Overcome stress the easy way
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A first handful of ideas to help you live your life with less stress and greater enjoyment.
1. Always move on.
“Move on.” These two simple words will save you more stress than any others I know.
- Don’t dwell on your mistakes or other people’s successes. Don’t wonder “what if.” It will drive you insane. The past is past and cannot be changed. Move on.
- Don’t corrupt your mind with jealousy. It won’t change your life for the better, but it will absorb time and effort that just might. Move on.
- Don’t give in to guilt. It’s a worthless emotion. If you screwed up, admit it, apologize, and focus on not doing it again. Move on.
2. Take your time to find out where to head for and how to get there.
It‚Äôs easy to fall for conventional assumptions about what constitutes a ‚Äúgood career‚Äù or a well-balanced life. There‚Äôs no one-size-fits-all way of living that’s satisfactory. What works for you may be quite different than the so-called ‚Äúnorm.‚Äù The only way you‚Äôll find out what works for you is to spend enough time exploring your options and discovering what‚Äôs right for your specific circumstances.
Where you go matters less than whether it‚Äôs going to make you feel good about yourself. If you don‚Äôt, you‚Äôll feel wretched even after you arrive — whatever success you achieve in the world‚Äôs eyes. In fact, knowing that you‚Äôre a fraud playing a part that isn‚Äôt authentic to who you are will likely make you feel even worse.
3. Enjoy the ride as much as you can.
It‚Äôs fashionable today to encourage people to focus on their goals; a course that can swiftly build unnecessary stress. First, you may set impossible goals — or find luck doesn‚Äôt run your way — and end up convinced that you‚Äôre a failure. Secondly, too much focus on the future will mean you miss most of your life today.
Life happens now. If your mind is locked into plans and dreams way ahead, you’ll spend the present in a fog, scarcely remembering what happened and enjoying very little of it. Whatever your intentions for yourself, your eventual destination is not yours to control. Might as well enjoy the ride, then you’ll have experienced something good wherever you end up.
4. Happiness, like sexual attraction, is all in the mind. Look for it there.
Most people assume that you need to get something first — success, power, wealth, the right mate — then happiness inevitably follows. Since everyone wants to be happy, they pursue these ‚Äúbringers of happiness‚Äù with grim determination. Marketers know this and join in the fun by suggesting that every possible product, from a luxury apartment to a pair of jeans, is a sure-fire bringer of instant joy.
It ain‚Äôt so. There‚Äôs good evidence that working on cultivating a happy outlook on life first is the right path. Happy people are happy first. They’re far more likely to be successful as a result of being happy — and certainly more likely to have good friends and find the right mate — than successful people are to be happy simply through achieving some supposed success.
Even if success doesn‚Äôt come, they‚Äôll still have been happy. Making your happiness contingent on something — or someone — else means handing it over to events to play with. Much of the misery and anger in this world arises because people blame their misery on things or people that they believed would make them happy, but let them down.
More in the next episode.
Technorati Tags: ideas to help you live your life, less stress, move on, where to head for and how to get there, what works for you, too much focus on the future,
Photo credit Mary R. Vogt
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