cleaned it off right away it would be done with no extra effort. It’s the same thing with my messy desk. If I put my items where they belonged immediately, I wouldn’t have to deal with spending extra time looking for important papers that I needed to fill out; searching for my keys under said papers, or making piles to then sort and put away at another later time. In other realms of life, getting out of something, such as getting back into physical shape after you stopped exercising or over eating causes a lot more suffering and takes a LOT more time instead of simply making the effort right from the beginning. I hope you are seeing the point. Do it right, PREVENT stress, save time for other more fun activities in your life when you organize and follow through right from the beginning. It’s said that a new habit takes 28 days of repetition to become established. Start today and see how much less stress you have a month from now!