How to deal with stress?

I feel like if my husband summed me up in one word, that word would be stressed. I don’t handle stress really well. I’m not someone who can just let things go. He doesn’t let much get to him, I, on the other hand, let everything get to me. If I’m not stressing about our kids, student loans, family etc., I’m stressing about other people’s problems.

We owe a lot on our student loans. We graduated in 2008–it’s been 10 years and we still owe a fortune. And I’m not exaggerating. Combined, we owe a total of $175,000. We pay more monthly for our loans than we do our house. And that number never seems to go down. How do we fix it? I don’t know. My husband has a great job, but it’s not enough. We found out recently from Navient that the payments for my husband’s private loans have to go up because his FICO has improved. His score goes up, so they want an extra $400 a month. How is this possible? Is any of it even fixable? Then I think about the people making less, but still owe as much. Between that, my son’s medical bills & my medical bills, I don’t know what we can do. Most days, all I think about is money. How to make money, how to save money… Between taking care of the kids & my medical problems, I can’t work a full-time job outside of the home. I have my Etsy shop that I’m hoping to open back up in the future, but I pulled tendons in my right arm & when my job calls for constant hammering, I don’t think it’s going to happen anytime soon.

I see how happy my kids are all the time and it makes me sad. Well, I’m happy that they’re happy–the sadness comes from how naive the kids are. They don’t know what goes on outside of all the playing & we work really hard to keep it that way. Sometimes, I just wish things could be easier. Actually, I always wish that, it’s just that some days I’m more cynical than others. Overall, I’m a happy person–I really am! It’s just, sometimes, after the stress builds up, I need to complain. *sigh*

-Lissa

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