Yesterday, I did something simple.
I took out a couple of folders from their place near my desk, went through them, and recycled everything I didn’t need anymore.
The job took less than ten minutes. But for months, I hadn’t done it. Something else always seemed more urgent than that job. The papers wouldn’t protest like the dog does without dinner, for example, and they wouldn’t get a negative impression like a potential client might if I didn’t email them back quickly.
Many small stressors create a load that’s too heavy
I have a lot of little jobs like this on my to-do list. Taken individually, they’re almost insignificant, and like the folder sorting, they don’t have particularly heavy time commitments. Yet, they are like straws of hay on the camel’s back. They have weight, and at some point, there is one straw too many. The tiny stress each one contributes translates to a total load that’s not manageable. It’s death by a thousand cuts, just with annoyance and anxiety.
I see often people talking about stress and how to manage it. But the discussion often is around larger pain points, such as navigating parental responsibilities or working with a toxic boss. Much of the time, addressing these bigger issues is a lot of work or complex.
But after fixing the folders, the relief I felt was astronomical. I hadn’t expected that, because the job was so small. But I suspect I felt the relief to the degree I did because of the way my brain had linked it to all the other small, stress-inducing jobs left to be done. It might be that, because I mentally associated all the tasks, handling just one of them made me feel like they were all doable, like the load was not, in fact, going to crush me. With just one straw off my back, I could manage the rest.
Perception is everything
The situation suggests how razor thin the line between what a person can and cannot tolerate can be. But it also suggests that, when all the little stressors in your life add up to become one big bale you can barely heft, taking care of even just one small task can make a massive difference in the ability to feel better and persist. It doesn’t remove the rest of the load, but it can influence how you perceive that load, and that makes the load tolerable.
If stressors are adding up for you and it’s not possible to set down your entire load, try removing a single straw. It’s not as insignificant as you might think, probably because of the way the brain naturally tries to group points together. Whatever small thing you can do, let that be the method by which you stay able to persist.