MilSo Life Lesson: Compartmentalizing Stress

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One of the best lessons I have learned as a military spouse is to compartmentalize stress. When your husband is deployed, you have the entire house and family to keep afloat and you're exhausted you learn what is really worth getting worked up about, giving your time to or even entertaining in your thoughts.

Very quickly you learn to prioritize. For me it became 1) Keeping my husband, child & myself alive, healthy and sane. Everything else became a distant second, third or just plain dropped off the scale all together.

I did not have time to pout, sulk or have hurt feelings. I had a Navy family to keep afloat. I didn't have time for extended family drama and learned to take appropriate actions when necessary but definitely not to let it keep me up at night! Too busy for that!

I let go of unnecessary commitments and learned not to feel sorry in the least when I had to say "No" to requests for my time and invitations that made my life more stressful than less.

Learning what stress I was willing to entertain and what I refused to pick up was a something I learned through trial and error. I learned how to be helpful to my husband and provide him an escape valve for his frustrations without his negative feelings affecting me. I learned to let go of it all as soon as we got off the call. This was super valuable. While I expressed love and compassion and wished all good things for him, his frustrations, exhaustion and stress were not necessary for me to carry as well. Taking a few minutes to cleanse myself of those negative energies allowed me to return to a healthy state very quickly after a frustration-filled call and to tend to responsibilities that were mine to manage.

Emotional exhaustion teaches you pretty quickly that you can't worry about your significant other dying in the war every day. Or that your relationship will fail, or a million other tragic, terrifying worries that can plague the mind. Some days that worry is heavy and some days you just have to say, "Ah screw that. I can't worry about that today" and live your life. Learning not to obsess over doom & gloom possibilities means it's more likely you'll get some sleep, be healthier and happier during deployment. Remembering that the odds are in your favor that things will be okay can be helpful.

I also learned how important it is to take time for me. If you see a woman acting crazy or looking downtrodden it's usually because she isn't making time to take care of her own well-being. My big lesson during deployment was that it's no one's responsibility but my own to carve out that time, make it happen and take good care of myself. No one wants a crazy lady for a wife or a mom. They are okay with you taking some time to pull yourself together and keep it together. It requires awareness, discipline and organization, but you're always better for having done it!

These are important skills that I needed to learn as part of my human experience. Things that I wasn't as good at before. I consider these things the blessings of deployment. These are hard earned lessons but they will serve me for a lifetime.