When I am at my worst, my main go-to for dealing with stress has always been “ignore it until it’s worse.”
Take a nap. Spend money on something that can distract you. Sure, it won’t cure the problem, but it’ll go away for a little while.
It’s like in science fiction stories when someone is diagnosed with an incurable disease so they’re cryogenically frozen, hoping that one day in the future a cure will be found and the person can be unfrozen and saved. That’s what I do. I put the stress away hoping Future Taylor is able to handle the stress better than me.
It’s a wonderfully flawed system. Why would Future Taylor be more equipped? He’s still me. And if I won’t deal with the stress now, it’s not like he’ll have any more experience and expertise. If I want him to be better at dealing with stress I have to set him up for success by dealing with it now.
I want to live my life where I’m constantly saying “Wow, thanks Past Taylor. You really made today easy.”
I’m running a marathon in January and I really hope I’ll be able to thank Past Taylor for training.
I’ll be sitting down to do my taxes (probably the day before they’re due) and I hope Past Taylor will have made things easy.
But Future Taylor’s Past Taylor is Present Taylor (what?). I, me right now, am here to make Future Taylor’s life better. So I can’t put stuff off, even when I know it’s going to suck. I’ll thank me later.
At the same time, I ALSO need to remember that productivity isn’t everything. In some cases (a lot fo cases) productivity can be an idol.