I have just spent half an hour being driven mad by Twitter, there is some sort of problem with their security shut down on accounts, it keeps telling me my account has been hacked and I need to change my password, in seconds it does it again. Of course, that means you have to wait for the email to come through before you can reset it, that means I am checking and checking my email as I have no patience at all with emails. The same thing happened a few weeks ago and they eventually admitted it was an error on their side, but now it is doing it again! So I am taking a break from it and the only way I can stop myself just trying and trying again, I am just hoping if I wait ten minutes or so, it will work as it should and let me get on with my daily routine. There is nothing more annoying than password issues with any on line site, if there is one thing in this modern world that is going to get you wound up and heading for a heart attack, it will be passwords, in fact I am surprised that we don’t hear that people expire just trying to use a cash machine as there you just know it is going to eat your card and then you will face the hassle with the bank.

I have always loved the ways that both doctors and MS Nurses keep telling us that the worst thing for our health is stress and that we should avoid it, I have never worked out what world they live in as it sure isn’t the same one that I do. Avoid stress, who are they kidding, it has to be the most unavoidable thing there is. It really did used to take major work issues to get me stressed, but once triggered everything that followed stressed me much quicker for the rest of the day. Outside of work I was generally not easily stressed, yes like anyone else when something major went wrong I got uptight about it, but small things well I really didn’t think that I did get stressed note the word didn’t. It wasn’t until the last year or so that I realised just how much of the stress I lived with was caused by me, not outside forces, in fact, I would go as far as to say that all of us are behind our own stress and that includes much of the stress that we have at work as well. Stress starts from when we are young and the first time someone told us we could do better, we just had to try harder, young children really hate letting their parents down and they take it to heart and push themselves to not disappoint again. The more we want to please, the higher our scale on the perfectionist ladder we go, as we grow up we learn that the world isn’t actually perfect, in this simple explanation I will say we go one of two ways, those who learn not to worry about it, if the world isn’t perfect why should they try to be, or those who see it as no excuse at all and they will still strive to be perfect regardless. If you have chosen perfection as I did, you simply won’t accept anything less of yourself and you land up spinning so many perfection plates, that it’s almost impossible to keep them all spinning and the stress just grows and grows until it feels normal. It wasn’t until I was forced to stop, to let all those plates crash to the ground and not even being able to pick up a single piece, that I realised there had been an excessive amount of stress in my life and in everyone else’s, without them knowing it was there either.

I have learned to ignore dust, mess and everything else, I have grown this bubble that means none of them even touch me any longer, something if you had said I would be able to live with 10 years ago, I just wouldn’t have even entertained the idea far less the possibility. Yes, I did have a stressful job, that is a fact not my assessment of it, as the role of Operations Manager for any call centre is living in stress, my job had an added role and added stress, supplying the statistics for the entire company. Add into it that I worked with rampant PRMS for 6 years and it clear to anyone that my stress levels just kept rising and rising with every new hurdle my health throw in its way. Within a month of working purely from home, which meant no meeting or stupid questions from those who knew better, I started to be able to eat and removed my gastric tube never to use it again. 3 years later I was made redundant, it took a year for the stress to start leaving me, but now well I am a different person. There are and always will be small things like passwords or things being moved or changed that bring on instant stress, but day to day life is so calm, so laid back that I actually notice any form of stress instantly. It took 5 password changes this morning before I started to stress and the fact that Twitter is now saying that I have tried to change my password too often in a short period of time hasn’t made me explode even though it is all their doing not mine.

In normal life stress is everywhere and no matter how well you believe you deal with it, trust me you don’t. My doctors were right, my life ran on stress and I was in many ways addicted to it, if I wasn’t stressed I didn’t know what to do with myself, I started looking for something, anything that could replace it, I am reasonably sure that was why I had a total inability to just sit still and do nothing. Doctors may tell you, you have to reduce the stress you live under, well the only way that happened for me was for it to be forced on me, I suspect the truth is the same for most of us, as modern life is stress, stress, and more stress. Everyone wants more down time, more time to relax, but we throw that away years ago when we demanded equality with men, hand in hand with women working, stress started to build on both sexes, you can’t have a perfect home, perfect children, and a perfect job, without perfect stress. The stupid thing is we all want better jobs, so that we can afford all the time-saving devices, send our kids to all the clubs and activities we don’t have the time to do with them ourselves and as our earnings rise we have to earn more and more, so we can pay for a cleaner, a childminder, better holidays, more gizmo’s and so it just goes on, we do it to ourselves.

I may have lost my health, my income and a hell of a lot more, but the best thing I lost was stress. No one would choose to be in my position, but it does have a few good things about it and being calm and unhassled by life is a huge plus. I never thought that being able to do so little would actually make me feel so much more alive, as back to front as that is, it’s the truth, I just wish I had learned that a long long time ago. I honestly wish that I could make all those out there who are trying right now to be the perfect everything, just what they are missing, if they would just set their sights that little bit lower, their lives would be so much better. If you didn’t have to earn that £3000 per year needed to pay for a fancy holiday abroad, that actually will just keep the stress going and instead worked less, not earning that £3000 in the first place, your life would benefit so much more, than it does with 12 days on a beach and 2 days in maddening airports, ever could.

Please read my blog from 2 years ago today – 19/10/12 – Stop picking

At last, it is Friday, the days of the week don’t often bother me what day of the week it is or what is happening outside of my home, to be honest. I look forward to the weekends, to having Adam at home and to having some company if that company always spends half the day asleep, he is still here. It is not just…..