Stress Management 101: Murder It!

I had an exceptionally stressful morning. High anxiety. The type of anxiety where it feels like there's a hornet's nest in the middle of your chest and somebody just whacked it with a stick. Anybody know the feeling? Similar to if you swallowed a palm sander, turned it on and let it start sanding your insides.. So how do you deal with it? Do you have a couple drinks? Smoke something (legal or otherwise)? Take a bath? Read a book? Have a cup of tea and watch re-runs of "What's Happening"? Some of these are healthier ways of dealing with stress than others.. I spent a lot of years dealing with stress in an unhealthy manner. And if there's one thing I learned it's that it never actually helped, and in most cases made it much worse. For example, alcohol is a popular way to temporarily escape your issues, but then when you wake up the next day feeling like crap has it really done anything to solve your problems? Of course not. 

Since I've committed myself to a healthy lifestyle, both mentally and physically, I am much better at dealing with stress than I ever have been and I continue to get better at it. The brutally difficult workouts that I've put myself through over the years have given me an amazing amount of mental toughness so that I know I can deal with anything. Now, when I'm confronted with stressful situations, I deal with it rationally. The pressure inside still builds up from time to time (like the hornet's nest previously mentioned). If that happens I either get on my bike or I go to the gym, and I absolutely murder it.

Today, the wind is howling with 30mph gusts and the wind chill factor is in the low 20's. Biking was an option, but if you know what it's like to ride into 30mph headwinds then you know how demoralizing that is. I felt the ride would have just raised my stress level, not helped it.. So today's implement of stress destruction was a Bodyweight Prison Workout at the gym.. We have a Prison Workout we do here for a fitness assessment for incoming 60 Day Challengers. It's a 10-9-8-7-6-5-4-3-2-1 format of Pushups, Situp-n-Reach, Burpees, Body Rows, Box Jumps.. I've done that workout in the past in 9:30.. A sub 10:00 wasn't going to be enough to kill all the hornets in my chest so I had to make it harder. So I made it a 20-18-16-14-12-10-8-6-4-2 workout.. I went at it with everything I had today, and to be honest, I hoped I would have done better than the 23:22 that it took me. On several occasions I had to take about 5-10 breaths, mainly after the burpees or box jumps. I didn't want to take breaths, I needed to take breaths. The alternative was to collapse. 

Totals:

23:22

110 Pushups

110 Situp and Reach

110 Burpees with full pushup and jump

110 Body Rows

110 24" box jumps

It was brutal, and it was effective. The buzzing in my chest is gone (replaced with wheezing from exercise induced asthma from spending over 20 minutes at about 95% max heart rate). My head is clearer. The stress is gone. It wasn't postponed, or pushed off to the next day. It was murdered. And I'm a stronger person for having dealt with it...

Train hard.

kevin