Take It All Away: Commitments

This series is focused on what you can remove from your day to day life that suck your days and life away. Many of these things are not inherently bad, but the way that we utilize them may be detrimental to our stress levels, our hormones and our health.

Today, we are talking about ALL the commitments that we have in our world. You know what I am talking about!

In our world, there are commitments for work, after work, drinks with friends, dinner with friends, family, dinner with family, birthdays, anniversaries, church, sports leagues, kid’s academics, kid’s sports and the list goes on forever!

You see, all of these things may be urgent, but may not be important. The urgent matters seem and feel really “loud”. “Come out with us for drinks,” sounds like they are shouting at you and pulling you into the restaurant! “Come do this thing after work with us,” is just something else that can take time and energy away from you.

Additionally, as a society, we do not want to be known as the person that “let someone else down”, even if it is something that we do not care about or agree with! However, we should be focused on ourselves, our goals and our own internal energy meter before agreeing to outside commitments, especially those that suck energy from us!

So how can you decide what to commit to?

Choose ONE! That’s right, ONE thing to commit to! If it is church, fantastic! If it is drinks with friends, awesome! If it is sports, alright! But just choose one!

Know that it is OK to say NO! Your friends will recover, the world will move on and you will feel so much better! Not crowding your schedule allows you to have time for you! It allows you to relax and unwind! It means that you have time to read a book, sit in a bath, exercise or sleep! All of those things will help you to feel better and reduce your stress!

So in a world that is spinning faster and faster, commit to being the one that slows it down for yourself…you will be so glad that you did!