Stress and Homesteading

"Sensational" Lilacs from my spring 2012 garden.

Since today starts the observation of Lent, I was going to get all super religious today and write about Lent, but I have ended up having one bad day. Actually it has been more than just bad...it has been horrible. After working 20 hours straight with no sleep on a client's website, I learned that a family member of mine had died this morning, another family member is getting divorced, and, that a member of my immediate family will be losing their job in a couple of months. Plus everything I said or did today, someone was right there “correcting” me on whatever it was that I said or did or trying to “one-up” me.

By late this morning, I was a mess. I was stressed out. I mean I was REALLY STRESSED out. I just wanted to crawl in my bed and cover my head up and stay there for a very long time.

The last thing I wanted to do today was anything to do with homesteading. Yet, I knew that I had to bake some bread if we wished to have some tonight and tomorrow morning. So I made up a batch of bread dough and started to knead it. As I kneaded the dough, I started to feel some of the stress going out of me. The more I kneaded the less stress I felt. That dough ended up being the best kneaded dough ever in the history of the world of bread baking. **LOL**

But as with all good things, that too came to an end. Today is fairly decent day weather-wise, so while I was waiting for my bread dough to rise, I went outside and started to work on preparing the yard so that I can double the size of my vegetable gardens this spring. That was very labor intensive and hard work. The physical energy that it took to do that helped to channel some of that stress adrenaline that I had been feeling into a sense of accomplishment. .

I then went and rearranged my food storage area putting things in nice neat order. My life may be all out whack right now, but my pantry doesn't need to be out of order too. By doing something as simple as that, it brought some soothing calmness and order once again back to my mind.

My point in all of that?? While I know of no “scientific” study or research on this, I am finding that one of the best things to help deal with stress is homesteading. Not only is the simpler lifestyle less stressful to begin with, but the very nature of the physical energy that it takes to homestead, I believe, also reduces the stress adrenaline in our lives. I am wondering, since stress is the cause for so many illnesses/diseases, could homesteading also improve our physical well being as well as our mental well being? I don't know...we shall see.

Thanks for reading and for visiting my blog. :-)