Small Details, Big Breaths: How I Handle the Stress of Planning a Wedding

I am a little over a month away from walking down the aisle, and nothing feels quite real. People keep telling me that, for a bride so close to the biggest day of her life, I am oddly calm. I’ve gotten similar comments my entire life about various things; in college, my classmates thought I was intimidating because I always seemed to have my life together. Maybe I was really good at hiding the intense anxiety I was feeling at the time. Maybe, until recently, I was still really good at hiding those feelings.

I have always been a meticulous planner. When it comes to my wedding, I’ve done as much of the leg work as any one woman could – spent countless hours dog-earing bridal magazines, called and recalled the venue, caterer, and musicians to sort out the tiniest details, and made sure all my relatives had their travel plans set in place. My green Moleskin notebook is filled with daily wedding to do lists and, at this point, is well-worn and well-loved.

However, all of my planning couldn’t prepare me for the breakdown I had at one of my dress fittings. The tailor was pushing the final pins into place in the back of my dress when a text from my fiance, Rosanna, flashed across my screen. She was asking me to call her – there was news about the videographer we had booked for the wedding. When I called, Rosanna relayed the news that he had cancelled, despite my calling him to confirm the details for the ceremony a week prior.

It had been a long day at work. The call sent me into near-hysterics. We had wanted to have the video as an homage to Love Actually, the movie we had watched on one of our first dates. It was a small thing, but suddenly, I felt like I had no control over anything in my life, especially when it came to my wedding. That poor, sweet tailor. I completely broke down. After about five minutes of waterfall tears, I remembered the breathing exercises I had learned from one of my favorite professors in college. He called it the 4-7-8 breath, referring to the amount of time on each breath: 4 seconds of inhaling, 8 seconds of exhaling, punctuated by a 7-second hold in the middle. I repeated the breaths until the tears stopped.

Rosanna, knowing I would be upset, forwarded me a study on wedding photography trends she had stumbled across, pointing to one statistic in particular: Only 29% of couples watched their video in the last year. Not having a professionally shot video, while disappointing, wouldn’t stop our wedding from being the same levels of magic as Juliet and Peter’s in Love Actually. The reassurance from that small piece data, combined with the mindful breathing, helped me calm down enough to think rationally. When Rosanna reassured me that the videographer’s cancellation wouldn’t be the end of the world, I knew she was right.

I used to think that when people told me to take a deep breath to combat stress they didn’t understand what I was feeling. But there have been a lot of moments over the past year of planning that I couldn’t have gotten through had I not stepped back, taken a breath, and then continued onwards. While I’m reluctant sometimes to suggest breathing exercises to someone struggling with stressful situations, I don’t know if I’d have any hair left on my wedding day if I didn’t use them. That’s the beauty of it: The breathing exercises work for me, help me recenter when I feel like everything is crashing down around me, and give me a minute to pause and really be in the moment. I feel so many things now that my wedding is right around the corner: elated, scared, and yes, anxious. Saying “I do” to Rosanna is the easiest decision I’ve ever made, but I still know I’ll need that deep breath before the words come out. Not everything will be perfect. Videographers will cancel, I’ll get poked by my tailor’s pins, and yet, there will still be space for me to recenter. There always will be.

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