It's back to school season, and many students will be looking for ways to make better grades with less effort. Even those of us who are not enrolled in formal education, are faced with having to learn more now than ever before. Over years, I have learned many tricks to increasing intelligence and making learning easier. Here is a brief synopsis of what I've learned.

1) Pay attention! Most people don't learn things simply because they are thinking about something else at time. If you are in class and professor is giving a lecture, don't spend time writing notes or planning outings. Also, keep note taking to a minimum, since focusing on writing takes your attention away from what you are hearing.

2) Memory works better when you have visual images. Instead of trying to remember words, dates, and facts, try to visualize information, and even put it into a story format if you can. The mind remembers stories better than dry facts.

3) Another memory trick is to put a lot of contrast into what you are trying to remember. Imagine information as if it were cartoonish. Make it colorful, imagine it at high-speed, or very, very slowly. Imagine villain with horns and a tail, or victor with a sword and wings. Anything to make it different from your normal experiences.

Stress comes from only 2 sources. Either believing that you are not capable of performing as required, or being uncomfortable in your present surroundings.

I know there are many who will disagree with me, but bottom line is that any other explanation on cause of stress will boil down to one of these two reasons.

Knowing this gives us several options in resolving our need to eliminate stress from our lives. I'm sure you've heard that not all stress is bad, or that we need a certain amount of stress just to stay alive, and other things along these lines. The stress I'm talking about in this article is excess stress that we don't need, and that can cause problems for us.

Many of us are not aware of how much stress we are carrying around with us. There are so few people who actually have eliminated all excess stress from their lives that for all practical purposes we can say they don't exist. If you feel as though you are one of these rare people, then congratulations! But even so, examine what I'm about to cover and see if maybe you can eliminate a little more stress and reach a healthier state of being.

Let's take a look at easier of two situations, being uncomfortable with your surroundings. This could be physical discomfort, or emotional discomfort. Physical discomfort refers to being too hot, too cold, sitting on too hard a surface, and that kind of thing.

I've found that in many cases, discomfort stems from resisting situation and not accepting it. I've never liked being too cold, but when I've consciously accepted it and stopped resisting cold, then I became much more comfortable with it. The same is true in situations that are too hot for my preferences, as well as practically every other physical discomfort that I've tested this theory with. Resistance equals pain, and acceptance will eliminate much of discomfort.

Stress that results from physical discomfort can be eliminated by either accepting situation, or by changing it. The famous Serenity Prayer stems from this idea. If you can change something you don't like, then change it. If you cannot change it, then accept it.