1 Question for 50% of Your Stress

I concluded, shortly after college, that life was going to be a series of bothersome events.

Everything pointed towards this. Freshly launched into the adult world, I soon got into a rhythm of complaining about the traffic on my way to work, cursing managers who made me repeat boring tasks, and silently contemplating ways to kill all those ahead of me in the lines at the grocery store.

I was running out of patience. “Is this what I’m supposed to do for the next forty or fifty years?” I cried out, “I’m already tired.”

Photo by Vladislav Muslakov on Unsplash

I reflected on what was draining all my energy away, and how I could avoid being caught up in these problems.

The Source of the Problem

I am only 23 years old. Among my brightest memories are the first time I travelled to Europe, enjoying nights at the beach with my friends, or how proud I felt to receive my first paycheck.

You know what I don’t remember? What I used to fight with my sibling about, the days that my hair just wouldn’t look right, or that time when my water bottle leaked in my bag.

The great tragedy of life is that of these two kinds of events — discrete, vivid moments, and continuous trash — we tend to get more affected by the day-to-day garbage (which will soon be lost in the sands of time).

Remember that one time you had a perfect day? Yeah, nor does anyone else. There are no perfect days. Every day will have its share of uncooperative colleagues and pens that stop working, and there is absolutely no amount of complaining that can make it stop.

So what did I do about it?

I devised one question to remove over 50% of my worries:

Will this matter 3 days from now?

There is no long term perspective to adopt, no reason to try and be the bigger person, no philosophy to understand. If the answer to this question is no, I don’t bother about it.

If you the impact of the problem doesn’t even last 3 days in a life which, on average, lasts 70 years (or 25,550 days, for perspective), can it really be worth stressing over?

Let’s look at situations where this policy works —

1. I made a mistake at work and have to stay back till after dinner to fix it.
   (I come back home tired and sleep late. From tomorrow, work continues as normal.)
2. My neighbour is getting her pipelines replaced so I have to listen to a drilling machine all Sunday.
   (From Monday things return to normal.)

Typically, I would get very frustrated and roll my eyes at the unfairness of the world. This question, however, gave me a lot of patience and I just carried on with my life.

It’s not brand new information. Remember when they said, “Don’t sweat the small stuff”? They didn’t mean don’t pay attention to detail, just don’t pay attention to irrelevant detail that adds nothing positive to your life.

What to do with all this time

Now that you’re not spending time being annoyed by trivial issues like the rude driver on the road who rolled down his window just to tell you to “go back to school”, you can spend it on what does matter.

Catch up with school friends. Go for a run when the weather is good. Eat the dessert. Make more of the moments that you will remember 3 days later.