Choice Relationships: 2008: The Stress-less Year!
Circulation 1500
Volume 19 December 2007
In This Issue:
My Personal Insights:
Choice Tips:
Additional Resources I Recommend:
Empowering Information and Tools:
I remember as a little girl shopping for holiday gifts and actually loving the crowds - for me, it added to my excitement. For most people, this is a wonderful time of year, but it can also be quite stressful. And, then, of course, there's the magical feeling that as the New Year approaches, you can wipe the slate clean and create new beginnings. In this newsletter, I'd like to offer you some suggestions to help with new beginnings and also wish you a year of health, happiness, joy and love!
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Stress is in the Eye of the Beholder:
Let me offer you a very basic explanation of the way stress operates. It is totally a personal reaction. What sends one person over the top might have no impact on another person. In other words, the sense of stress is a very individual experience. Stress can be cumulative and doesn't necessarily have to be the result of something large. Little, annoying things count.
However, once you do react to something or someone as potentially threatening, harmful, or upsetting, your body goes into stress mode to deal with the problem. So, if you're the kind of person who reacts to a lot of stimuli as stressful, eventually you could be taxing your health.
And of course, if you are always stressed out, your reactions to others are not "in flow." So, your relationships are impacted too!
Choice Tips:
- Learn to let go. In life sometimes things just don't go the way you want them to. As a matter of fact, sometimes, things really go badly. The more you can let them go, the less stress you will feel. Learning how to meditate can help you with the process of "letting go."
- Be willing to laugh. Laughter has been found to be very healthy for you and it relieves stress. Also, people respond better to those who are positive. And be willing to laugh at yourself rather than trying to be perfect - having a sense of humor is main trait that people look for in others.
- No matter how long or how well you've known your partner, don't assume you know what he or she is thinking. There's a good chance you're wrong. Yet, you're likely to react based on your assumptions and not always in the best ways. There's an easy solution: ask!
- Have you taken a vacation recently? No time? Not enough money? Studies have shown that if you visualize a pleasant scene and really imagine yourself on this "mini-vacation" for five minutes, it will help you relax and re-energize you. You're definitely worth five minutes of your time!
- On a practical level, we get so much accomplished through computers. But long hours working in front of the screen has been found to cause physical body strain that correlated to mental stress. There's an easy fix to this: take a break and walk away from the computer for a while.
- Do you live alone? Consider getting a pet. Research indicates that pets are a wonderful buffer to stress.
Additional Resources I Recommend:
Bodhipaksa, Guided Meditations for Stress Reduction (audio), Wildmind Meditation Services, November 2004.
"Wisdom" from the internet: Click here to read!
Empowering Tools and Information:
You really do have a choice in whether you experience stress or not. Listen to a talk I gave about this concept on my CD, "Choose to Live a Stress-less Life" Click to learn more.
And it comes with a great bonus that offers you practical tips to minimize your stress.
I've also written a chapter on stress in the book, Self-Improvement 101 . In addition to my article, there are 100 other experts to offer you great tips for your life. What a wonderful tool as you start the New Year!
Check it out here.