Stress Reduction - Stress Relief

Cope with Stress, Anger, Fear.
Find Inner Peace and Spiritual Comfort.

Today is Your Day to Dance Lightly with Life.  It Really Is.
      - Jonathan Lockwood Huie

Stress reduction - stress relief articles...

• Stress Reduction - Stress Relief - Making Healthy Choices
• 12 Ways to De-Stress Your Life - Lose Weight and Stop Smoking by Reducing Stress
• Five 30-Second Emotional Releases to De-Stress at Work
• 7 Tips for Stress-Free Living
• Positive Affirmations for Relieving Stress
• Conscious Breathing to Relieve Stress

Everything has beauty, but not everyone sees it. - Confucius

God grant me the serenity
To accept the things I cannot change;
Courage to change the things I can;
And wisdom to know the difference.
- Reinhold Niebuhr

Stress Reduction - Stress Relief - Making Healthy Choices

- Jonathan Lockwood Huie

Stress is to your emotional health as junk food is to your physical health. You need a certain amount of food to sustain your life, but overeating and eating the wrong foods are unhealthy and sometimes dangerous.

As you need food to live, you also need a certain amount of emotional stimulation, but unless you choose to live alone far from the reaches of civilization, you are bombarded daily with innumerable stressors (agents, conditions, or other stimuli that cause stress). You hear the daily woes of friends and family. Your job and your daily commute are filled with stress-causing agitation. Just a few minutes of the 11 o'clock news provides far more than your daily requirement of stressful emotional stimulation.

What to do?

1. Simplify your needs: Much of our stress is due to what we believe we need to have. Actually, we need very little - food, a roof over our head, companionship. The rest is all perceived need that causes stress. As a crazy, but everyday example, we get stressed that we don't have the money to finance a relaxing vacation trip. Suppose we just relaxed every day knowing that we don't need luxuries.

2. Simplify your obligations: Practice saying "NO." No, I won't babysit your parakeet. No, I won't work a double shift Sunday. No, I won't chair the fundraising drive. There is actually almost nothing that you must do. Everything in life is a choice. Break the habit of assuming that you need to do everything you are asked to do and watch your stress level go way down

3. Ask yourself what is the worst that can happen: Usually the worst isn't really so bad. For example, the worst your boss can ever do is to fire you, and if you hate your job, that would be a blessing in disguise. Is that worth getting angry or stressing over?

4. Don't be demanding: You ask someone to do something, they don't do it, and you get upset - raising your stress level. Suppose you asked less of other people? Your stress level would go way down. For example, you want your teenagers to keep their rooms tidy. For them, a structured living space is not a priority. Ask yourself whether getting angry and exerting your control is worth the high stress level that it causes you.

5. Mentally, prepare for failures: Your boss WILL be critical of your work. Your cell phone and computer WILL fail. The stock market WILL drop. There WILL be another terrorist attack or war. It is just life. If you are mentally prepared, you won't be surprised or get angry or stressed when the inevitable happens.

6. Mind your own business: Many of us get upset - and stressed - over the actions of others that are really none of our business. The lifestyle of others is NOT our business. Whether your adult son or daughter has a job, whether they married the "wrong" partner, whether your neighbor recycles, whether the man down the street watches adult movies or his wife is having an affair - these are NOT our business. Know that there is no single way that life is "supposed" to be. Demanding that life meet our expectations is a sure fire recipe for a miserable existence. Life is a game with no rules. Have NO Expectations of life. Stay in your own business and lower your stress and avoid anger.

7. Be grateful for what you have: Each of us has been infinitely blessed - beginning with the gift of life. Whatever may appear to be missing or broken on any particular day, our glass is not half full, it is 99.9% full. More practically, when we feel ungrateful, we become unhappy and stressed. When we choose to feel and express our gratitude, the act of feeling and speaking our thanks creates a happiness within us. The more we express our gratitude, the more we have for which to be grateful.

8. Make YOU your top priority: Your ONLY responsibility in life is to your own happiness. Lower your stress and raise your joy by focusing on yourself. Today and every day, take time to celebrate your life - whether an hour's meditation in a quiet natural space, or a brief moment's conscious pause to breathe deeply and celebrate gratitude for your life.

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This above all, to thine own self be true. - William Shakespeare

Happiness depends upon ourselves. - Aristotle

12 Ways to De-Stress Your Life

Live a Happier Life by Reducing Stress

- Jonathan Lockwood Huie

If you have put on weight, have a smoking habit, or otherwise feel your life is out of control, weight, smoking and such are probably only the visible symptoms of a common underlying cause and the real enemy - Stress. Stress is a truly sinister and cunning opponent.

Here are 12 ways to de-stress your life, and in the process to jump-start your battle with weight, smoking, and other behaviors you wish to change...

1. Get more physically active. If your doctor okay's strenuous activity, get out and work up a sweat. Digging in your garden for a few hours is a real stress-buster. Go for a hike in the woods, pick a steep hill. Remember what you used to love doing, or always wanted to do, and begin today. Dust off your old bike. Buy an inexpensive kayak and learn to paddle. Choose outdoor activities whenever you can. When you are limited by weather or time, choose aerobic dancing to compelling music that captures your whole being. Or just workout until you are tired. But whatever you choose, focus on your activity. Don't talk, watch TV, or think about anything except what you are doing at the instant.

2. Spend time alone in nature. Who can stress while walking barefoot on a lonely expanse of sand, watching the seabirds soar and dive, and listening to the waves break and the wind rustle through the beach grass. Combine physical activity with time spent alone in nature by hiking, paddling, or biking.

3. Release your attachments. Stress is caused by the fear that we will lose what we value. We stress because we fear that we will lose our health, our job, our home, our spouse or friends. We stress that we will have less tomorrow than we had yesterday.

By releasing your attachment to your possessions and your attachment to your relationships, you can eliminate most of the stress in your life. Make a daily practice of visualizing your life without those things you most value. Visualize yourself without a car, a computer, a cell phone, and recognize that those things do not define the true value of your life. If you are in a highly troubled relationship and fear that the other person may leave you, visualize your life without that person, and accept that your happiness in life comes from within, and not from any other person.

4. Simplify your life. Once you have released your attachments to your possessions, consider releasing those things physically as well. Search through your home for things you have not used in a year. Consider which of those items could be given away without loss to your happiness. Perhaps you want to ask yourself about the true value to your life of other possessions as well. What do you own that creates happiness and what creates stress? Would downsizing de-stress your life?

5. Reduce your obligations. Some people keep to themselves. Others thoroughly enjoy being president of their kid's school PTA and volunteering to drive seven girls to scout camp. But many others suffer with too many self-imposed obligations. If you don't enjoy a responsibility, and it isn't truly crucial, just say NO. Focus your volunteering on those activities that give you great joy and satisfaction.

6. Learn to love your job, or get a job you love. This idea for de-stressing your life is the most difficult one for many people. If your reaction is that you simply must continue with a job you hate for the sake of your family, think again. Your family loves and cherishes you for far more than the paycheck you bring home. If taking a different, more personally rewarding, job would make you a happier and more pleasant person, don't you think your family would appreciate the change? Turn the tables and ask yourself if you would want your spouse to work at a job they hated in order to bring home a few more dollars each week? Trust that they would make the same choice for you. Love and honor yourself enough to choose a career that brings satisfaction as well as a paycheck.

7. Begin a project you love. Give yourself a little time each day to work on something creative that you love doing and that makes you feel good about yourself. Knit a scarf. Play the piano. Take up woodcarving.

8. Know that you are not responsible for the whole world. If you are going to make a difference, take up a cause. Campaign for the candidate of your choice, volunteer in your local soup kitchen, write a big check to Doctors Without Borders. But then turn off the eleven o'clock news. Worrying and stressing about the state of the world, or the economy, or crime in your community, or the health of your Aunt Judy in Des Moines, or whether your adult child's marriage is going to fail, is a waste of your time and causes much unnecessary stress.

9. Give your time to others. It's hard to worry so much about yourself when you give your time to help those less fortunate. Consider becoming a community volunteer.

10. Forgive everyone, especially yourself, for everything that has ever been done or been left undone. Your anger and hatred hurt you. Forgiveness is the salve that removes the sting of past injuries. Resentments and regrets do not cure the past, but unconditional forgiveness does.

11. Have gratitude for everything that has ever happened or not happened. All of your life is part of a grand plan. You wouldn't be who you are today if you had missed out on any of your experiences.

12. View life as an adventure. Everything changes. The inherent nature of life is constant change. To fear change is to fear life itself. Once you accept that whatever you hate about your life will change soon, and that whatever you love about your life will also change, you can view all of life as the adventure that it is, and end your stress.

Once you are serene and happy, you are far less likely to feel driven to overeat, smoke, or bite your nails. Begin by de-stressing your life, and changing your behaviors will follow naturally.

Five 30-Second Emotional Releases to De-Stress at Work

- Jonathan Lockwood Huie

To reduce the effects of stress in the workplace, take an emotional and spiritual, as well as a physical break, at least every two hours, preferably every hour.

Here are five de-stressors you can do in thirty seconds each...

1. Stretch your hands, arms, and shoulders. In addition to unwinding the kinks, this exercise provides a good warm-up for any of the other emotional exercises. Stand and hold your arms out to your sides so your body and arms form a cross. Gently bend each hand back at the wrist until the fingers point straight upward. Keeping your arms fully extended to the sides, with your fingers still extended upward, twist each hand and arm in a wringing motion as if you were operating a screwdriver.

2. Conscious Breathing: Breathe deeply and slowly. Focus your entire attention on each in-breath and out-breath. Visualize drawing new clean energy in through the top of your head on each in-breath, and expelling old stale energy out the soles of your feet on each out-breath.

3. Inner Smile: While conscious breathing, close your eyes and set the corners of your mouth in just the slightest smile. Visualize your smile growing larger and larger, and your happiness increasing.

4. Release: This exercise releases both your attachment to those things that haunt you, and your attachment to the fear of losing what you do not believe you can live without.

4a. Choose something that is very important to you and that you don't think you could stand to lose - such as your house, your favorite sport, your pet, your relationship with a loved one, your hearing, your eyesight, your life. Visualize your treasure between your hands. Feel intense love and gratitude for every joyful instant that you have spent with your important something. Now slowly raise your hands above your head, spread your hands apart, and RELEASE your treasure back to the Universe. It never belonged to you anyway - it was just on short term loan from Spirit. Choose another important something and release it. For everything important in your life, pick it up, love it, nurture it, give thanks for it, and then release it. Do the same exercise for each person that you have ever loved, and that has passed from this life. Hold them, love them, give thanks for them, and then release them back to the Universe.

4b. Now, release your burdens - your fears, regrets, guilts, shames, embarrassments, stress, angers. One by one, focus on each memory or fear that troubles you, hold it close, then release it back to the Universe. Release each incident from your past that still bothers you. Release each fear - your fears about your health, your family, your job, and every other fear. Breathe deeply, and give thanks.

5. Merging: While conscious breathing, close your eyes and visualize merging with the entire Universe - with each person, each animal, each plant, each bit of everything seen and unseen. Feel a unity with Spirit and all that is.

Further reading: Choose Your Habits, Choose Your Life - 5 Secrets For Breaking Your Bad Habits

How To Talk Yourself Into Making Personal Changes - Alan B. Densky

What To Do When Your Whole World Is Falling Apart?

How To Stop Worrying By Using the Qigong Release Exercise

Today is Your Day to Dance Lightly with Life.  It Really Is.
      - Jonathan Lockwood Huie

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