Stress and vacation

I still need some work on my ability to identify the best point to take a vacation and actually taking vacation at that point. I do think I'm getting closer, though.

It's difficult to recognize the warning signs of stress and realize that it's time to take a vacation and a general break from things and let my stress levels go down again. I normally handle things just fine for an extended period of time and then suddenly begin feeling extremely stressed over the course of a week or two, and then it becomes much more difficult to last until vacation. On top of that, I find travel inherently stressful, so when I go on vacation when I'm already stressed, it results in an increased short-term burst of additional stress and can be very uncomfortable.

The best sign that I've been able to find so far is "productivity" levels on weekends. I put the word in quotes because it's not quite the right term, but it's the right general idea. If I'm spending most weekends just zoning and feel very unmotivated or unable to work up the energy to do anything, this is a sign that I'm approaching that knee in the curve and should take a vacation soon. If I'm tackling a ton of personal projects on the weekends, that usually means I'm doing fine. But I have to really pay close attention to pick up on this, since I seem to come up with a lot of other reasons for why I'm feeling however I'm feeling.

I think I mostly got it right this time, but I'm about two weeks late. That's better than I've done before, but it could still use some tweaking.

Posted: 2003-04-10 18:27 — Why no comments?

yeah, you're a little late, but you actually knew when the right time was, just that you couldn't leave then for work-related reasons. so the "sensors" are getting pretty darn good.

Posted by piranha at 2003-04-11 01:03

Last spun 2022-02-06 from thread modified 2013-01-04