Tag Archives: Stress

Get Relief From Stress NOW

One Simple Trick To Quickly Banish Stress

There is a quick way to beat stress, and once you realize how simple it is, you can do it more and more often, allowing you to get so good at it that it becomes almost automatic. This will have a profound impact on your life, as most of our problems are either caused by stress, or made much worse by stress in the from of unnecessary worry and anxiety.

We are all very busy today. It seems that there is less and less time to focus on ourselves, and our own desires. It seem that everybody would love no more than to steal one hundred percent of our attention for their own needs. Work, family, obligations. They can add up.

When most people think of a vacation, they think of a couple weeks off from work, on a plane to some island getaway. These can be wonderful. But when you consider that most people can only experience something like this once in a great while, they tend to lose their effectiveness in our daily lives.

So we need to develop the ability to get the same results without actually going anywhere. This is like taking a mini vacation. Once you get good at this, you will be able to do this several times a day, no matter where you are. At stoplights, during commercials, even while sitting in meetings. Pretty soon you’ll be able to do this during conversations with others (although I wouldn’t recommend doing this during serious conversations with loved ones or family members.)

The trick is to completely shut off all thoughts of the past, and all thoughts of the future. In the past are all of our memories. The first thing to realize is that most of our memories are inaccurate. We rarely remember things exactly as they happened. This is one reason that if all the police have is eyewitness testimony, they often times won’t pursue a case. It has been shown in several studies by leading psychologists that human memory is spotty at best.

The second thing about human memory is we usually tend to be overly critical on ourselves when remembering events.

I should have…

I wish I would have…

Why did I….

Why did he/she……

These are statements we usually use to frame the past. Rarely do we remember soemthing and pat ourselves on the back for a job well done. So when you develop the ability to temporarily shut off your memories of the past, you also shut off the guilt, worry and stress associated with how you frame those memories.

The other side of the coin is the future. Unless you just won an all expense paid trip to Paris, (or somewhere else cool) when you think of the future, if you are like most people, you think of it with at least a little bit of worry and anxiety.

Will I be able to pay the bills?
What will he/she say?
What if I fail?
What if I screw up?

When we think of the future in these terms, it’s no wonder we have stress related health problems.

So the second trick is to temporarily cut off all thoughts of the future. When you do this, you can notice a small bit of relief in the present moment.

How do you do this? Focus on now. Focus on the physical feelings you are experiencing. Take a slow, deep breath and focus your concentration as much as possible on your physical body. Start with your feet and slowly move your awareness all the way up. Go for as long as you can without letting thoughts of the future or past creep into your mind.

Assert to yourself that you have the power over your own choice. You have the power over where your attention goes. Your mind goes where you tell it, not the other way around.

One way to do this is when you slowly breath in, say to yourself:’

“I choose…”

And as you slowly breathe out, say to yourself:

“Now.”

By combining your concentration on those two sentences, your breath, and whatever physical sensations you are feeling, you’ll effectively shut out thoughts of the past and the future.

Your conscious mind is like a computer. It only has so much processing power. By forcing yourself to think about your breath, your body, and those two statements (or whatever similar statements you want to use) you are effectively using one hundred percent of your conscious processing power.

One important thing to keep in mind is that it will be difficult to keep those other thoughts away for long. Thinking of the future and the past have been necessary for human survival for hundreds of thousands of years, and it can take a lot of practice to shut them out for more than a few moments. But that is all it takes to put a crack in stress and see the light of now, that can shine through and give you a small bit of needed relief.

The more you practice, the better you’ll get at this. Soon you’ll be a master of your own mind.

How to Quickly Beat Stress for Good, Everytime

Your report is overdue. You’ve heard rumors at work, and you wonder if your job is the next one to be cut. Your wife says if you’re late one more time you’re sleeping on the couch. Your kid just failed his third grade spelling test. You desperately need another cup of coffee because you were up late last night worrying if you could make your mortgage payment. Everyday you turn on the news there’s nothing but bad news. Terrorists. Shootings. You look forward to the weekend only to find put of tasks beginning to grow out of hand, out of reach. There doesn’t seem to be an end in sight.

You are stressed. Perhaps you have a little big of high blood pressure. Perhaps your doctor even recommended something about that. Of course, he likely didn’t give you any helpful advice. Maybe a handful of pills that your insurance wouldn’t pay for. He just told you of the dangers of stress, and in telling you how many different ways it can kill you, probably made it even worse. I won’t tell you that most doctors think that stress is behind fully 75% of illnesses today. I won’t tell you that stress is directly responsible habits such as drinking, smoking, over eating, that can cause a slew of health problems, and shorten your life by ten years or more. I’m sure that you already knew that.

Because you are sitting there now, reading this, in that chair, you can naturally begin to realize that you are about to discover the secret that can beat stress before it even starts. Not that stress is all bad. You need a little bit in life to keep you motivated. You can keep the good stress. Competition among peers, a slight bit of frustration that naturally turns into curiosity to give your brain a boost as you are about to learn something new here.

I’m talking about the deadly, useless stress that only seems to make everything worse. That is what you need to get rid of.

The secret? A combination of your breath, appreciation, and choice. Sounds hokey. Sounds metaphysical. Sounds like some goofy tip you’d read in a free online article (wait a sec..). But guess what? It works. The more you practice it, the sooner you will realize that because it is up to you to choose how to respond to your environment, it is you that can decide to feel stress, or not. It may not seem like that now, but after you give this a go, I mean a serious effort, and keep practicing, you’ll your life change for the better.

Ready to learn? Ok, here we go.

If you can try now, fantastic. Otherwise try it at home or when you won’t be disturbed for a couple minutes. It takes a couple minutes to learn, but once you get the hang of it, you’ll be able to do it in the middle of a heated conversation and nobody will be the wiser.

Take in a deep breath, hold it just a bit, and then exhale. After you exhale, wait a little bit before you inhale again. Wait until you build up a fairly strong desire for oxygen. Then inhale slowly, and as you do so, feel a deep sense of appreciation for the air you are breathing (I said this was hokey, right?). You might need to try this a few times and really feel the gratitude for the air, the oxygen, whose absence would surely kill you must faster than any amount of stress.

Then when your lungs are full, hold it again. And really imagine all the molecules in your lungs greedily extracting the oxygen from the air and transferring it to your red blood cells, to carry and feed your body. Delicious nutritious oxygen food that keeps you alive. Just before you breath out, when you are feeling the gratitude for the gift of life from the air you breath everyday, say to yourself:

I

and then as you breath out slowly, again say to yourself:

CHOOSE

And let it sink in, really sink in that it is up to you to choose all your reactions to the world. All the ways you respond to how people treat you. From your wife of fifty years to the guy that bumped into you on the way to the bus stop. It is up to you to wish things were different, to figure out a way to extract what you want from your circumstances. It is up to you to choose to be a victim, or a victor. It is up to you to feel stressed, or feel relaxed. It is up to you to give in to hypertension, and take bottle after bottle of pills that may or may not work. The choice is, has always been, and always will be yours.

Breath

Gratitude

Choice

You can practice these three anywhere. Walking, driving, sitting, watching movies, even during sex. The more you practice the easier it gets and the more it will become second nature to you.

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Reduce Stress, Improve Life

I was talking to my friend on the phone this morning. She was telling me about her boyfriend. He has one of those jobs where he’s on for three days, and then off for two. It’s great when their days off overlap, but sometimes it can be stressful. It helps that she has studied yoga for a while, and knows several techniques to help her relax when she is stressed out. She tells me there are several different types kinds of yoga, with different intentions. Some are for physical health, others are for spiritual rejuvenation, others are for overall stress reduction.

I think that stress is an under looked at problem in today’s society. Everybody has stress. The problem with stress, is that it goes undetected. It’s a quirk of the human system, either by evolution or some kind of omnipotent creator, that low level pain often gets put into the background of the mind. Acute pain is one of the few outside stimuli that can not be ignored, for obvious reasons. But mental or physical stress, unfortunately is one of those things that can too easily get ignored.

According to doctors and researchers, the biggest problem regarding stress is people that are under unhealthy levels of stress don’t even know it. They go through life, doing the same thing day after day, and not realizing how many problems the stress is causing them because they think its part of their normal life. They have carried the same amount of stress for so long, that it can even become part of who they are. Some can even feel uncomfortable when the stress is removed, because they have identified with it on such a deep level.

I was with a friend of mine on a bike ride a few years ago. His bike was broken, so he borrowed one from another friend. It hadn’t been ridden for a while, but since it seemed to be ok, neither of us gave it any second thought. After a few miles into the ride, my friend began to feel unusually tired. He’s in pretty good shape, so we wondered what the problem might be. Diet? Nope. Not enough sleep? Nope. Girlfriend troubles? Nope. As much as we tried, we couldn’t think of a solution, so we just accepted the fact that he was performing under par that day, and adjusted our speed accordingly. It wasn’t until after we’d completed the ride that we discovered the problem. The rear brake on his bike wasn’t releasing completely when he’d finished breaking. It was causing a slight drag on the bike, making him work just a little bit harder. Instead of a nice relaxing enjoyable ride, we went slow because we just accepted that we had to go slow.

The secret to reducing stress is to find the brakes that are holding you back, and release them. Unfortunately, in today’s society, the most popular solution to stress is to cover up the feeling. Alcohol, drugs. Even if you go to the doctor, you’re likely to get a prescription for drugs to mask the effect, and not address the cause.

The first step in reducing stress is taking an honest look at your life to discover what it is that is causing the stress. Work, family, money, all these can be sources of stress. The biggest cause, however, is worrying about things that you can’t control. Once you realize exactly where the line is between that which you can control, and that which you can’t, you’re on the right track. If you take little steps in the direction of the things that you can control, and release the things that you can’t, you’re well on the way to significantly reducing the amount of stress, and all the accompanying problems.

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Easy Way to Bubble Your Way Out of Stress

I used to live in a city where I had to ride my bike around. The only time I ever took the train was when I had to go someplace out of reach of my bicycle. There was a movie theater I used to go to that was about a ten kilometer ride, so it was defiantly doable, but I didn’t want to get sweaty before I watched a movie, so I usually took the train. The local places that I went to I usually went to by bicycle. And at the time, I thought it was a drag, because sometimes I was kind of tired, and didn’t really feel like riding my bike home.

I had a friend kept three or four bikes around town. His theory was that two or three junker bikes would be a better value than one nice bike, because he would always have an option of leaving by bike or by taxi. Because he always had a bike stashed somewhere he could use. And some of the bicycle places shut down early, before the bars, so it was sometimes convenient to get a ride someplace other than he had planned on going. He was always looking for ways to be more flexible. He thought that always having two or three options in his back pocket was the best way to go.

He reminded me of a speaker at a seminar I went to once. It was a stress management seminar, and the guy was saying that most people make the mistake of wanting less stress. He said that people that have lower stress overall actually have pretty boring lives. He said they key is to be able to find the bubbles in the stress, and make good use of them. One guy that was sitting next to me asked about this, as did the guy that was sitting behind me. They wanted to know why he was talking about bubbles in stress. But then he said that bubbles were really the moments in the middle of a stressful period where you can momentarily forget what is going on around you, and just exist by yourself, in the moment. Just take a quick break and follow your breath for a couple cycles. In. Out. In. Out. Slow like. And he said the people that are actually the most flexible, the people that can find the most little bubbles in the stress throughout the day are the most healthy. He gave an example of an old Samurai warrior who had about a five minute time period between battles, and decided to lean against a tree to recharge himself, while all his Samurai buddies were sharpening their swords. The tree contemplating Samurai, of course, was victorious.

Sometimes my friend even was able to loan his bikes out due to his flexibility in their placement, because it’s always good to have friends. And he told me once he even had bikes in other cities, because sometimes the trains stop at stations that aren’t so close to the city center, and you never know when you are going to take an impromptu trip out to the sticks.

The city I live in how has lots of trains and opportunities to use public transportation, so I haven’t even used my bike yet. But I’ve had to run and catch connecting trains and busses and such, and I’m finding that those bubbles sure do come in handy. But you already knew that, didn’t you?

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Use Your Dreams to Beat Stress and Say Goodbye To Anxiety

This article is first in a series on dream interpretation.  If you haven’t yet, please consider reading the article on how to remember your dreams so you can easily maximize your benefits from this article.

The first, and most common type of dream is referred to as ‘Release’ dreams. These are dreams where you are drifting through them and there is absolutely no rhyme or reason to what is going on. These are the most important, and can be the most helpful kind of dream. As you go through the day, you worry about this, stress about that, and create all kinds of emotional worry that doesn’t really offer you much benefit. When you sleep, your brain scans through you recent memory and decides what’s important, and what isn’t. According to Nobel Prize winner Francis Crick, the reason these kind of dreams can seem so chaotic is due to the physical matrix structure of the brain. You might have a memory about your neighbors dog which happens to be physically right next door to a memory of something your third grade teacher said. Your brain will decide that both those memories might be taking up valuable space in your brain, so they might get fired off at the same time. As a result, you have a dream about being in third grade, and your neighbors dog is yelling at you for not understand long division.

Because these are the most common, they are naturally the most useful. Simply because your brain is telling you what not to worry about. If you brain has decided you don’t need to worry about something, why should you, right?

One good way to handle these dreams is to pay attention to the images that you remember upon awakening. What do they remind you of?  How do those things make you feel? And what do those things remind you of? It’s important to ask yourselves these questions when you are still in the groggy waking up state while you are still blinking the sleep out of your eyes. It might not be natural at first, but as you practice this, you will get better.  The key here is to accept whatever images come up in those first few moments. These are the things that your brain has decided are not important enough to worry about. So whatever images and feelings associated with those images come up, simply choose to release them.  And if you happen to think about them later in the day, just remind yourself that your brain already decided that you don’t need to worry about those things any more, because they have already been taken care of. You can choose to free up your thoughts to think about better things that will help you to get what you want out of life.

And when you decide to release your anxiety about things that are no longer important, you will notice that you will naturally decrease your stress. And when you do that you will start to notice less and less anxiety, which will lead to you not only to improve your physical health but to improve your mental health as well.

And all it will cost you is a few minutes of focused releasing every moring. You can do that, right?

Please be sure to check back often, because as most people are starting to realize, the more you improve yourself everyday, the happier you will become.  And one good way to do that is to share this with others.

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