Stress: A valuable lesson.

I was thinking about stress – what it does to us AND how we create it.

Here’s a story of how I created a whole lot of stress for myself and made myself sick. It was a big awakening.

My family lives in Toronto, the HQ city of Fairmont Raffles Hotels International. I don’t live there anymore because I moved to South Carolina to be closer to my husband’s roots in Georgia. So I spend a lot of time flying back and forth.

I try as much as possible to not check bags. It’s become a bit of a joke in my family that whenever I do check bags they take a different route and show up later!

Last month, I tested fate again and checked a bag. Not unexpectedly, it didn’t arrive when I did. The good news was that I had taken an extra set of clothes in my carry on, just in case. The bad news was that I had a brand new pair shoes in my bag, stunning leopard high heels I’d never worn.

This was on a Monday. I was told to check online. I tried a couple of times but there was no update. I called the phone number but it was on fast busy because the airline had too many calls to answer. Finally at 11:00 that night I got through and learned that maybe my bag was in Toronto but they couldn’t be sure. I should call back.

Next morning, fast busy again and no change in the information online. Now obsessed with finding the bag, I got up early and stayed up late to find it. Nothing.

After a week of meetings all day and missing sleep because of my obsession, I was exhausted. So on Friday, I get to the airport early to track down the bag myself. I found it out in the middle of the baggage claim area.

Everything was intact so I said a hello to my new leopard shoes and sent the bag off to be checked in again. (I couldn’t help it; it was too big to carry on.) You know what happens next.

Delta loses the bag again! It was finally delivered at 3:00 a.m. on Saturday. That morning, I woke up with a horrible cold, my first in years. The cold turned into a sinus infection, my first ever.

I am blessed with a great immune system and lots of energy but I’d let my self get stressed about something over which I had no control and I didn’t sleep.

I could have responded differently: made it a game and laughed, taken the opportunity to buy new clothes – and shoes, ignored it and let it play out, or gone back to the airport earlier in the week to hunt it down. There were lots of options.

Loretta LaRoche has a fun book I love. It’s called Wear Your Party Pants and it’s full of ideas for managing stress and I’d just forgotten all of them and went straight to stress mode.

The experience made me stop and think about stress and the challenging times we live in today. We all lead busy lives already and now we have another layer of economic volatility and news media eager hungry to tell us every nasty nuance.
We just have to take care of ourselves and keep our immune systems healthy. Food, water and rest is philosophy we have adopted as health basics, which are critical before healing. And we have to laugh stress off, find different options to things that happen.

So, on my trip this week, I checked my bag again, only I patted it first and told it “See you in Monte Carlo.” Of course, the leopard shoes are in my carry on.