How Do You Manage The Stress of Life?

My eye is twitching.  It has been for two weeks.  One of my students asked me this morning if I could stop my eye from "twitting" back and forth when he talked to me.  Yesterday it started drooping a bit.  For some people this would seem a bit alarming.  Not for me (but is should be).  This is just the run of the mill, stressful reaction in my life.  This is when I know I have reached my max - and yet in these moments I am so far deep that I can't get out.  Needless to say, I don't balance my life well.

It has become overwhelmingly apparent in the last couple of years how my body reacts to stress.  The early signs are often as typical as tension headaches in the back of my head and neck, tightness in the chest when I am at my most relaxed, and much more irritable.  Many of you can probably relate to these experiences, and agree that these are typical to someone during their most heightened levels of stress.  These are the moments I should listen to my body and find a way to back out of the stress.  But I don't.

What often comes next is the lack of sleep, or twilight sleep, as my mother calls those moments.  But they aren't moments - they go on all night long for months.  These are the moments when my brain is constantly active - I am dreaming about school, students, parents, meetings, songs and dances, presentations...  That usually happens from September until November.

Next becomes cognitive and speech delays.  These are the most frustrating and challenging - these are the scariest.  I struggle to find the right words, and stutter through my sentences.  Getting half way through a sentence and not being able to find the right word, when you talk all day long, used to be when I would get nervous and panic.  Now I know it is when I need to focus more than ever.  The other day I was with my sister and my mother and I was struggling so much to find the words to ask a question.  I could feel my shoulders slip down and that defeating feeling of being different started to surface again.  Later, I was checking out at Target and needed to get my wallet from my car.  I ran out I had no idea where I had parked and started to worry about holding up the line.  I got outside and realized I wasn't even in the Target I was envisioning - I was five miles away from where I thought.  Does this happen to you?

This morning is the day of our first performance here in sixth grade.  The students are excited and ready to celebrate - but we are still putting out the little fires that occur regularly in teaching and in performances.  It was in this moment of lost costumes, changing performance times, and excited sixth graders that I wished I had a method for reducing my stress during the day.  It was while I was holding my had over my eye in the hopes to calm it down, that I wished I had a method for handling life better than I do now.  The eye is new.  This is not a consistent reaction my body has had in the past to stress.  But that is the point - my body is always developing new outlets to manage stress.  Each of these outlets are damaging to my body, so I have to work on this more than ever.  It is scary to envision what will happen to my body, to my health, if I choose to ignore these signs.  

I know there are obvious answers - workout more often, meditate, take a walk, WRITE...  I try.  But it seems that when we are in our most stressful and anxious moments, we take care of our ourselves last.  Why is this?!  We all know it is wrong.  I have autoimmune diseases and I still take care of myself last.

So, I wonder... How do you take care of yourself in the most stressful moments?  What do you do if you have five minutes to pull yourself back from the brink of stress?