It had been one of those weeks. Work was so chaotic I was beginning to suspect that professionals had been hired to sit in secret alcoves and jeopardise my every move. When I wore a skirt, it was raining; when I wore a coat it was splitting the skies. Due to chronic absent-mindedness and extreme busy-ness, I had to cancel lunches, bluff like a salesman and bark down the phone instead of talking. All in all though, I was holding it together, until one thing threatened to finally send me over the edge - the thought of missing my yoga class.
Every Wednesday, I trot along for an hour and a half of breathing and stretching like a good little twentysomething. I've been attending for about 18 months, but seeing as I've never managed to put in even 10 minutes of practice outside of class, my chances of turning into trendy bendy Madonna are pretty slim. But even just one class a week provides a bit of exercise in my otherwise sedentary lifestyle, and fills me with a quiet hope that I won't be spending my old age bent double examining my toenails.
Yoga has the added advantage of being quite tricky, which forces me to stop thinking in rat-on-a-wheel fashion about the things I've forgotten to do (pay bills, file copy, be nice to old people) or want to do (get my legs waxed, be satsified with my lot, defuse the tricky situation in the Middle East). Instead, I find that after attempting to hold my own skull in a headlock and coaxing my legs behind my back for an hour-and-a-half, my brain is reduced to a cosy, healing torpor.
So when I realised on Wednesday afternoon that unless I managed to get 900 words written, make five phone calls and write a couple of e-mails in the space of 40 minutes, I was unlikely to make the class, I started to get all worked up and neurotic. I tried to work with increased efficiency and speed which, of course, meant I locked my diary in a cupboard and knocked over a glass of water. I began to write, but kept making silly mistakes like spelling my own name Louse. I could feel the pressure behind my eyes steadily pushing towards its own crescendo, as I convinced myself that the yoga class was my one chance at relaxing during a hectic week, a chance that I had thrown away through my own ineptness. By the time I left the office, work half done, and started to jog-trot to my yoga class, I was nearly crying with frustration.
It wasn't long before the absurdity of the situation hit me: I had managed to get totally stressed about being relaxed. Like the oxymoron that I was, I had created a situation in which the most tense point in the day was my leisure time. Although I don't get stressed very often, I'm remarkably adept at getting anxious about not being relaxed. In a tough assignment for the style page, I went for a facial early one morning and spent the entire time worrying if my arms were floppy enough and whether I should fall asleep or not.
Even after the distractions of yoga, I find it difficult to empty my mind during the relaxation session that rounds off the class. I lie there plotting my deep breathing like a military campaign - "Breathe in, fill the lungs, fill the stomach, hold and release slowly, no, slowly goddamnit. For God's sake get it right next time."
I once lived with a girl who used to put enormous amounts of time and energy into switching off. She would spend hours rounding up candles, sorting aromatherapy oils, and heating towels before taking to a deep bath where she would lie rigid, with all her attention focused on a cassette of dolphin sounds, as though the mournful wailings were the formula for true happiness in code. We're obviously not the only ones to be so dedicated in our pursuit of relaxation; once I noticed my own obsession, I began to see evidence of it all over. Every beauty range now seems to promise relaxation instead of glamour; magazines are full of tips about the best places, methods and clothes in which to unwind, and friends are full of talk about rushing off to the country for the bank holiday, in order to chill out.
As I see it, there are a few possible reasons for this kind of self-defeating cycle of getting stressed about relaxation. The cynic in me thinks that it's probably just because I, and others like me, just don't have enough to worry about. If somebody is going to repossess your house or mad cow disease has infected your herd, you can bet you wouldn't be getting in a tizzy about your anxiety levels. I read once that in times of war, the numbers of suicides and great works of literature - both, in very different ways, physical manifestations of personal neuroses - decline dramatically. No time for angst when death is casually strolling around.
YOU also have to factor in that one of the symptoms of even mild stress is an inability to rationalise and put things in order of importance. Last Sunday, I was reduced to tears because I couldn't decide whether or not to go to Witnness. I stood in the kitchen, half the way through washing a saucepan and worried about whether my day, my week - for all I knew, my life - was going to be greater enriched by staying in and sorting my laundry or going out and listening to Beck. I dithered so long that my lift had to go on without me so I spent the afternoon fretting about my own inability to make decisions.
The thing is, stress is no longer something for which you get sympathy - it's something to feel guilty about. Stress is a sign that you can't handle pressure, that you can't stand the heat, but are too neurotic to get out of the kitchen. We've all been told so many times that stress leads to ulcers and hair loss and cancer, that stress has lost its glamorous early-1980s connotations of hard living and fast thinking. Instead it has become a game that only losers play, losers who don't have their priorities straight and are feckless with the one thing that matters: their health.
This is undoubtedly a good thing - there's no kudos in glorifying a health risk - but it does mean that when you are stressed about work, or your health, or your finances, you start feeling even more stressed once you realise you're getting tense. You know you're going to get a headache, and you won't sleep at night and you'll probably end up drowning kittens in fertiliser sacks before the day is out, so you start getting anxious about de-stressing yourself. But next time, I think I might just try enjoying my stress, wallowing in it, indulging it and feeling heartily sorry for myself. At the very least, it will make a nice change to be relaxed about stress rather than stressed about relaxation.
Louise East can be contacted at wingit@irish-times.ie