I think we’ve all had snaggles in our days or hardships in our weeks; and for some of us those weeks turn into months and years. We do what we can to salvage what we’ve got and ignore the temporary disappointments and annoyances. When things are tiresome at work, you expect other areas of your life to run smoothly. When things aren’t going so well in your personal life you often find yourself delving further into work for distraction. Life IS a great balancing act after all.

So what happens when you have a week, or a month, of bad runs? When work is stressful and hectic, and maybe your spouse or partner and you have been fighting more than usual because of other life stresses, or maybe you’re feeling “alone,” then the volunteer work that you’ve been working non-stop on seems glaringly under appreciated …maybe the group of us were called “assholes” during a meeting (albeit jokingly), then two of it’s most INVESTED members were implied to be bullies and crazy people in consecutive e-mails the following day. (I suppose it’s the hard-lined New York way of wrangling and thanking your volunteers.) So the 8 + hours you spent that morning suggesting ideas, sending sponsorship letters out and giving contact numbers to members working on other projects was completely ignored and NOW you’re just feeling angry on many levels. Crappy work, crappy love life, crappy extracurriculars. Frustrating right?

What’s the counter weight when you’ve got such a heavy load on one side of the life-scale? For me, it’s usually an early evening in with a bottle of wine, a pizza and a movie. More often than not I feel revived after a few hours of silence and a good nights sleep. Then I spend the next few weeks focusing on some “me” time with friends, and doing things that make me happy in the most selfish of ways.

I know that the best way to relieve stress is to integrate more of these days into your life, but living in New York City, you really have to put forth an enormous effort to keep up a blooming quality of life. Many of us get bogged down by work, as though it’s the top priority in one’s life. What’s worse is that many of us know that our jobs shouldn’t fall into the number one spot, yet we do little to change it. 9-5′s don’t exist anymore, so whatever we’re working on, we’re working on constantly.

Until you make a change.

My choice was to implement some satisfying philanthropic work into my life and spend more time with my friends, old and new. It’s a good plan, but not when those things become burdensome in themselves (not often, but sometimes), which makes me think that perhaps the best thing to do when you’re really in a rut moving in a thousand directions…is nothing.