You’ve had a holiday but you know you need more….

The holiday season is over. Whether you’ve actually taken time off work or not, September brings a change of pace as everyone gears up again.

Maybe you anticipate this with relish. You’ve enjoyed the break but you’re ready now to get going again.

Or maybe not.

Maybe you know that your holiday wasn’t enough. You’re back to work but your batteries are not sufficiently recharged. You have to force yourself. You feel choked by your tie or strangled by your schedule. You even worry that you no longer have what it takes…yet what can you do?

There’s no time now to stop and sort it out and the last thing you need is for people at work to get a sniff of what’s going on inside your head. You have no choice but to plough on acting as if everything is ok.

Is this you?

If so, what can you do?

Stubbornly ignoring how you feel won’t work.  Rashly chucking in the towel will only bring unwanted complications. But there is a middle way – calmly work on making changes. Support yourself while you work out a plan.

This is how you do it.

Apply the following Principles of Survival to your situation:

• You have time to work it out.

When you’re stressed out, it’s tempting to snatch at a solution. Don’t. Wait until you feel more in control. The hormones involved in fight-flight ( the stress response) are not conducive to quiet, calm reflection. Just by reassuring yourself that you do have time to work it out will actually reduce your feelings of stress.

• You can choose what to do.

You do still have choices, even though you might temporarily have lost sight of them.Your sense of having options is one of the first things to go when you are under duress.  It’s the same thing: the fight-flight response is not designed to consider the bigger picture; it closes down your horizons so you focus intently on the immediate threat. While this is helpful if you are actually faced with a physical threat such as a burglar intruding into your home, it will hinder you when you are trying to get a wider perspective. Your sense of choices will reappear, however, when you take back control. Reminding yourself that you have choices puts you back in the driving seat.

• You can keep on going until you find a better way.

You will find the strength to carry on but only if you apply the first two principles. They will give you back a sense of personal power. It may be fragile but it is there and will provide the strength and mindset you need to both carry on and explore the way out. A warning however, this strength will evaporate if you do not act in accordance with Principles 1 and 2!

Your survival plan:

Suspend the panic.  Get back in control. Take it a day at a time. Make your physical wellbeing an absolute top priority: diet, exercise, relaxation and sleep.  I know it is hard when you are already mentally and physically exhausted but if you want to avoid a crash, you have to do it. Start small if necessary. Get a routine going, something that works for you. Aim for 3 sessions of vigorous exercise a week. You don’t have to go to the gym if you don’t feel up to it. A brisk walk around the block or in your park is enough. Learn a simple relaxation technique and unwind for at least a hour before bed; cut back on caffeine and alcohol . Yes, you’ve heard it all before, but that’s because it works!

When you attend to your physical wellbeing, your emotional and mental resilience also re-builds. Get this in place and the next part is possible, but if you spiral off into bad health then it all becomes so much harder.

Having attended to the basics, you can work on the root cause. Dealing with the symptoms of stress buys you time but you need to look deeper.  To do this you need unhurried yet focussed space to explore your current situation and then work out a way forward. We call it Time Out.  (We write a lot on the blog about this.) If you want things to change rather than descend into burnout or depression, you really need to get serious about this.

Hang on a minute, already telling yourself you just don’t have time? That’s a choice.

Just think about the time you spend awake at night with your mind endlessly circling or the hours you spend half-heartedly browsing the net looking for distractions or the weekends nursing a coffee after a bad night’s sleep or picking up the pieces after a row with your wife or husband….

So if you’ve had a holiday but you know you need more, then you are right.

And you have two choices:  ignore it or work on it. Which is it to be?

Take the second option. It is far kinder to yourself and others in the long run….

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