Relax!

It’s been over 20 years since the band Frankie Goes to Hollywood released that famous song with the line “Relax don’t do it, when you want go to it...” That may seem like a long time ago, but to this day every single person on the planet knows it. Heck, I sing it when I’m freaking out. My best girl friend sings it to me whenever I’m beginning to lose it (which used to happen quite often) and the song was quite prominent in the hilarious Ben Stiller movie Zoolander, where it was used as a switch to activate the male model to become an assassin.

These days I’ve noticed that I’ve had to repeat those lines in my head more and more often. I suppose since the year is just beginning and everything is starting to pick up, buckling under the expectations of our resolutions, we are running on overdrive trying to accomplish everything and do everything that we said we would, thereby almost killing ourselves in the process.

I suppose everyone has stress. That’s a part of life. But for some reason it affects some more than others. I have always kind of been a stress case. I think a lot of it goes back to my obsessive-compulsive tendencies. Maybe because I need things to be a certain way at a certain time, I set myself deadlines that are sometimes impossible to meet and I drive myself crazy trying to finish. It’s not an all bad thing, though; sometimes it’s this insane stress that allows me to accomplish great things, though I have to wonder if I’m also digging myself an early grave.

Indeed, so much has changed medically when it comes to things like stress and depression. In the old days people used to die because of heart failure or brain failure or cancer. Now things like stress can actually kill you. Isn’t it called “the silent killer”? Who knew that something that every single person feels on a daily basis can conceivably put you in the hospital? With that in mind, I have recently come to the conclusion that I really need to put my stress in check.

Ever since the start of the year I have struggled to look for ways to be more organized and more concise so there will be no reason for me to stress out as much as I normally do. I have made lists, kept notes, backed up files — did everything I could think of to cover all my bases. And yet, of course, there’s really no way to be sure of everything so every now and then things crop up that were not in my plan and this naturally annoys the crap out of me, especially since I had tried to prevent just such things from happening.

So I have come to the conclusion that battling stress isn’t about having an airtight plan for one’s life. It’s about learning to deal with all the problems life throws your way — and believe me, it will throw more than you can ever know and all when you least expect it. So you have to battle the stress that comes with all of that by learning how to balance it out with fun activities to help you relax. You have to make time in your busy schedule to buckle down and do the things you want to do so you have those couple of days of fun to counteract those days of being high-strung and freaked out.

And so, as I sat in traffic with road rage building up inside of me, I made the decision to couple my stressful days with some fun days. I’m looking forward to weekends spent hanging out with friends, having movie marathons and laying in bed for hours on end doing nothing. I’ve come to believe that’s the real way to handle stress. By learning to accept it when it comes, dealing with it, and setting it aside when you get home at the end of the day.

We all have stress. It’s a part of life. But we shouldn’t let it consume us or dictate how we live our lives. We can’t erase it, control it, or get rid of it. We should just accept it and handle it by learning to relax when we can and enjoy our quiet moments whenever they come along. And when you start losing it, just sing these words your head: “Relax, don’t do it…”