The stress cycle

Sometimes it feels like I'm some kind of weird biorhythm thing with stress because every time I get my stress levels down it's about two months before they're back up. But it's always something new. Admittedly, part of it is that, once one big stressor comes along, other things that I could normally brush off -- like jerkish behavior in Lusternia, or the cats waking me up at 5am every morning -- start to become part of the accumulation. In fact, while Carnage was a destressor on balance, some things about finding suitable food options there were stressors to the extent that more than a week later I found myself having stress-expressing dreams about it.

My current biggest stressor is something about which I can't say anything for various reasons, but it's a work thing. Actually right now there's two, one big and one not so big, and neither are really suitable subjects for blogging. Suffice to say that I'm not even missing coding; right now I'd be happy to be able to be writing an RFP.

Of the things I know of that'd help me burn off stress, many are unavailable or out of my control, but those that remain are usually simply inaccessible due to lack of time. There are too many things I need to spend time doing, because if I don't do them, they won't get done. In some cases, the destressors require work or preparation which itself is a time-limiting factor preventing me from doing other destressor activities. I wish I could just set things aside or dump them on someone else, but usually if I got it in the first place it's because no one else would do it.

The current stress-storm is mostly because of a situation that will probably resolve itself within a few weeks, so this time, maybe I just have to outwait it. Once that happens, one way or the other, the other work thing might not be too bad. On the other hand, this is the worst time of year for this. Shortage of sunlight, tightness of budget, extra pet energy from lack of exercise causing more strain, company over for holidays, and everything at work being cranked up due to the pressures of supporting retail, add to a difficult period to come into already having problems and stresses.

It's also not good for my blog, whose buffer has shrunk to under a week lately. I have fewer fun things to write about, and don't want to bore you with posts like this too often. And too much of what's going on in my life right now is stuff I shouldn't or can't write about anyway.