I carry my stress in my jaw and shoulders. Where do you carry yours? When I’m stressed, I can feel the tension in my body as I struggle to deal with it.

When we are going through a difficult time, we can’t see the future.

A friend of mine said to me last night: “When we’re waiting at the bus stop and the bus is late, we don’t know if the bus will come in 5 or 50 minutes.”

If we knew that the bus would be coming in only 5 minutes, we’d be fine.

There are a lot of triggers happening right now in our world. At the time of my writing this, more than 170,000 people have died from the coronavirus in America. There are more than 5.4 million people who have had the virus. When I started writing the first volume of Let Go and Be Free only 9 months ago, I didn’t know we would be where we are now.

More than 56 million Americans have lost their jobs, families distributed due to challenges of the virus, social justice movements spreading throughout the country to protest the death of so many Black people (George Floyd and Breonna Taylor), schools going all virtual in the fall for my students due to high incidences of the virus in counties throughout America, and violent protests that have erupted in major cities.

Stress is at an all-time high for many of us.

We are all on edge as we struggle with historical challenges.

And on top of all that, at the micro-level we still need to deal with the problems within our families. As part of an Adult Children of Alcoholics Anonymous online group, I’m seeing people sharing their struggles with spouses and parents drinking more during the crisis we are living through.

What are you doing to handle your stress?

Have you found healthy ways to mitigate the stress?

Are you struggling with finding a balance between your work and family?

What if I told you that we have all we need to be okay?

Take time to breathe. Take time to sleep. And take time to love and have fun.

We don’t know how long the challenges are going to last. I pray that you will read this in the near future and you will smile because the world has moved on from the pandemic.

But that’s not the case for me today.

If you are struggling with stress, consider these tools to help you:

• Talk to a therapist.

• Spend time talking (and listening) with a loved one.

• Eat, drink, and sleep as needed.

• Set aside each day to de-stress (read, go for a walk, listen to music, play a game, meditate, or do a bunch of these activities).

As children of alcoholics or having grown up in dysfunctional families, we are often hard on ourselves.

Let’s not do that today.

Like what you’ve read? Be sure to check out my other posts in my Let Go and Be Free blog.