Get Rid Of Stress Quotes

Closing The Cycle One always has to know when a stage comes to an end. If we insist on staying longer than the necessary time, we lose the happiness and the meaning of the other stages we have to go through. Closing cycles, shutting doors, ending chapters - whatever name we give it, what matters is to leave in the past the moments of life that have finished. Did you lose your job? Has a loving relationship come to an end? Did you leave your parents' house? Gone to live abroad? Has a long-lasting friendship ended all of a sudden? You can spend a long time wondering why this has happened. You can tell yourself you won't take another step until you find out why certain things that were so important and so solid in your life have turned into dust, just like that. But such an attitude will be awfully stressing for everyone involved: your parents, your husband or wife, your friends, your children, your sister, everyone will be finishing chapters, turning over new leaves, getting on with life, and they will all feel bad seeing you at a standstill. None of us can be in the present and the past at the same time, not even when we try to understand the things that happen to us. What has passed will not return: we cannot for ever be children, late adolescents, sons that feel guilt or rancor towards our parents, lovers who day and night relive an affair with someone who has gone away and has not the least intention of coming back. Things pass, and the best we can do is to let them really go away. That is why it is so important (however painful it may be!) to destroy souvenirs, move, give lots of things away to orphanages, sell or donate the books you have at home. Everything in this visible world is a manifestation of the invisible world, of what is going on in our hearts - and getting rid of certain memories also means making some room for other memories to take their place. Let things go. Release them. Detach yourself from them. Nobody plays this life with marked cards, so sometimes we win and sometimes we lose. Do not expect anything in return, do not expect your efforts to be appreciated, your genius to be discovered, your love to be understood. Stop turning on your emotional television to watch the same program over and over again, the one that shows how much you suffered from a certain loss: that is only poisoning you, nothing else. Nothing is more dangerous than not accepting love relationships that are broken off, work that is promised but there is no starting date, decisions that are always put off waiting for the "ideal moment." Before a new chapter is begun, the old one has to be finished: tell yourself that what has passed will never come back. Remember that there was a time when you could live without that thing or that person - nothing is irreplaceable, a habit is not a need. This may sound so obvious, it may even be difficult, but it is very important. Closing cycles. Not because of pride, incapacity or arrogance, but simply because that no longer fits your life. Shut the door, change the record, clean the house, shake off the dust. Stop being who you were, and change into who you are.

A great way to get rid of stress is, every once in a while, do something totally different and unexpected without any prior planning.

​The right self-talk wires your brain to focus on finding solutions, taking action, creating more self-confidence, and giving you more peace of mind––exactly the mental states that help you get rid of stress.

Mindfulness helps you deal with stress in the present; meditation gets rid of stress from the past; and manifesting helps you clarify your dreams for the future.

Minimalism is really about reassessment of priorities, so you can remove unnecessary thigns from your life; get rid of things like possessions, activities, and relationships that do not improve or bring value to your life.

Minimalism is, in its essence, about getting rid of the negative and non-essential, so that you may focus more on the positive and important.

how do you get rid of habitual negative thinking and break the stress cycle?

What has this book got to do with Palaeoanthropology? The short answer is 'not one tiny bit'. But it has everything to do with stress, communication and change, especially for the modern Caveman.

This practice is powerful because it transforms you from the inside out. When you’re in a grateful and joyful state, you open your eyes to see and receive miracles. When you’re in a negative, stressed state it’s like putting on sunglasses that completely block out the light. How can receive a miracle when you can’t see it? Use this practice and get rid of those dark shades for good so you can see the light shining within you and around you.

Fatigue is an excellent gauge of well-being because it is a very hard symptom to mask. The only way to get rid of fatigue is to treat the underlying causes. Fatigue has many faces, but they all say the same thing - the mental and physical load are too great.

Sokolov was favorable impressed by the fact that he had not yet shit his pants. Men always made crude jokes about people pissing their pants with fear, but in Sokolov's experience, shitting the pants was more common if it was a straightforward matter of extreme emotional stress. Pants pissing was completely unproductive and suggested a total breakdown of elemental control. Pants shitting, on the other hand, voided the bowls and thereby made blood available to the brain and the large muscle groups that otherwise would have gone to the lower-priority activity of digestion. Sokolov could have forgiven Peter for shitting his pants, but if he had pissed his pants, then it really would have been necessary to get rid of him. In any case, Peter had done neither of these things yet.

So the Deep Nutrition formula for weight loss is simple: Get rid of inflammation that blocks cellular communication, and eat foods that enable you to convert fat cells into healthier tissues. Of course, there’s more to health than a healthy diet. Sleep and physical activity generate other chemicals that help your body know what you are expecting of it. So in order to reshape your body and achieve maximum health, your regimen must include eating real food, resting properly, reducing stress, and doing the right kinds of exercise.

But you may not be aware that suffering happens when you “feed” emotional pain with the very energy you use to resist, avoid, and try to get rid of it. Your struggle to make emotional pain go away only turns emotional pain into suffering. Suffering is part of being stuck and interferes with healing from trauma.

Although we can expect pain as part of being human, suffering is a different story. One part of a path to recovery is to allow your painful feelings to be as they are. You already know from experience that it is not possible to get rid of painful feelings. So what can you do? Practice mindfulness. Mindfulness helps you work with this habit of trying to solve the problem of emotional pain by avoiding it—that is, trying to ignore it or make it go away. Mindfulness is a way to relate differently to emotional pain. Mindfulness can help you focus your

Often at shelters, we hear, 'I told my child she could get a pet, but she will have to take care of him.' That is an unrealistic expectation and often results in the pet being returned days, weeks, or months later. It is hard for pets to go in and out of a home. They bond with their humans and when they find themselves at a shelter, they become stressed at being taken away from home and the people they love. When an 'easy-way-out' decision is made to give up a pet, we are teaching our children that animals can be given away, turned away, and gotten rid of at the drop of a hat. If you are considering getting a cat or kitten, go into it fully aware that the adults in the home will have to help with the care of the pet.

Stress mindsets are powerful because they affect not just how you think but also how you act. When you view stress as harmful, it is something to be avoided. Feeling stressed becomes a signal to try to escape or reduce the stress. And indeed, people who endorse a stress-is-harmful mindset are more likely to say that they cope with stress by trying to avoid it. For example, they are more likely to: Try to distract themselves from the cause of the stress instead of dealing with it. Focus on getting rid of their feelings of stress instead of taking steps to address its source. Turn to alcohol or other substances or addictions to escape the stress. Withdraw their energy and attention from whatever relationship, role, or goal is causing the stress. In contrast, people who believe that stress can be helpful are more likely to say that they cope with stress proactively. For example, they are more likely to: Accept the fact that the stressful event has occurred and is real. Plan a strategy for dealing with the source of stress. Seek information, help, or advice. Take steps to overcome, remove, or change the source of stress. Try to make the best of the situation by viewing it in a more positive way or by using it as an opportunity to grow. These different ways of dealing with stress lead to very different outcomes.

Why do we despise, ostracize and punish the drug addict when as a social collective we share the same blindness and engage in the same rationalizations? To pose that question is to answer it. We despise, ostracize and punish the addict because we don’t wish to see how much we resemble him. In his dark mirror our own features are unmistakable. We shudder at the recognition. This mirror is not for us, we say to the addict. You are different, and you don’t belong with us. Like the hardcore addict’s pursuit of drugs, much of our economic and cultural life caters to people’s craving to escape mental and emotional distress. In an apt phrase, Lewis Lapham, long-time publisher of Harper’s Magazine, derides “consumer markets selling promises of instant relief from the pain of thought, loneliness, doubt, experience, envy, and old age.” According to a Statistics Canada study, 31 per cent of working adults aged nineteen to sixty-four consider themselves workaholics, who attach excessive importance to their work and are “overdedicated and perhaps overwhelmed by their jobs.” “They have trouble sleeping, are more likely to be stressed out and unhealthy, and feel they don’t spend enough time with their families,” reports the Globe and Mail. Work doesn’t necessarily give them greater satisfaction, suggested Vishwanath Baba, a professor of Human Resources and Management at McMaster University. “These people turn to work to occupy their time and energy” — as compensation for what is lacking in their lives, much as the drug addict employs substances. At the core of every addiction is an emptiness based in abject fear. The addict dreads and abhors the present moment; she bends feverishly only towards the next time, the moment when her brain, infused with her drug of choice, will briefly experience itself as liberated from the burden of the past and the fear of the future — the two elements that make the present intolerable. Many of us resemble the drug addict in our ineffectual efforts to fill in the spiritual black hole, the void at the centre, where we have lost touch with our souls, our spirit, with those sources of meaning and value that are not contingent or fleeting. Our consumerist, acquisition-, action- and image-mad culture only serves to deepen the hole, leaving us emptier than before. The constant, intrusive and meaningless mind-whirl that characterizes the way so many of us experience our silent moments is, itself, a form of addiction— and it serves the same purpose. “One of the main tasks of the mind is to fight or remove the emotional pain, which is one of the reasons for its incessant activity, but all it can ever achieve is to cover it up temporarily. In fact, the harder the mind struggles to get rid of the pain, the greater the pain.” So writes Eckhart Tolle. Even our 24/7 self-exposure to noise, emails, cell phones, TV, Internet chats, media outlets, music downloads, videogames and non-stop internal and external chatter cannot succeed in drowning out the fearful voices within.

When someone is judging you, it's unlikely that their judgment is actually about you. As I see it, we're all carrying around a bunch of suitcases. We have our insecurities suitcase. We have our stress suitcase. We have our guilt and our worries suitcases. Some suitcases we might have been carrying since our childhood, stories we were told about who we are that aren't even true. They're fiction that we were handed, picked up, believed, and still carry. Sometimes a person comes along with one of their suitcases, with their issues all packed up and ready to go, and they try to hand it to us. Do not pick up that suitcase! Do not pick it up! Because if you pick up their suitcase, you will be up all night, worrying if what they said about you is true, stressing yourself out, questioning yourself, getting bitter, and feeding your insecurities. Over a suitcase that never belonged to you in the first place. So if people keep trying to hand off their suitcases to you like you're a bellhop, you might need to break up with them the same way you would break off an unhealthy relationship with an emotionally abusive boyfriend. And as you go through life, trying to figure out how to ferry around those suitcases that do belong to you (and we all have our own stuff . . . the stuffiest of stuffs!), don't try to hand those off to someone else as a way to try to get rid of your pain. Instead, sit down with a friend or a great therapist and have a big, nonjudgmental "let's unpack these suitcases together" session.

I’m mean? That’s the worst you can throw at me?” “Mean and self-pitying. Does that make it better?” “And what are you, Astrid?” he shouted. “A smug know-it-all! You point your finger at me and say, ‘Hey, Sam, you make the decisions, and you take all the heat.’” “Oh, it’s my fault? No way. I didn’t anoint you.” “Yeah, you did, Astrid. You guilted me into it. You think I don’t know what you’re all about? You used me to protect Little Pete. You use me to get your way. You manipulate me anytime you feel like it.” “You really are a jerk, you know that?” “No, I’m not a jerk, Astrid. You know what I am? I’m the guy getting people killed,” Sam said quietly. Then, “My head is exploding from it. I can’t get my brain around it. I can’t do this. I can’t be that guy, Astrid, I’m a kid, I should be studying algebra or whatever. I should be hanging out. I should be watching TV.” His voice rose, higher and louder till he was screaming. “What do you want from me? I’m not Little Pete’s father. I’m not everybody’s father. Do you ever stop to think what people are asking me to do? You know what they want me to do? Do you? They want me to kill my brother so the lights will come back on. They want me to kill kids! Kill Drake. Kill Diana. Get our own kids killed. “That’s what they ask. Why not, Sam? Why aren’t you doing what you have to do, Sam? Tell kids to get eaten alive by zekes, Sam. Tell Edilio to dig some more holes in the square, Sam.” He had gone from yelling to sobbing. “I’m fifteen years old. I’m fifteen.” He sat down hard on the edge of the bed. “Oh, my God, Astrid. It’s in my head, all these things. I can’t get rid of them. It’s like some filthy animal inside my head and I will never, ever, ever get rid of it. It makes me feel so bad. It’s disgusting. I want to throw up. I want to die. I want someone to shoot me in the head so I don’t have to think about everything.” Astrid was beside him, and her arms were around him. He was ashamed, but he couldn’t stop the tears. He was sobbing like he had when he was a little kid, like when he had a nightmare. Out of control. Sobbing. Gradually the spasms slowed. Then stopped. His breathing went from ragged to regular. “I’m really glad the lights weren’t on,” Sam said. “Bad enough you had to hear it.” “I’m falling apart,” he said. Astrid gave no answer, just held him close. And after what felt like a very long time, Sam moved away from her, gently putting distance between them again. “Listen. You won’t ever tell anyone…” “No. But, Sam…” “Please don’t tell me it’s okay,” Sam said. “Don’t be nice to me anymore. Don’t even tell me you love me. I’m about a millimeter from falling apart again.” “Okay.

Habitual negative thinking keeps you disconnected from your core self. It can actually be easy to have worrisome or negative thoughts, especially when you are anxious or stressed.

For me, minimalism is about getting rid of unnecessary clutter (in all areas of life!), organizing what is left, and living in a peaceful, contented state, devoid of the extra stress that too much baggage brings to your life.

Many of us know what it is like to be a burden to others. It is a common side effect of being controlled by an addiction or compulsive behavior. Sometimes our behavior has made us lose our job. As a result, we have found ourself in financial need. This humiliation can affect our family in many ways. We may have caused our loved ones great stress and shame because we haven’t provided for their needs.     The apostle Paul taught us to follow this standard: “For you know that you ought to imitate us. We were not idle when we were with you. We never accepted food from anyone without paying for it. We worked hard day and night” (2 Thessalonians 3:7-8). “Make it your goal to live a quiet life, minding your own business and working with your hands. . . . Then, people . . . will respect the way you live, and you will not need to depend on others” (1 Thessalonians 4:11-12).     It is important for us to think about how our irresponsibility has affected others. Much pain may have been caused by our failure to provide for our family’s needs. We need to reflect on how this failure has caused us to lose their respect and trust. The shame of not facing this aspect of our life can be terribly discouraging. Once we face this and become willing to make amends, our sense of self-respect will improve significantly. This step will help us get rid of some of our daily stresses, freeing us to proceed further with recovery.

Meditation, as I define it, is helping you get rid of your stress from the past. Your body is a perfect accountant: Every all-nighter you’ve pulled, every bite of fast food you’ve ever eaten, and every shot of tequila you’ve done—it’s all stored in your cellular memory.

Today, we live in a world that is more stressful than ever before. If you are having trouble staying focused, maintaining your personal relationships and keeping up at work, then Sage sticks can deliver several benefits for you. In order to deal with this stressful world, it is important to get rid of the negative energy around you. Burning Sage, also known as Sage smudging, can help you with this by delivering several benefits for your health and wellness. Similar to other routines, rituals, and herbs, it is important to understand how to use Sage smudging appropriately.

At its core, minimalism as a philosophy seeks to rid life of its excess. This means getting rid of the unimportant things that cloud both our immediate space and our minds with clutter and stress.

When you are overwhelmed, tired and stressed, the solution is almost always less. Get rid of something. Lots of somethings.” - Courtney Carver

It was quiet. Then he asked, “What do you have to do?” I pointed at his stress grip. “Things like that. I mean there’s more, but that’s a great place to start. But hey, I’m pretty similar to you in all this. I’ll show you a few things. You know, different ways to breathe, for example. How to talk to yourself in a positive way. How to realize that it’s the anxiety and not the situation. But on the positive side, do you know what happened when I learned to live with my anxiety instead of trying to find a way to get rid of it?” “What?” he asked. “Well, my life got better. I got happier. I started smiling more, and I stopped being so afraid all the time. And when I look back at my life thus far, I’ve gone to college. I’ve gotten married, gotten a good job, and had three amazing kids. All of it with my anxiety in the back seat. Life’s been pretty good despite my anxiety. Pretty sure it’s going to be the same for you.” I gave him one of those soft, fatherly punches to the arm. He let out this long breath, and I could almost see the steam of feeling odd or like he was holding on to some great burden alone come pouring out of him. Then he said something I think all dads never, ever, get tired of hearing. “Thanks, Dad.” “Anytime, kiddo. Anytime.

Depression is supposed to be this genetic disease. Really? What does it mean to depress something? It means to push it down. What gets pushed down in depression? Your feelings, your emotions. Why would a person push down their feelings? Because they are too painful, they are too much to bear. In other words, the pushing down of feelings becomes a coping mechanism in an environment where you are not allowed to feel because your feelings threaten your attachments. So you learn to survive by pushing down your feelings and then 15 years later or 30 years later you are diagnosed with depression. Now, as a medical, biological problem, they give you a pill. I'm not here to fight against pharmacology. I've taken anti-depressants and they've helped me. They work sometimes. But they are not the answer. Because the answer is how does that childhood experience manifest in your life today. If you understand all of these historical, cultural, familial stresses imposed certain behaviors on you, certain self-view, certain patterns of emotional relating, now you can do something about it. Now it is not longer "there is something wrong with me", it is just that "this is how I adapted to what happened to me." And therefore I have the capacity now, as a conscious human being, to become aware of all this and to transform myself. It's not so easy to transform yourself because, of course, these adaptions that I've talked about, originally related to our very survival as young children and so we think we have to be that way. And we don't know any other way of being, except there's something telling us that "this is not right." Something is telling us. So we can see individual problems like depression or ADHD or multiple sclerosis or anything else as problems to get rid of or we can look at them as warning signs that we are out of sync with our true nature, that we are misaligned somehow with actually who we are. And that something in us is trying to wake us up.

Sodium in the diet causes the body to eliminate cortisol more slowly. Lower-salt diets help the body get rid of it faster, and that lowers the total stress level.

try keeping a diary of stressful episodes and after 2-4 weeks you can review it and spot all the possible

You cannot get rid of things that annoy you, but you can learn not to be stressed (or to be less stressed) by them.

mostly thanks to estrogen working as an antioxidant, getting rid of damaging oxygen radicals.

Now that I am fully aware of the incredible connection between the mind and the body, I am almost always able to get rid of the aches and pains that arise by recognizing them for what they are: physical symptoms as a manifestation of stress, worry, anxiety, fears, anger, and the many other emotions that come with being human.

Red Fox dying ushered in a series of struggles that anyone I asked attributed to “life out in the country,” but secretly, I knew were happening because I lacked the courage to make them stop. Any calm confidence I’d felt before was officially gone. I spent the days worrying and reacting to a hemorrhage I couldn’t staunch. Such as the lump in William’s leg. Hang Judith’s old warnings about doctors—I took him to the only doctor in town, terrified it was a tumor. “Do you have cats?” asked the doctor. “Particularly un-vetted cats?” We were overrun with the cats by now. Today’s count was thirty-eight, and just this morning, in my hurry, I’d popped the head of a kitten when I backed out the van. I’d scraped the little body into a bag, careful not to let the kids see, and choked back my tears because I didn’t want them to see me cry either. “I think your son has cat-scratch fever, not cancer. Here’s a prescription. Get rid of the cats,” he said, tearing a paper for antibiotics off his pad. Next came the intestinal symptoms that ravaged little Liam’s gut. We went to Children’s Hospital for that, in Knoxville, because he needed a colonoscopy and eventually a PICC line. The doctor said stress and bacteria were the likely culprits, and could I please tell him what life was like at home.

income, expenses, and finances: How much debt do I want to carry, and for what purpose? Would I like to pay off one or more of my credit accounts? By when? How much money do I want to make next month? Next year? Five years from now? What expenses do I want to cut down or cut out? — My home and community: What changes do I want to make in my current living environment? Do I want to fix up my home or yard? Do I want to move? What is my ideal home like? Where is it? What is my personal corner or room like? Does it have a garden, pool, or pond? Is it near the ocean, a lake, the desert, or mountains? Is it in the city or the country? What part of the world do I live in? What is my neighborhood like? What community projects am I involved in, if any? — My spiritual life: How much time do I want to devote to spiritual practices, such as meditation, classes, church, volunteer work, and so on? What books do I want to read? What classes do I want to take? What spiritual teachers, authors, or leaders do I want to meet, listen to, and/or work with? What spiritual power places do I want to visit, with whom, and when? What spiritual projects do I want to work on? What spiritual gift do I want to give to others? — My health and fitness: What changes do I want to make in my health and fitness? How much time per day or week do I want to spend exercising? What type of exercise program would I most enjoy and benefit from? Where would I exercise? With whom? What physical healings do I want? If I were to manifest my true natural state of perfect health right now, what would my body be like? About what weight or fat percentage would my body feel comfortable and healthy being? What types of foods would be in my regular diet? What would my ideal sleeping pattern be? How would I deal with stress or tension? What unnecessary stressors do I want to get rid of? What toxins (emotional or physical) can I eliminate from my diet or life? — My family life: What type of family life do I want? What about children? How much time do I want to spend with my kids? What do I want to teach or share with them? How can I be closer to my family and/or spend more quality time with them? What type of

Take a few moments to list your most meaningful roles, relationships, activities, or goals. In what parts of your life are you most likely to experience joy, love, laughter, learning, or a sense of purpose? When you have listed a few, ask yourself this: Would you also describe any of them as sometimes or frequently stressful? We often imagine how ideal it would be to get rid of the stress we experience at home, at work, and in pursuit of our goals. But that isn’t a realistic possibility. We don’t get to choose between a stress-full or a stress-free experience of family, work, community, love, learning, or health. If there is something in your life that is both meaningful and causing you a great deal of stress, take a few moments to write about why this role, relationship, activity, or goal is so important to you. You might also consider writing about what life would be like if you suddenly lost this source of meaning. How would you feel about the loss? Would you want it back in your life

And let’s be clear about this. Every single thing you own is a decision you’ve made and so getting rid of clutter is not about sourcing bags and boxes and arranging sales and giveaways or even making a room look nice, it is about making decisions. Lots and lots of decisions. That can be very stressful. The average wedding requires around a thousand decisions to be made and we all know how stressful arranging a wedding can be. So how much more stressful are the many more you’ll have to make on your decluttering journey?

when you breathe in your air, it is going to be clean. Imagine the color of clean. This is so clean and so pure that when you feel it enter your body, it wants to get out anything that is bad. As you breathe out, it gets rid of the bad air that dissolves into nothing. Then you breathe in some crisp, pure air and breathe out the bad nasty air again. Just focus on your body and breathing. Good in, bad out. Feel it go through your entire body, especially up through your head. We are going to start going into your brain. Imagine a hallway, it is a long hallway. Picture it. Is it tall or short? Wide or narrow? It has a lot of doors, see the details on the door. The handle is made of what material? Any particular designs? See the hinges, the numbers and vividly see all of it. How much detail can you put into this? Find the detail. You walk down the hall you will notice some doors have a good energy coming from them while others do not.

Because we have never been taught any other way to meet our distress, we don’t realize how much our habits of avoidance or brooding are making things worse, turning momentary tiredness into exhaustion, momentary fear into chronic worry, and momentary sadness into chronic unhappiness and depression. So it isn’t our fault that we end up exhausted, anxious, or depressed. We have been given only certain tools to deal with things we don’t like: get rid of it, work harder, be better, be perfect—and if we fail to make things different, we too easily conclude that we are a failure as a person.

He came to believe that, in addition to getting rid of parts of the self, projective identification was sometimes the only way in which some very fragmented patients could communicate. The problem lay in recognising, understanding and making sense of what was being communicated by the patient, in such a way that the patient could better understand what was happening in his internal world. Before any of this can happen, however, the therapist has to be capable of receiving, and holding on to (that is, containing) ‘inside of himself what the patient has projected into him. These unprocessed, raw, fragmented, and sometimes ‘unthinkable’ thoughts and feelings were called by Bion, ‘Beta Elements’, and the capacity to process and think about them, was referred to as ‘Alpha Function’. It follows from this that an increase in Alpha Function will also lead to a greater capacity in the therapist to contain and manage stress.

Getting rid of negative emotions seems like an impossible task. It seems that stress, anxiety, fear, anger, shame, jealousy, guilt, depression, etc, are regular parts of almost

And that is the only thing that truly is not an option at all: to keep stuff you know you don’t want because you’re so stressed out over the best way to get rid of it.

Don’t stress over things you can’t change. Focus on what you can control instead – your own heart’s desires. Mark Manson contemplates, “What if the solution

If we get sick and there’s no easy cure, we may be stuck with chronic pain. When we’re hurt by unkind words, we may feel an anger that lingers. Perhaps we find ourselves obsessing about what we should do, or why our current strategies aren’t working. We step up our focus on the pain or anger, and how to be rid of it. Or maybe we tell ourselves there’s nothing we can do, and instead get frustrated with our thoughts and sensations, which don’t seem to listen to reason. We get stressed about getting stressed, turning the fight in on ourselves. So what can be done? Of course, the best result would be not to experience the misfiring mechanism, but as the actor’s tale shows, the fight or flight reaction can’t be shut off easily. However, we can choose to practise staying present to thoughts and sensations, by noticing how automatic stress reactions arise in our bodies, and how we tend to resist or identify with them. This might not make them go away, but it significantly alters how we experience them: the meaning we ascribe them, the degree to which they control us, our way of relating to them, and our response. Instead of running round screaming, ‘I’ve got to get rid of this anxiety – now!’, we might bring a friendly interest to sensations of stomach churning, and the thoughts that come along with it. Staying present to thoughts, sensations and automatic reactions, we shift our relationship to stress.

As a result of my experience on that summer day as well as similar experiences I’ve seen repeated many times, I have some advice for you: If you’re getting rid of things to simplify your lifestyle, don’t try selling them. It’s not worth the trouble. Selling everything brings extra burden and stress to the minimizing process.

As one shelter leader put it to me, it’s not a question of if a shelter dog will deteriorate. It’s a question of when. There’s some debate as to whether the dogs are deteriorating or, rather, displaying what is normal behavior under trying circumstances. That “normal” won't help dogs get adopted. That’s why the current thinking on remedying kennel stress is to find a dog a home pronto. In the meantime, shelters such as the ARL do what they can to relieve a dog’s duress with walks, play groups, snuggling, toy puzzles, all of which is referred to as “enrichment.” Other shelters have constructed larger, better buildings with training arenas and soundproof kennels. Rich Avanzino, of course, has the most radical answer to kennel stress: get rid of the shelters.

Any activity that stimulates fasting lessens the risk of cell death, getting rid of damaged cells due to oxidative stress.

No matter how big and tough a problem may be, get rid of confusion by taking one little step toward solution. Do something. —George F. Nordenholt

effective people learn to live in Quadrant 2. They are able to focus on the important things before they become urgent.