Lifestyle Stress Reduction
When my wife and I first started living on our homestead it was more rustic than it is today, (this is saying something since we still live in our tiny cabin with four small children, while we build our timber frame home). We weren’t seeking to be anti-technology or anti-amenities, yet enjoyed the reduction to simple basic needs: bathing with a bucket, using an outhouse for….. outhouse needs, hauling water for the garden. It was a salient change of gears from the typical needs of a modern lifestyle. That said, with all that we were trying to take on, it became necessary for us to start to embrace some of those modern conveniences once again.
We’ve slowly developed a “philosophy of upgrade” through a trial by error process that has been bearing good fruit for us. I believe this folksy homestead wisdom is transferrable to non-homestead lifestyles so feel free to take it for a test drive at the end of this blog post.
To illustrate our philosophy let me describe how our water system evolved. When we first moved into the cabin, it had a water system that only worked in the summer time. It consisted of an outdoor tank, a pump, and an on-demand hot water heater. We found out it was a “summer-only-system” because when we moved in, it was late March and we figured we could get away with hooking it up…. Needless to say we froze up when “fools spring” ended and the mercury dipped back down below freezing. It was also time intensive system because with our little family we needed to fill the tank 2x’s a week which took about 30 minutes each time. This system clearly needed some work.
Our next few iterations of our water system consisted of finding insulated situations for the water tank (burying it, putting it under the cabin ect.), heat taping our plumbing, better insulating places where we found, through trial and error, that it was freezing and eventually abandoning the water tank and digging a shallow cistern near the cabin. We went from a process that took 30 minutes 2x’s a week (assuming the hoses didn’t freeze or the tank didn’t run dry early, burning out the pump and the water heater) to a system that works smoothly and doesn’t take any time. Call it a simple pleasure, but the amount of relief and satisfaction we experience with our current system is hard to convey unless you’ve wrestled frozen plumbing at 20 below. I also can’t tell you how much more confident I am at tackling plumbing issues now, whereas before I used to be intimidated by all things plumbing.
Our philosophy of upgrade can be described as such: study your life, explore where you’re losing time to things that stress you out and see if you can innovate a solution to streamline and/or eliminate the tasks that you don’t love. Whether it’s relationships that get stuck in predictable, dysfunctional cycles or a car issue that you’ve been ignoring too long, these little frustrations can become the “straw that broke the camels back” if you’re already stressed and heading towards burnout. Fixing these stressors can be a meaningful step towards stress proofing your life.
If you’re paralyzed by the complexity of the upgrade that you want, take some time to research it, give yourself permission to learn new skills or even hire someone else to do it for you. Don’t wait to start out of a fear that you can’t do it right and remember that it’s OK to be a work in progress. It’s been said that you can learn just as much from failure as you can from success, so if your first attempt doesn’t succeed, study what didn’t go right and try again. If you’re weird like me, you may even find that you enjoy the process of learning, planning, implementing and refining durable solutions to difficulties. Mark Twain has a famous quote that I absolutely love for those of us prone to procrastination: “If it's your job to eat a frog, it's best to do it first thing in the morning. And If it's your job to eat two frogs, it's best to eat the biggest one first.” In other words the sooner you get it out of the way, the sooner it no longer hangs over your head, contributing to your stress load.
Can you think of an application for this in your life? Maybe a relationship that needs better boundaries, or a home improvement project that just needs to get done? Why don’t you make a list of the tools, materials or skills you need to acquire to get the job done. If you take things step by step and learn from your imperfections you’ll be on track to lowering your stress levels.
