Saturday was a very busy day for me. For the most part, I was on the go from the time I woke up until I went to bed. The day got away from me and left me with a lot of preparations to make for the following day and very little time to complete them. I was stressed when I got home later than I expected and felt like I still had a mountain of work ahead of me, and I was sure that the next day was going to go badly for me. At some point, I realized that I needed to change something, and that’s exactly what I did.
The first thing I did was make myself stop and take several deep breaths. That calmed me down and allowed me to think through everything I’d need for the next day and figure out how to prepare most of it that night. Then I went to work. I gathered up as much stuff as I could (including clothes, snacks, and information about my destination) so that most of it would be ready to go in the morning. I also looked up how long it would take me to reach my destination and calculated when I’d have to leave in order to give myself a bit of a time cushion in case I got turned around (an inevitability when I’m driving somewhere new), ran into heavy traffic, or had to make a few stops. That showed me what time I’d have to wake up so that I could shower, eat, grab everything, and load it into my car and still get there on time. After I finished all of that, I felt much better and sat down to read a bit, grabbed one more thing I’d forgotten earlier, and then went to bed. The next morning, I had no trouble leaving early enough to make a quick stop on the way, get turned around a few times, and still arrive early. And I had an amazing, though tiring, time with everything I did and enjoyed a wonderful, smooth day.
This experience taught me a few valuable lessons. For one thing, I’m sure that I slept much better after getting ready at night than I would have had I waited until morning to do everything. Taking action to improve my situation did instead of worrying about it did the trick. The relief I felt after getting everything squared away and knowing that it would be easy the next day made it easy to relax, focus on my book, and enjoy my sleep. Even though I got to bed later than I would have liked, I think I got enough quality sleep to get me through the next day, and I’d rather have a little quality sleep than a night of tossing and turning and waking up due to stress. Additionally, I now have much more respect for good preparation. Although I didn’t have much time to prepare on Saturday, I could have used the little bit that I did have that day and in the previous days to come up with a plan for Sunday. That would have put me in a better position on Saturday night and I probably would have gotten more sleep if I’d started preparing sooner. I plan to learn from this experience so that I don’t end up repeating my mistakes in future situations. This way, even if I run into similar situations, I’ll be able to handle them much better by taking the initiative to make them easier to manage and less likely to stress me out.