Chapter 11
Stress-Resilient Values, Goals, and Attitudes
In This Chapter
Recognizing how your values and goals create stress
Discovering what’s important to you
Finding your sense of humor
Seeing the value in helping others
Adding a spiritual dimension
Just as your thinking plays an important role in creating (and relieving) your stress, your values, goals, and attitudes can increase or decrease the amount of stress in your life. This chapter helps you identify and clarify your personal values and goals and shows you how you can create more stress-resilient ways of looking at your world.
Recognizing the Value of Your Values
“What,” you may ask, “have my values and attitudes got to do with the stress in my life?” The answer is, “Lots.” Your personal values and your overall philosophy of life play a major role in determining your stress level. What you think is important and what you value act together in often subtle yet important ways to either protect you from stress or make your life more stressful. Rarely a day goes by without some decision, some opinion, or some action being determined, or at least shaped, by your values and attitudes. Your values in large part determine your goals, your needs, and your wants. And when you don’t reach these goals, or fulfill these needs and wants, you feel stressed.
You may not even be aware of holding such values and attitudes. Yet you do. And either consciously or subconsciously they guide many of your more important decisions — everything from what you eat to how you vote, from what work you do to how you spend your time and money. Clarifying your values and attitudes is an important first step in moving toward developing a stress-resilient philosophy of life. The greater the congruence between your values and your goals, and between your decisions and actions, the lower your stress level. Think of your values and attitudes as your roadmap in life. The better the map, the smaller the chance that you may make a wrong turn.
At various points in life, you realize that some of your values and goals are not providing you with the kind of happiness and satisfaction you want. Many of your core values may not be the values you truly believe in. They may be values you inherited from others, without much thought on your part. These values can come from your parents, your peers, your religion, your teachers, television and the movies, the corporation or organization you work for, or the community you live in. Such values can match your own values. However, in some cases, they may not reflect what is truly meaningful or important to you at this point in your life. Yes, you’re climbing the ladder, but it may be the wrong ladder. What may have seemed worthwhile and important at one stage of your life may not seem as important later on. Your values and goals change, and reevaluating and reconsidering your values from time to time is important.
Clarifying Your Values and Goals
In this section, I provide you with several exercises designed to help you discover and clarify what values and goals are important to you. These exercises aren’t about passing or failing or being right or wrong, so just be honest. Does this mean some values are less stress-resilient than others? Absolutely. But you alone can determine which of your values and goals you should hold onto, and which of your values and goals you need to revamp or even throw out altogether.
The tombstone test
Contemplating your own demise may seem like an overly dramatic way of getting in touch with your core values and central goals, but it can be remarkably effective. The following exercise was designed to give you the ultimate perspective. Take a pen or pencil, and a piece of paper (or your keyboard), and answer the following question:
When I’m gone, what would I like my tombstone to say about me? (Assume you have a very large tombstone.)
Include in your tombstone description the answers to the following, more specific questions:
How would I like people to remember me?
What would I like to have accomplished in life?
This exercise should help you step back and look at the bigger picture. It forces you to consider what exactly you value as worthwhile and important. This approach worked for Ebenezer Scrooge. Give it a try.
Five-ish years to live
This section gives you another upbeat exercise. In this one, you aren’t dead yet, but you will be shortly. You’ve been told that you have at least five years left, but not much more. You’re reassured that you will experience no pain, and you can carry on a totally normal life until your death. This exercise differs from the preceding “tombstone test,” in that it looks less at the “big” picture and asks that you re-consider and re-evaluate your present day-to-day involvements and concerns.
Ponder the following question:
If you had just five more years to live, would you spend the time you have left any differently than the way you are spending it now?
If yes, what would you do that is different? Would you stay at your job? Would you live where you’re living? Would you finally call your mother? And so on . . .
The rating game
One of the simplest ways of uncovering your values and goals is to rate a list of the most common ones. Use this simple ten-point rating system, where ten means “extremely important to me” and zero means “not at all important.” You’re not ranking the items in order from least to most important. You’re just considering each item individually and rating it on a scale of one to ten. Take a stab at it:
____ Achieving financial success
____ Being seen as smart
____ Being powerful
____ Being a leader
____ Winning at most things
____ Helping others
____ Being seen as physically attractive
____ Being admired
____ Being seen as honest
____ Spending time with family
____ Spending time with friends
____ Achieving fame
____ Being respected
____ Being loved
____ Having a strong spiritual foundation
The purpose of this exercise is to get you to re-assess specific goals and involvements in terms of their value and importance for you. After you rate these values and goals, take a moment to consider which items you rated a seven or greater. Elaborate on what that value or goal means to you. For example, does “financial success” mean having millions of dollars, or does it mean having enough money so that you don’t have to worry about paying your bills? A sentence or two should do it. Hopefully, completing this exercise will help you discover something about what is important to you, and perhaps identify some aspects of your life that you may want to change.
Things I love to do
This exercise is a lot easier. I’d like you to simply list 15 things you really enjoy doing. I’m not talking about bettering the world; I’m talking about things you really like to do. It can be anything — traveling, playing a favorite sport, reading pot-boilers, learning, gardening, sleeping, watching TV, or whatever else you really like to spend your time doing. Sometimes just putting these activities down on paper can trigger a realization that you’re missing out. Then ask yourself:
“Why am I not doing more of these things?”
If you love playing golf or you’d like to spend more time traveling, ask yourself why you’re not spending more time on these kinds of activities. Later sections in this chapter can help you figure out how to find the time to build in the activities you love into your busy life.
Some other intriguing questions to ponder
If your brain isn’t completely drained by now, here are several questions that you can ask yourself to get to know your values and goals a little better. If you’d rather not ponder these questions now, jot down the questions and pull one out next time you find yourself waiting in a long line or sitting on a plane or train.
If I could come back in another lifetime as someone else, who would it be? Why?
If I had oodles of money, what would I do with it?
If I could make only three phone calls before I had to leave this world, who would I call? What would I say?
And the old job-interview favorite: Where do I want to be in one year? In five years?
Actualizing Your Values, Reaching Your Goals
Having identified your values, you may realize that you’ve been paying lip service to them without following through. People have a tremendous ability to hold a set of values they feel are meaningful, yet in their day-to-day lives they can sometimes fail to recognize the importance of those values. Thus, you may value the notion of spending time with your family yet find yourself, for whatever reason, actually spending very little time interacting with family members, even when you have the chance. The way to avoid this trap is to become more conscious of how exactly you do spend your time, money, and energy.
Staying on track
This exercise will help you organize much of the material culled from the preceding exercises and also enable you to assess the extent to which you’re actualizing and achieving those goals and values you feel are highly important to you. The following sections take you through this process.
Step 1: Ranking your primary values and goals
From what you discovered about yourself by doing all the preceding exercises, come up with a ranked list of your top ten values. These values can include more abstract ones (such as honesty and integrity) and more specific goals (spend more time with family, get more involved with the community, and so on).
Step 2: Evaluating your progress
In a second column, rate the extent to which you feel you have achieved or actualized those values and goals listed in the first column. Again, use a simple ten-point scale, where ten indicates “completely” and zero indicates “not at all.”
To help you think of specific goals and values, here are some categories to get you started: Job/Career, Family, Friends, Health, Money, Hobbies, Interests, Travel, and Spirituality.
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My important values and goals |
My success at actualizing these values or reaching these goals |
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Making the time
Actualizing your values and reaching your goals require time. And because you’re incredibly busy already, finding time for the more important things in your life may take some planning. You need to schedule your priorities, rather than merely prioritizing your schedule. In other words, start out by determining which activities are more important in your life, and then make the time to do them.
To help you identify those activities, here’s a starter list for you to begin with. For each of the items below, indicate the extent to which each is a priority and exactly how, when, and where you can find or create the time for that priority.
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I would like to spend more time . . . |
How, when, and where can I do this? |
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With my kids |
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With my spouse |
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With friends |
______________________________________ |
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On my job or career |
______________________________________ |
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On a hobby or interest |
______________________________________ |
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Playing sports |
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Reading |
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Keeping in shape |
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Nurturing my soul |
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Doing community activities |
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Traveling |
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(Add any others you may have) |
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Expressing Gratitude
Psychologist Robert Emmons defines gratitude as “a felt sense of wonder, thankfulness, and appreciation for life.”
I also like the definition developed by another psychologist, Sonja Lyubomirsky, who defines the process of gratitude as “a focus on the present moment, on appreciating your life as it is today and what has made it so.”
Gratitude can mean different things to different people. In its simplest form, it can be saying thank you for a gift or service. For you it may mean feeling thankful when you dodge a bullet or get over something bad that happens to you. The word may take on a religious meaning, thanking a higher power for bestowing goodness and “counting your blessings.” For others it can mean feeling grateful when others are less well off than they are. (This may take a less commendable form when a person “compares downward,” identifying others who have less money, less success, less attractiveness, or less intelligence and feeling grateful to be better off.)
Understanding how expressing gratitude reduces your stress
Research has shown that people who feel gratitude are happier, report more life satisfaction, and report less stress. Grateful people are less likely to be depressed, anxious, lonely, and neurotic. But it also appears that grateful people don’t live in a world of denial. They don’t ignore the negative parts of their lives.
The connection between gratitude and stress may not be immediately obvious. After all, why should I feel less distressed when I feel grateful for something? Here’s how it works:
Gratitude allows you to detach from a stressful period and savor a positive memory or experience. This positive focus can create a positive sense of well-being. This can distract you from your worries and upsets. Remember that it’s hard to think of two things at the same time. Feeling gratitude probably means you’re feeling less stress.
You can feel better about yourself. When you express gratitude, you recognize that people care about you and have done a lot for you. This can enhance your positive sense of self, reducing levels of negative, self-downing thinking.
When the gratitude is aimed at others, you feel better about yourself because you’re recognizing and emotionally giving to others. Giving to others more often than not makes you feel better about who you are.
Gratitude pulls you out of your negative mindset. Much of your stressful thinking is automatic. By focusing solely on your negative experiences, you can spiral downward. By expressing gratitude, you give your thinking a more positive target. You feel better; you feel less stress.
Gratitude puts things into perspective. Gratitude provides you with a sense of balance that can help you avert feelings of hopelessness and despair that can play a major role in creating stress.
Expressing gratitude to others can create and enhance relationships. You feel better about yourself, and others in turn feel better about you.
The bonus is that you may get a thankful response of gratitude from the person to whom you express gratitude. Most often that can make your day and lower your stress.
Keeping a mental gratitude journal
Intuitively you know you should feel and express gratitude, but you may put it into practice less often than you think. You may look at exercise in the same way: You know you should do more of it, but you just don’t. Sometimes you need to be reminded and encouraged. Keeping a journal makes it more likely that you’ll be aware of the importance of gratitude and express gratitude more frequently. Here’s what to do:
Find a time when you have a few moments to yourself and think about four or five things in your life right now for which you are thankful. This could be on the train on your way to work, on a coffee break at your desk, or at any quiet moment when you can step back and reflect. Here are some things you might be grateful for:
Your health
Your friends
Your children
Your relationship
Your skills and talents
Your home
Your job
Your life itself
Add to this list and come up with additional aspects of your life for which you can feel grateful.
For some people, carrying out this exercise daily may work best; for others, once a week may be enough. If you’re a good journal-keeper, you may want to jot down these objects of gratitude. Either way, try to make this exercise a regular part of your day or week.
Remembering to actually express your gratitude
Acknowledging those parts of your life for which you should be grateful is important; expressing gratitude to others is the other part.
Too often we feel gratitude but fail to express it. Our hearts are in the right place, but we don’t communicate our gratitude to the other person. This communication can take the form of a simple thank you or a more elaborate expression of gratitude. It can be in response to a specific behavior or a larger pattern of behavior on the other person’s part. It can be something that happened recently or something that goes way back. It can be someone you know personally or someone you only know of. It can be a close connection, such as a family member, or someone more remote, such as a mail carrier, an author, or your child’s teacher.
These days, you have plenty of options for delivering your message. The vehicle for your gratitude could be a face-to-face meeting, a phone call, an e-mail, an instant message, a text message, or perhaps even a letter. Don’t wait for next Thanksgiving.
Cultivating Optimism
Much of our stress comes from looking at the future with either anxiety or hopelessness. We fear the uncertainty of the future, often believing that the worst will happen. We depress ourselves about the future, believing that nothing good will come of it. But our lives can be far less stressful if we look forward with more optimistic and hopeful attitudes. Being optimistic is not simply believing that everything in your life will turn out wonderfully. Being optimistic means believing that your important life goals can somehow be accomplished and that you can find ways to make those goals happen.
Recognizing thinking errors that hinder optimism
A first step in cultivating optimism is recognizing the distorting attitudes that undermine how you view your future. If you look closely, you realize that you may be experiencing some of the common thinking errors I define in Chapter 10. Here are some examples of these cognitive distortions, which might reflect your own pessimistic and hopeless thinking:
Overgeneralization: Thinking in terms of “all or nothing,” always and never, and black-and-white opposites such as good and bad, right and wrong. For example:
• “Everybody thinks I’m stupid!”
• “People never change!”
• “Everybody is always only out for themselves!”
Conclusion jumping: Taking one small bit of current evidence and wrongly predicting negative future outcomes. For example:
• “Because I failed this test, no college is going to admit me.”
• “Because he didn’t say hello to me yesterday, I have to assume he doesn’t like me.”
• “Because she wasn’t interested in me, I’ll never be in a relationship.”
Self-rating: Taking one of your traits, abilities, or performances, and/or other people’s disapproval, and equating that with your self-worth. For example:
• “My boss criticized my handling of the project. I’m incompetent!”
• “I failed that test. I’m stupid!”
• “I let her down! I’m really a bad person.”
Catastrophizing and awfulizing: Predicting that the worst will happen in the future. For example:
• “I know this headache means I have cancer!”
• “I know I’ll screw up this interview!”
• “I know I’ll grow old alone with no one to be with me!”
Arguing with yourself
As you can see, these thinking errors can create a rather pessimistic and hopeless view of the future, and with that bleak picture comes much unnecessary stress. Chapter 10 shows you in detail how to identify these distortions and dispute the thinking behind them. Here are some useful challenges and quick questions to ask yourself:
“Am I over-reacting here?”
“Do I have any real evidence that my predictions will come true?”
“Haven’t I been wrong in the past about what I thought would happen?”
“Because something happened once or twice, does that mean it will always happen?”
“How can I tie my entire self-worth to one bit of failure or disapproval?”
“What advice would I give someone else who was thinking the way I am?”
“Most of the bad things I’m imagining probably won’t happen.”
“Accept uncertainty! There are lots of things in life you can’t control.”
“Don’t assume the worst!”
“Thoughts aren’t facts! You don’t always have to trust them.”
“I can come up with a new game plan to change things. Let me look at this differently.”
Constructing an optimistic future
You probably have many stories you tell yourself about your life that give it meaning and shape the way you think, feel, and act. Three such stories concern your past, present, and future.
Your history — the story of where you came from and how you got to be who you are today.
Your present life — a description of where you are right now in life.
Your future — what your life will look like in the future.
These stories play an incredibly important role in determining how you look at yourself and the direction your life will take. Particularly important is the story of where your life will be in the future.
Try this exercise: Take a piece of paper (or use your tablet or computer) and construct a realistically positive picture of where you want to be in five or even ten years. Be specific, describing your goals, dreams, and aspirations. Include your relationship goals (marriage? children?), career goals, and any other important goals. Don’t censor yourself, but be realistic. Allow your thoughts to go in optimistic directions. Repeat this exercise on a regular basis, updating your goals and wish list.
Research has shown that writing this way on a regular basis can make you think more optimistically. This is more than just positive thinking (“If I think about it, it will happen”). The writing and thinking help you escape the barriers of negative, limiting thought. Writing down your goals certainly makes you feel happier and shows you that you have a choice in the way you view your world. It suggests more options and helps you identify unrealistic goals and potential roadblocks. The more you practice optimistic thinking, the more internalized these thoughts become. And when you really believe them, they become more possible.
Laughing Your Way to Stress Reduction
If you take life (and yourself) too seriously, you can just about guarantee that your stress level will be higher than it has to be. Life is filled with hassle, inconvenience, and a myriad of other nuisances that can either drive you crazy or bring a smile to your face. And even the more serious problems that may come your way often contain a trace of humor. Humor gives you the ability to defuse much of the potential stress and pressure all around you. A sharp sense of the absurd combined with a dash of whimsy can make your life far less stressful.
He (or she) who laughs, lasts
Humor is a more serious stress-reducer than you may think. Here are some of the ways it can lower your stress level:
It relaxes your body. The physical act of laughing can result in an overall lowering of your physiological stress level. After rising briefly while you’re laughing, your blood pressure drops and your heart rate slows. The brain may also release endorphins, which can induce a more calming physical state.
It can enhance your immunity. Researchers are beginning to discover that humor may have even more important health-enhancing effects. Laughter reduces your body’s production of stress hormones while increasing production of disease-resisting T-cells and the chemical interferon, all of which can result in a stronger immune system.
It gives you perspective. Humor creates distance and objectivity. If you can find some way to see a potentially stressful situation in a humorous way, you reduce the stress potential of that experience.
It can get you to take yourself less seriously. Much of your stress comes from giving too much importance to how you see yourself or how others see you. If you can learn how to laugh at yourself, you rob other people — and circumstances themselves — of their ability to trigger your stress.
Some humorous suggestions
Very few of us would admit to not having a good sense of humor. Yet too often, we lose the ability to laugh (or at least smile) at the nonsense and lunacy of life all around us. You don’t have to be a standup comic or dazzle the group with side-splitting one-liners to make humor work for you. Here are some ways you can make humor one of your stress-reducing tools.
Reframe the situation. Dr. Joel Goodman, director of the HUMOR Project in Saratoga Springs, New York, suggests that if you’re having trouble finding humor in a potentially stressful situation, try to see that situation through someone else’s eyes. Try to imagine how a friend with a particularly offbeat sense of humor may see it. Or ask yourself how not finding a parking spot or losing your wallet may have been handled on an episode of Seinfeld.
Be around others who make you laugh. The humor of other people can be contagious. Not only can their laughter and humor lower your stress level, but you can begin to talk about your own stresses in more comical ways.
Tickle your fancy. Try to find and collect bits of humor that you can use to induce a smile or a laugh. It can be that picture of you with that ridiculous look on your face. Stick it up on your bathroom mirror. Or it may be a humorous quip or cartoon that makes you chuckle. Put that on the fridge or stick it on your desk at work. Whenever I’m stressed by the need to clean up the house, I recall that marvelous Joan Rivers quip: “I hate housework! You make the beds, you do the dishes — and six months later you have to start all over again.”
Anything that can evoke a smile can change your mood for the better.
Blow things up
Exaggeration is a great way of diffusing a potentially stressful situation, robbing it of much of its impact. One form of exaggeration uses the Blow-up Technique. Here’s how it works. Suppose you’re angry because your neighbor has the TV sound turned up too loud. Let your imagination take it from there. Now imagine that he has turned it up full blast. Not only that, but he has turned every radio he owns up to ear-splitting levels. You notice that you hear live music and realize a high-school band is practicing in his living room. The walls are now shaking. You get a phone call from your cousin half a mile away, asking what’s going on. The police and fire department start arriving . . . and then you smile.
Exaggeration and distortion can help you put things into clearer perspective. Try it.
Doing Something Good for Someone Else
Doing something for another person can act as a stress buffer, enhancing your stress resilience. Most often, you get back just as much, if not more, than you give. And this can be achieved without drastic commitments on your part. You don’t have to become a Mother Teresa or have homeless families come and live with you. Small, simple acts of generosity and kindness can go a long way.
How helping helps
The rewards of helping others may not have to wait until the hereafter. Here’s how doing community service can be good for your stress level:
It gives you a sense of purpose. At least some of your stress may come from a feeling of uncertainty about the nature of your existence and a search for some meaning and purpose in your life. Helping others can add to a sense of doing something worthwhile with your life and making a genuine contribution to others. You feel better when you help.
It connects you. Almost all acts of community service (short of writing an anonymous check) bring you into contact with someone else. It can be the person or group you’re helping, an agency or service, a board, a committee, or a fellow volunteer or caregiver. The act of helping adds to your social support system and increases your sense of connectedness to the world around you.
It keeps you busy. Helping others in your community, in whatever form, is an involvement that channels your time and energy. It can distract you from your cares and worries and focus your attention in a rewarding and certainly less-stressful direction.
It increases your sense of self-worth. When you help others, you feel good about yourself. Your self-esteem is enhanced; you feel valued. Because so much of your stress is related to a feeling of a lack of self-worth, doing something for others becomes a truly valuable way of changing the way you see yourself.
How to get started
Often the biggest obstacle to volunteering is figuring out what to do and where to go. Most communities have one or more umbrella organizations or volunteer clearinghouses that are aware of all the volunteering opportunities in your area. To find it, contact any major volunteer group. They will know where to send you.
Here are some ideas of ways to volunteer:
Become a Big Brother or Big Sister.
Volunteer to help out at a local homeless shelter.
Help out at a library.
Help at a local museum (serve as a tour guide or help with fundraising).
Improve a neighborhood garden, park, or sidewalk.
Coach kids in a team sport.
Deliver food to the homebound or the elderly.
Become a tutor in the public school system.
Help administer a favorite charity.
Help out at the ASPCA or Humane Society.
Help organize a blood drive.
Be part of a hotline.
Teach literacy for adults.
Become part of an ESL (English as a second language) program.
Help with fundraising at a public radio or television station.
Work at a nursing home or senior-citizen center.
Be a helper at a nonprofit daycare center.
How to offer random acts of kindness
Remember, you can be altruistic in ways that don’t involve a regular time commitment or membership in an organization. You can “freelance.” Dozens of opportunities exist for you to help someone or do something positive for another person. Random acts of kindness — a kind word, a small deed, a courtesy — all work to produce positive and satisfying feelings within you, and within the people with whom you interact.
Adding a Spiritual Dimension
Having a belief in something greater than your immediate experience can be a powerful force in helping you create inner peace and cope with the stress in your life. We live in a universe that is both mystifying and, at times, overwhelming. We attempt to give meaning and purpose to our all-too-brief lives. Faith in something bigger, something cosmic, can help us come to grips with the unknown and perhaps unknowable. No one right way exists for finding a sense of spiritual connectedness. For many, this belief may take the form of a belief in God and involvement in a traditional religious system of beliefs. However, your spirituality may take a different form. It may be a belief in a more global, more vaguely articulated higher power or higher purpose. Or it may take the form of a belief in such values as the human spirit, the human community, or nature.
Understanding how faith helps you cope with stress
Whatever form your spiritual beliefs take, growing evidence shows that faith can be a powerful stress buffer, enhancing your ability to cope with life’s more serious stresses. Faith can help you cope with illness, and it may even help you live longer. The reasons why faith helps are both direct and indirect:
Faith can provide meaning and purpose. Having a deeply felt belief system can help you cope with many of the perplexing and distressing questions that surround the meaning of existence. Why are you here? What is the meaning and purpose of life? What happens when you die?
Faith can strengthen stress-effective values. Virtually all religions promote the values of love and kindness and condemn stress-producing feelings such as anger, hostility, and aggression.
Faith can provide hope and acceptance. It encourages a sense of optimism and hopefulness that things will work out for the best. Faith also helps you accept what doesn’t work out and what you can’t control.
Faith unites you with others. It can create a sense of community that often brings people together in a mutually supportive way. Having others to be with and share with can lower your stress. Belonging to a religious organization can put you into contact with others in the wider community who are less fortunate in some way, which allows you to play a helping role.
Faith can calm you. It often involves prayer and contemplation, which, like meditation and other forms of bodily relaxation described in other chapters, can result in a range of physical changes that reduce stress.
Appreciating the power of belief
A number of studies now document the importance of faith in strengthening one’s coping ability. Just take a look at these:
A recent National Institute of Mental Health study, for example, found that people who consider religious beliefs to be a central element in their lives experience lower amounts of depression than does a control group.
In another study, researchers in Evans County, Georgia, looked at the stress-reducing effects of regular churchgoers when compared with non-churchgoers. They found that blood pressure measurements were significantly lower for the committed churchgoers. In a different study, in Washington County, Maryland, researchers found that those who attend church on a routine basis are much less likely to die of heart attacks than are infrequent churchgoers. (Researchers made sure the results had nothing to do with smoking, drinking, and other variables that may have clouded the results.)
In a study conducted in Israel, researchers compared the health of secular and orthodox Israelis and found that the less-religious or non-religious group had a risk of heart attack that was four times higher than their religious counterparts. Also, the non-religious group had higher levels of cholesterol than did the more religious group.
Helping hints
In his book The Healing Power of Doing Good, Allan Luks offers some guidelines about which volunteering experiences are the most stress-effective. Here are some of his suggestions:
Find situations that bring you directly into contact with others who need the help. Stuffing envelopes is okay, but you’ll find greater satisfaction in a hands-on situation.
Find an area of helping where you feel empathy for those with whom you’re working.
Find an involvement that can utilize a skill or ability you have.
Don’t over-commit yourself. You’re better off starting small and adding on.
Exert yourself to reach out. Stretch yourself in some way.
Gathering a Little Wisdom
A storehouse of collected wisdom can insulate you from many of life’s stresses. If your collection is a little thin, you can begin collecting the wisdom of others. Kindergarten wisdom, Chicken Soup stories, sayings, affirmations, insights, parables, and maxims can help you cope with a potentially stressful situation. Stick them on your refrigerator or bathroom mirror. Here are some of my favorites to start you off:
“When you get there, there isn’t any there there.”
— Gertrude Stein
“If I had my life to live over, I’d try to make more mistakes next time. I would relax, I would limber up. I would be sillier than I have been this trip. I know of very few things I would take seriously. I would be less hygienic. I would take more chances. I would take more trips. I would climb more mountains, swim more rivers, and watch more sunsets. I would eat more ice cream. I would have more actual troubles and fewer imaginary ones.”
— John Killinger
“I am an old man and have known a great many troubles — but most of them never happened.”
— Mark Twain
“No one on their deathbed ever wished they had spent more time at the office.”
— Anonymous
“It’s not the large things that send a man to the madhouse. Death he’s ready for, or murder, incest, roguery, fire, flood . . . no, it’s the continuing series of small tragedies that send a man to the madhouse . . . not the death of his love, but a shoelace that snaps with no time left.”
— Charles Bukowski
“Live each day as if it was your last, because someday you’re going to be right.”
— Anonymous
“Life is what happens to you while you’re busy making other plans.”
— John Lennon
“Rule Number 1: Don’t sweat the small stuff. Rule Number 2: It’s all small stuff.”
— Richard Carlson
“The true value of a person is to be measured by the objects he pursues.”
— Anonymous
“If you never want to make a mistake, do nothing, say nothing, be nothing.”
— Anonymous
“Other people are not in this world to live up to your expectations.”
— Fritz Perls
“For every minute you are angry, you lose sixty seconds of happiness.”
— Ralph Waldo Emerson