Screw you by Guest Blogger David Lin

​When I came back from a week in Colorado with the mud doggo, I realized the benefits of my mortgage don’t quite stack up tall enough for a “guy with a dog.” In just a few weeks, I decided to sell my house in a rapidly worsening market with constantly rising interest rates. I committed myself to a race against time to get back on the road again.

Weeks of sleeping on the floor, living in a wet tent with a bored dog, and working to the bone on the house with every spare minute of the day and night had already taken its toll. I drove my storage unit where I had packed all of my belongings to pick up tools to remove two tree stumps in the yard when I was greeted with a low tire pressure warning. Just another problem to throw on the stack, I thought to myself as I got out to check the tires.

Sure enough, a bright silver screw with a philips head was staring right back at me from the edge of the tread where a tire can’t be patched. I knew what it was trying to tell me: “screw you.” The tire shop didn’t know when my replacement tire would come in and wouldn’t schedule an appointment for me to replace the tire until they had it. Emma was on a spare and looked like a three-legged dog going around town with just half-loads of all the mulch, rock chips, and topsoil I needed for the house.

Staying healthy is tough. Getting healthy is tougher. Trying to do that when you’re being given the middle finger by life? Quite the challenge. Or is it? In the two months I spent uncomfortable, miserable, and living on the edge, it might not have been surprising if my journey to health had somewhat declined. I broke my twice-a-week gym habit - for exercise, at least. I did not have a kitchen convenient to prepare a variety of meals that fit my health plan. I had a lower quality of rest, constantly changing air temperature and humidity, and broke almost all sense of routine.

Somehow, I got healthier. It surprised me too! This was something both unexpected and not at all what I was trying to do. It turns out that stress and adversity don’t necessarily have to negatively affect your health, even if it makes you have to drive twice as many trips to the hardware store for mulch. A bunch of things happened to me during this period of my life:

• Complete change of my day-to-day routine.
• Spent a lot more time outside being active doing physical work.
• Fell asleep earlier when it got dark and woke up earlier in the morning.
• Spent a lot less time sitting at my computer.
• Removed a lot of the “guardrails” in my life that would keep me within my routine.
• “Freaked out” about the multitude of challenges I faced a lot more often.

Research has found repeatedly that stress can improve performance and health. A lack of stress is linked to boredom and depression. Where we run into problems are with chronic or long-duration stress or high levels of stress. Intermittent or low-duration stress events can prime the mind and the body to optimize performance, increase alertness, and improve memory. Breaking my routine exposed me to a parade of problems that had to be solved, work that had to be done, and activities that I wouldn’t have otherwise needed to participate in. Facing adversity worked with some of the more stubborn parts of my personality and caused me to find inventive ways to maintain my diet despite constantly eating out of drive throughs. It was this constant stream of challenges, the screw in my proverbial tire that helped me focus and keep working without feeling the fatigue and constant drag of monotony.

Where stress can really hurt us is when it becomes chronic or long-lasting. I highly doubt my health would continue to improve if living this way became my new routine. These past few month’s break from my previous routine, plus the surprise improvement in my health have made me really think about what kind of long-lasting, chronic stress was hiding in the way I was living before. Ultimately, I was comfortable with the way I lived, but the way I lived was not without chronic stress. I hope not to mistake comfort for a lack of stress again.

David
https://themudkingdom.com