How do you live with Stress?

I just started writing my calendar for the next three months. It should cause panic because there wasn’t enough lines for all the to-dos. But I’m not freaking out or having tunnel vision. My palms aren’t sweaty and my heart isn’t racing. My life should feel like a roller coaster right? No, I’m not on prescription medication. The focus has to change how I love with stress. It’s a challenge each and every day to balance life today. As I speak to families across America, families are struggling.

There are so many factors that we feel “have to make us happy.” And when we don’t have “it” then we are unhappy, stressed, anxious, and so much more. The best way I can related our lives is we want to live a movie of happiness. Instead, the focus needs to change. The focus needs to be in photographs of happiness. Snapshots of a particular instance that happiness occurred.

Then as you gather the photographs together to make an album of happiness you begin to realize just how many photographs you are having to work with. When you focus on the have not, the deficits, the short comings, the mistakes, the pain– how could you not feel anxious and stressed? Could you feel stressed looking through a photo album of just happiness or positives?

Now yes life will throw you challenges but in order for stress not to set in I need the glass to start half full and not half empty. So if you being to feel overwhelmed:

1. Take a minute to slow down. Life can be lived at 40 mph not at 140 mph.
2. Give yourself an end goal and reward– you deserve it for all your hard work.
3. Have someone who knows you look at your situation and then ask someone else (like a health professional) for an outside prospective.
4. Enjoy life– We don’t do it enough! Did you even watch the clouds float by today for a minute?

If you’re still not sure, go talk to a cancer survivor. I have found the best outlooks and wisdom from someone who treasures each and every photograph in their life.