Talk To Me – STRESS!!!!!

One reason I have avoided blogging the past few months is because I have literally LOST MY MIND.  And I mean literally, not figuratively. It is gone and I am slowly finding pieces of it but I don’t know if I will ever find all of my mind again.  Now I have heard that losing your mind is common when you are pregnant (pregnancy brain), but for me this is not an uncommon occurrence when I am just stressed….and let me tell you, I have been feeling it lately.  Yes, I am sure the pregnancy has something to do with my absentmindedness, but with the pregnancy also comes the stresses/concerns as well as all the other everyday stresses I had going on before this. 

Basically, the “I just have a lot on my mind” excuse is going on with me.

For the last 6-8 months or more I have had some level of stress/concern in my life and it is now truly affecting my daily life.  It is always a surprise as to what I will say, not say, or even do.  We have all been there, right?!  When the stresses of our life can cause us to feel like we had a lobotomy.   I would try to write blogs and nothing would come out.  I would read blogs and then forget what I just read or have no idea what to write.  I would try to be funny, whether on the blogs, facebook, twitter, or even in person and while in my mind I thought I was funny either nothing would come out right or worse people would get a series of words that vaguely resembled what I was trying to say but that made NO sense what-so-ever.  All this was usually followed by long awkward pauses from not just me, but the person on the receiving end of my gibberish. 

I can't even form complete sentences.  It's  more like “so do you want….” And then I forget what I am saying and try to remember it for 20 minutes, and then forget what I was trying to remember.  I even do stuff and forget what I am doing in the middle of it “Hey Terry/Kristen, why did I get up from the couch and come into the dining room?!”  And of course there is the forgetting where I put things.  Honestly, I now need an alarm on my keys.  And my favorite is not once but twice I grabbed a granola bar and threw the granola bar away while heading out of the kitchen with a wrapper in my hand. Riiiight.

I am really trying hard now that I am pregnant to worry less (HA – if you know me you know this isn’t happening), to not get myself so stressed, and just try to relax.  Easier said than done, no?!   I tried making lists, but found I was losing those.  I did go out and get a big calendar for our wall and started putting EVERYTHING, even when bills are due, on this calendar which has cleared a little space in my head.  But my head is still full of things that can easily stress you out…even just talking about it stresses me out!!  Once I get over this cold and can actually breathe again, I am going to start walking.  I am hoping that by trying to organize what I have going on AND take even 30 minutes of the day just to ease my mind it may help.  We’ll see though, it is easy to say you are going to make time for something but harder to actually do it!

So question – how do YOU deal with stress?  When you just have so much going on and what seems like no time to handle everything and you feel pulled in a 100 directions.  How do you make sense of it all and how do you de-stress?!