Stress Knitting

What to do when you are stressed? Stress or worry can appear at any moment, for any reason, and these feelings can truly weigh on you. It may feel like you are just a little bit heavier, everything is a little bit harder to do, conversations are a little bit more exhausting, just getting through a day is enough in that situation. My current stress is work related, as it takes up five days of my life each week, and for three of those I need to appear bubbly in a room full of people, by the time the working day is done I often just want to collapse into my duvet and pretend the world doesn't exist. So what to do, what to do? 

I for one, do not want to be defeated by stress, how dare a stressful situation try and best me! On a packed commute home, I thought about how best to get out of my own head. I feel like the more time I have left alone with my thoughts then the more thoughts I can have running around in circles causing me a headache. So I need something to concentrate on, something that takes my mind off the situation but also keeps my mind occupied enough that it cannot think of anything else. That's when I remembered knitting.

Why knitting? Simply because I only know how to knit in one direction, if I make a mistake there is no going back as I have no idea how to fix it. It will focus my mind on counting rows and not dropping a single stitch so much so, that there is not an ounce of room for another thought at all. Just to be safe I decided to push my skillset to the limit and incorporate multiple colours into my work. Now I need extra focus to make sure that the colours and stripes are spaced apart evenly, and that I don't accidentally drop the new yarn when I am switching colours. I was quite seriously committed to this idea at the start of the week that I set myself a goal to knit one section a day, then after a few weeks I imagined I would be finished. So determined to defeat stress as I was, I lost count of how many rows of knitting I had completed by the end of the week and had overachieved on my goal. Ha, suck it stress, I am a knitting machine! 

I fear that I have made knitting sound terribly arduous. It really is quite relaxing, and satisfying because at the end (or even when you just run out of yarn) there is a tangible output. In my case, a lovely, stripey, fluffy scarf. I've even talked to my friends at work about it, the stress is a universal one at the moment, so sometimes we call each other during the day for a "quick" chat and jokingly catch up on what we have now called my "stress knitting" it's going very well I always answer. That is of course the other answer to stress, or a bad situation, talking to a friend can really help lift your spirits. Even if you are both in the bad situation together, sometimes a little venting session can be just the thing you need. What I have learned from this, is not to dwell on stress, to take some sort of action to counter it, to show it that I am the one in control of my emotions and how my day goes, not the stress. So, I will persevere with my stress knitting, as this has also reminded me that I quite like knitting anyway, at least until I run out of yarn which shan't be long at the rate I am going. Then I will have tea and gossip sessions, because a day can only be made better by having a cuppa and a natter with your bestie!