We are not happy people – we journalists I mean. The job looks like a lot of fun on the outside – concert passes, media discounts, and meals sponsored by the magazine – but behind the scenes, we’re an angry, caffeine-addicted bunch who live in an alternate reality, and can hardly ever tell what day it is.
We’re also stressed out; and I don’t mean the run-of-the-mill variety that you can sleep off, or wash away with a weekend on the beach, I mean the never-ending, ever-growing type that feeds on you until you crack and escape the world for a few weeks – say, to Bali.
But clearly we can’t always just hop off to an island resort every time we get cranky, so journalists learn to manage stress as best they can, in hopes of staving off insanity long enough to get the next long vacation. And I’m not very good at that.
Abu Dhabi’s coming in for an exciting few weeks: awesome concerts, the Formula One, National Day, and even Christmas isn’t that far away. This means fun, fun, fun; but it also means staying up late, following divas around for interviews, sitting through monotonous press conferences and forfeiting my weekends.
I’ve been through this kind of thing before, of course – just last year in Beirut in fact, and right around this time of the year. Looking back, I no longer remember who I interviewed, what events I attended or where I slept for most of that time; but I do remember the meltdown. It happened right before Christmas, and it took a long vacation in the snow surrounded by incredible quantities of food and drink to weather it out. But this year will be different, this year I’m prepared.
I’ve learned to manage my stress, but it wasn’t easy. It started with a web search on stress management, and after reading pages on the mystical topic I was able to boil down into a few basic steps, which I’ll share here for your convenience.
Step one: identify the source of stress – and they say it like this is the easiest thing in the world. It is recommended that you start a stress journal for this purpose, and immortalise your stress on paper so that you may eventually study it all and figure out what’s causing it. Done that? Great! Step two: avoid the stress or alter the situation, and if you can’t then simply accept that some things cannot be changed. Really? Is that really your advice? Step three: employ relaxation techniques and make time for quality entertainment – right, so all this time I’ve actually had a few hours a day to kill on yoga, Pilates and quality time with my wife, but I’ve instead opted to work late.
It all started with a web search, but after wasting a few hours of my precious weekend on a load of online faecal matter, a poster in a pub showed me the way. This works, and I’ve shared this poster with you here on this page. Stick it on a wall, and follow the instructions. Step four: enjoy your new stress-free life!
