What’s Your Wake Up Thought?

What was your first thought this morning? If you are scrambling for the alarm clock that has snoozed you too long, then it may simply be a frantic fear of running behind, and wondering if you can catch up!

This seldom happens to me, but each of us is different this way!

Part of the answer comes from the load you are carrying and were you able to set it aside so you could have a restful night. The other part of the answer comes from the heaviness of all your loads and how stressed are you by the day that is before you…

What are you waking with? Stress for the day? Worried about what’s next? Is there something good ahead that you can look forward to?

Rest time (another blog thought) is so important. If you cannot cause your brain to shut down, then you will have a restless night. Tossing. Turning. Aching through the downtime never produces a successful day tomorrow.

It’s probably been a quarter of a century since I’ve had a great nights sleep that I can be happy about. Yes. I may sleep all night, but there is a part of my brain that struggles to shut down. I can wake at the same time every morning for weeks, normally about 2:40 am (yes…it’s a blog thought – go ahead click on the time to the left!) and struggle to get back to sleep.

I seldom have problems getting to sleep. Ask my wife. Seconds with my head on the pillow and I’m a goner! But wake up in the middle of the night, look at the clock and get distracted with the undone, then my mind will not shut down and I might as well get up and face the night!

Recently, while having a checkup with my doc, I asked him about my sleep issues. Now, I know it runs in the family to sleep 5-6 hours and then face the day full steam ahead, but I also know that the older I get the more important good rest has become. In my younger days I could sleep 2-3 hours and then go all day long, but now a 15-minute power nap sounds really good about half-way through the day.

What do you think my doctor asked about all of this? Here’s a summary.

“So, what happened about 25 years ago?” he ponders…Oh, about the time I started pastoring a congregation… “It’s funny, “he replied, “we know God handles all the load and we can cast our cares on him, but it’s surprising how much we struggle with what we know, and what we have to accomplish.” [paraphrased conversation]

Now, isn’t this a great Doctor, or what?!!?

So, we spent some time talking about the stress load I carry, and how it might be unloaded or managed better. Then we talked about getting a handle on the weight issue, and there’s no time like the present to tackle the underlying problem, which he surmised is simply stress. Stress creates weight issues, sleep issues, and blood pressure issues…and a whole host of other problems that will wear you out and make you sick!

How do you handle stress? I’ve joked about it for years, but “stressed” spelled backward is “dessert“… Not that I need dessert right now! Imagine for a moment the stresses you and I carry, and compare it to the President of the United States! Their load must be a million times harder. It’s not just 300 million people, it’s every corner of the globe! There have been photo shots of them at the start, and end, of their time in office. [Source] Go check it out.

So. Do you have a stress handler routine? How about sharing?

It was a famous person for some of us that give me a deep thought about stress.

“We can easily manage if we will only take, each day, the burden appointed to it. But the load will be too heavy for us if we carry yesterday’s burden over again today, and then add the burden of the morrow before we are required to bear it.” ~John Newton

Then, add to this thought another deep thinker thought:

“Much of the stress that people feel doesn’t come from having too much to do. It comes from not finishing what they’ve started.”  ~David Allen

Now, combine those ideas into this thought… We are loaded down with tasks and it seems like we find them lingering for days, if not weeks and months. Tasks lists become albatrosses around our neck and it is hard to move on because we struggle with finishing the one in our hands. If success is found in finishing what we started to accomplish, then we need to work better at what we are doing. This idea is found in these simple thoughts.

• Narrow your focus.
• Set some boundaries on your world – keep family time, downtime, and personal recovery time sacred.
• Manage your time well, and this learned process will protect you from daily struggles.
• Delegate what you can, keep what you must, but do not let there be more tasks than what you can handle.
• Don’t let tasks muddy the waters so that you cannot clearly see the finished line.
• Quit looking back thinking you could have “handled that better” or differently. When the task is finished, move on.

I’ve given this some thought, and will probably adjust this list during the next few weeks. In hindsight, this is a fluid list. It will change as you change. It will adjust as your plate size adjusts.

You need to have your own list.

What works for me, may not work for you. Controlling our world is perhaps one of the biggest challenges we face.

My world of pastoring is not dealing with “employees”, rather, it’s taking into consideration the “volunteer” that steps up and says, “Let me help.” Immediately, I think of what might be on their plate already, and how can I make sure they do not get overwhelmed as I feel sometimes. Let’s protect their family time. Make sure the spouse is okay with their help. Watch them closely for burn-out. Step in and help them see when they reach the breaking point. Celebrate their wins. Repair the times that things break. Help them to understand grooming their replacement.

I say this because I dealt with a time back in the early ’80s when I got too involved in too many activities. I’ve blogged about it enough (and have referenced some of them with links in this blog), but suffice it to say that the day was full of the job, and the evening was full of commitment. Somewhere in between my wife and kids got so little of my time. For about 18 months. Then I crashed and burned, and learned how to say “no”.

But no one said that to me. I had to learn it myself.

Perhaps this is the biggest thing for any of us to learn. If we are not going to take advice from someone who has been there, then we must learn what to do when we slam into that proverbial wall.

And that wall will show up at the most inopportune time.

How about you? How do you control your world? Feel free to share?