I’m kind of a workaholic. Attribute that to my mom, who worked tirelessly from the time she was young until just a few years ago. She held a variety of low-paying grunt jobs while I was growing up – dishwasher, assembly in a factory – the kind of jobs that most normal people would call in sick on a regular basis. But not my mom… She was grateful to have a job and then put in more effort than anyone else to do a great job at whatever she was doing.
So I’m the type of person that probably thinks too much about work, puts more effort into work than reasonable, and stress myself out about work stuff. I realize that a lot of my conversations are about work more than anything else. I don’t actually like this part of my personality. I mean, I should be more well-rounded, right?
And it’s been really stressful at work lately. We have a new overall leader who will likely be making significant changes to the organization; my boss is now throwing everyone she can think of (including me) under the bus to make herself look better in his eyes; and I’m feeling very disconnected and disengaged. It’s not a good thing. And it stresses me out.
And that worries me because stress plays a significant role in reducing the effectiveness of our immune system. And there’s a lot of research that points to a reduced immune system leading to cancer. I’m convinced that the stresses of those years – particularly those last six months – in San Antonio contributed to my melanoma. And I’m worried because I’m once again not able to sleep at night. That’s the canary in the coal mine for me in terms of stress. My stomach gets wrecked. I get more headaches. My allergies and psoriasis flares up. I get short-tempered. I know what happens to me when I get stressed. And every single one of these things is already in play.
That’s not good. I don’t know how this brave new body of mine is going to react. Will it decide to grow more amelanotic nodular melanoma? I need to get my stress under control but I suck at meditation. I took yoga for awhile and it did help me get out of my headspace because I was more worried about falling while trying to do the poses than anything else. As much as I love chocolate, stress eating a pound of candy will likely not help my stomach. What techniques do you have to control stress? Do they work?
And more importantly, I need to find a way to reduce the influence that my work has on my life. I try to tell myself that I’m not curing cancer (ironically) and that my job is not the center of my universe. But growing up the way I did, there is no greater shame than being unemployed and I totally overcompensate for that. So how do I reprogram to throttle back?