1. The Mentor Method: think of your favorite person. Someone you love, admire, trust, like a mentor or someone from your spiritual tradition. Simply thinking about them will help you change your focus from
stress hooey to a more desirable response associated with your favorite person. Also, you do not need to wait to get stressed out to do this as thinking of your hero's always makes you feel better. Pictures of family and loved ones also help so make sure you have these at work. Think of happy and/or silly times you've had with these people. Feel better already don't you? Good. Now relax, take a deep breath and enjoy yourself even more as you read on...
2. Create Worry zones and Stress times: pick a specific location for your worry party and limit yourself to this location for things worth worrying about. Get serious. Get wigged out. Get ready to worry! Do your rants/raves only in this place you have chosen and for time you have specified. That's right, there is a time limit to moaning/groaning!
When stuff happens that you habitually worry about then go to your zone and take care of business. Remember time limit...5 minutes max. If this does not seem like enough time then you must get better at worrying in a shorter time frame! Behave yourself everywhere else.
Make sure zone is not a place where you spend most of your time or has other people in it. Keep kitchen and family room as cheerful as possible. The bedroom is for sleeping and other pleasant activities so no worrying is allowed there. Ditto for office, bathroom, car, church meetings, movies, restaurants, etc. Pick only one place for worry zone.
3. Use " hello to life" activities to break out of your routines that produce stress. One of my favorite people, Truman Madsen, introduced me to this one. Do something radically different that is enjoyable. For example, instead of walking/worrying do some skipping instead. It's OK to continue with worrying but your main focus should be on skipping. You skipped as a kid. It's time to do it again. Not only will you feel better but just think how ridiculous you'll look to other's who see you skipping in your work clothes, carrying a briefcase and talking on phone at same time! At very least, it will make others feel better! They may not realize you are angry or worried. They'll simply think you are nuts.
4. Touch your nose: yes, you heard me. First, get yourself in a great state like hilarity. Get yourself laughing and goofing around feeling terrific. In this peak state of enjoyment, touch your nose. Get others in on this and make yourselves laugh more and more frequently touching your nose as you laugh, giggle, smile. This creates a neurological "anchor" where your brain associates good feelings of laughing and goofing around with touching your nose. In future, you may simply touch your nose to create good feelings. If you do this a lot you may learn to enjoy your stress. Warning: touching other people on nose when they are pissed off does not really help that much so touch your own nose only.
