Stress is a Choice

I believe that stress is a choice.

I have spent about 2/3 of my life quitting bad habits. I’ve gone from grinding my teeth to biting my nails and back again more times than I can count. I know that my bad habits crop up in times of stress and I attempt to quit them in times of relative peace.

In my second year of teaching I decided to keep a “stress calendar”. On every working day I rated my stress level from 1 (no pulse) to 10 (ready to be committed). Sometimes I forgot about it entirely and sometimes I got a bit of sick satisfaction from writing down an “8” or even a “9”. What I did not anticipate, however, was the amount of stress relief that calendar would bring me in my third year of teaching.

When I got to the end of my last staff meeting that first week of school in my third year, I checked my calendar. Last year I rated this day a “7”. Just reading that brought me down to a “5”. That day in October when I realized that my guided reading schedule, which looked so perfect in August, just simply wouldn’t work with this group of students should’ve been at least a “6”, but came down to a “4” when I realized that October never got below a “5” the year before. In December, when my family and my in-laws started competing for holiday time and my kids were bouncing off the walls, I didn’t even need to look at my calendar.

Now, in my sixth year of teaching, I never look at that calendar. I don’t need to because I realized that stress is a choice. There are ebbs and flows to the amount of stress I suffer from in my personal and professional life. I can choose to be stressed or I can choose to be calm. The things that I cannot control will not change no matter how stressed I am and the things that matter now will most likely be distant memories before I know it.

I believe that stress is a choice.