I support all the typical relaxation methods. Take a bath, going for a run or walk, coloring, these are tried and true but sometimes you gotta change it up and these are some of my favorite de-stressers.

Reading cookbooks. Stress often leads to unproductively. You sit there thinking about what needs to get done and what can go wrong and you end up accomplishing nothing which leads to guilt on top of the stress later. Sidenote, Texan was advised by some of the older men at work to never come home and say, “So… what did you do today?” Which just cracks me up.
I love to read but if there is a lot on my mind, I can’t process a storyline. This is when I pull out a cookbook. It’s something that doesn’t require me to pay attention but still gives me something to scan mindlessly. Cookbooks with pictures make this even better. Eventually I’ll see a recipe that looks interesting I’ll check see if we have the ingredients and out of my stress, dinner has been planned, something that benefits my household has been accomplished. Usually from these sessions I end up planning the weeks meals. Wanna feel like you run the world? Plan your weeks meals, bonus points if you realize you don’t have to go to the store to make any of it.

My favorites are this cookbook by The Pioneer Woman, that my sister in law got me for Christmas. The freezer food section can change you life. And this Superfood Smoothie cookbook. We got it for our wedding and honestly the first time I opened it I was overwhelmed because there were so many ingredients that just weren’t standard in my house. But I picked it back up later and started just buying one new ingredient each time I went grocery shopping. It has drastically improved our smoothie routine.

Watching a sport that you don’t understand. Alright for me this is a lot of sports. But somehow we have discovered that we just love this and I do think it is more effective with a spouse or loved one. Cricket is our go-to, or soccer even though we understand the sport, we usually don’t understand the announcers, and a few weeks ago we got REALLY into curling for about two weeks while some Canadian Championships were going on. By the end, we understood curling, knew a lot of the major players, and most importantly had bonded over something completely new to the both of us.

Find something, anything, one thing, and just get it done. Being overwhelmed is a vicious cycle and just like any you have to take that first step. If you an pin point the smallest task and accomplish it, you might just hit a stride and be productive for the rest of the afternoon. If you don’t, I wrote a post about how I deal with goals being less than achieved here. My one thing that I got done was a blog post, next hopefully will be some house work.

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