Stressor Stacks

Do you ever feel your life is a game of Jenga? If you pull out the wrong block the whole works is going to thunk down on your head?

If so, it's time to manage your stressor stack. We all have a tower of obligations that conspire to squash our creativity. The trick is knowing how many you can juggle at once and still have brain space to be creative.

Lately my writing brain has felt like cold oatmeal. 

Writer's block? No. A gazillion unfinished projects still rattle the bars in my noggin. 

Fear of rejection? No. Rejection is an expectation along the yellow brick writing road.

So what gooped up my process? Yep, you guessed it

 STRESS.

The human brain had a finite capacity to deal with stressors. When we overload it, we are zapped emotionally and the first thing to go is creativity.

I ignored and mismanaged my stressors, allowing them to shut down the creative factory between my ears.

So how did I solve it and jump back in the creative saddle? 

I identified and validated each stressor to keep them from immobilizing me. We all have them, and they're not going away. By ignoring them, I'd allowed mine to grow fangs and gnaw at my brain. Once I put a face and priority on the blocks in my stack, I could strategize, assigning each a fair portion of my consciousness. The stressors didn't disappear, but they no longer run wild, wantonly slurping up my mental time and emotional space.

I assigned importance to relaxing. I'm terrible at finding contemplative, peaceful moments, but I'm working on stillness to give stress an outlet to leak out of my ears and blow away on the breeze. 

More importantly, I re-validated the place creativity has in my life. It is a "have to" for me. By letting the stressors take the lead, I had passively relegated writing to a lesser priority. *slaps hand* I re-committed to treating my creative life as if I were an athlete in training. I focus on healthy eating, exercise, and not compromising the time my writing muscles deserve each day in order to tone and build.

And guess what?

The creative channels in my brain unclogged. The energy and drive to sit down and write came flooding back. Once again I'm surrounded by spiral notebooks overflowing with ideas and bullet points, and my laptop needs charging everyday.

So get out your whips and tame those stressors. Don't let them sneak up on you the way I did. 

Writer's have a right to write no matter how high your Jenga stack grows.

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