The stress in my life is getting to me. I feel my chest constrict, I can’t get a full breath. I wake at night with my heart racing. I have a dull pounding behind my eyes. My stomach hurts. Smiles aren’t as frequent, tears want to come more often. This has been building for a long time, but the past few weeks have felt dreadful! I need an escape from my life!

While I can’t control every source of my stress, one that I can control is this site. This isn’t my job, I do it for fun. And I don’t need to feel bad about deleting pitches that come into my inbox or “pressure to perform”.

 

People want me to preach about every item that comes to market. I haven’t run my site like that, but I still tried to be polite and reply to people. I can’t do it anymore! And I’m not sure that you guys want/need to know about every new supplement/drink that comes to market with promises to fix various weight problems, or the 8000 lines of patterned leggings to emerge, or the special “day of the year” that is coming up to celebrate some various healthy item (Celebrate National Nutritional Yeast Day with your readers!). I can’t do it anymore!

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A while ago I was sent the book “The More You Do the Better You Feel” to review. I accepted this only because I thought, “Okay, I’d like to feel better.” Is it really that those spare 3 minutes when I’m not trying to multi-task something should be filled with more?

But the book is for procrastinators, not people who are failing to get things done because they have too much on their list. I made it through half of it… it’s well-written and has a nice personable tone to it. But it’s not for me… I’m a person who is drowning and would like less to do.

That said… if you truly do struggle with procrastination, take a look at this book! I liked the tone and it had some good charts to work through for improving your life!

PS – there is a difference between occasional laziness and chronic procrastination. That is pointed out in the beginning of the book. And occasional laziness is probably acceptable!

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It’s nearly pumpkin season… meaning we’ll see a bunch of new products hit the shelves that are pumpkin flavored/scented. I admit, I’m usually tempted to try many of the food-related products. But some of them hold zero appeal to me.

But here’s a list of the start of pumpkin… and we’re still not out of August yet!

The name of this struck me as odd… Like “this is to make bathrooms smell pumpkiny” I guess that’s calling a spade a spade…

A photo posted by Jill (@jillwillrun) on Aug 14, 2015 at 3:33pm PDT

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I’m on the hunt for new running shoes. I’ve received a few pairs for review on this site over this year, but none of them have felt like “my shoe”. You know, that pair that is the one you just want to go to for every run? I have loved the Saucony Virrata… and Saucony has crushed me by stopping production on that shoe. So I need to find my new shoe. I’ve been running in the Skechers GoRun3 that I reviewed a while ago. I like the shoe, but my runs in it this week have been slower and the cadence hasn’t been where I normally fall naturally. That could be attributed to stress too. But some other options I’ve considered are to revisit Altra or try Skora. Both are zero-drop, which is what the Virrata is was. Or I could revisit the Saucony Kinvara, which is a 4mm drop. But shoes with a higher drop that I’ve tested haven’t felt like my running glass slipper. (Glass slippers sound dreadful, don’t they?)

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Have you seen this company Aloha advertised all over, or is that just my adaptive advertising feeds that know I was trying to consume more protein? Nevermind that, I decided to purchase their sample pack. It’s a plant-based protein source, which is good for me… whey makes me feel yucky. I thought the flavor of them was pretty good. And the ingredient list is unique from others I’ve seen:

Pea Protein, Pumpkin Seed Protein, Hemp Seed Protein, Coconut Water, Coconut Cream, Coconut Sugar, Vanilla Bean, Apple Juice, Madagascar Cinnamon, Sunflower Lecithin, Xanthan Gum, Himalayan Pink Salt, Monk Fruit Extract.

The caveat is when you buy that trial pack, you end up in their subscription model service where they send you new product on regular intervals and you can’t get out of it unless you call them. I hate services that make you call to get out of them. And calling to cancel them is one more thing on my to-do list. Blech.

I hope you heave a great weekend. I hope to work through my inbox and delete everything that is addressed to “Ms Jill Blogger” without any guilt or compulsion to reply! Maybe then my headache will abate, leaving me with all the other ways that stress can take a toll on physical wellbeing.