Everywhere we look there are reasons for us to feel a tremendous amount of stress.  Listening to the news can make us actually not want to get out of bed in the morning.  If we think about the economy we can feel stress about our financial situations, if we watch the election races we can stress over health care, if we are parents with children in Iraq we have an even bigger burden of stress to carry around each day.  Many of us have jobs that, while they pay very well, provide us with high levels of stress on our time, energy and intellect.  Life moves at a frantic pace and is filled from waking to sleeping with stress.

So what are you stressing over right now?  As with other things in order to figure out how to manage a problem, we must identify the sources of our stress.  I like to have people actually sit down and make a list of what brings stress into their lives, using three columns, “things I can control”, “things I can’t control”, “things that will likely never happen”.   Why these three categories?  Well, we all have stress in our lives that we can control.  For instance is we are stressed every morning because we always run behind, we need to look at our morning routine to see what changes we can make to lessen the agrivation.  There are also things in our lives that stress us regularly but we can’t change or can’t easily change them.  Things like a boss we don’t like, traffic, kids, and so on.  Lastly, many people stress over things that will likely never happen.  They worry about natural disasters, accidents, illness etc.  Knowing the source of our worry and stress can help us realize that we can stay in control of the stress in our lives.

Obviously a life completely without stress is not possible and most of us can’t even go twenty-four hours stress free.  Managing stress and difficulty is part of the human experience and stress is actually the friction that is necessary to polish us and make us better at life.  And even though there are some types of stress that are ongoing such as illness, perhaps a child or spouse at war, job loss, and the like, understanding our stress can help us use it to make us manage the burden.

What is your stress load like?  Sort it out, and take action against the things you can change and reduce.  Changing the things we can is empowering and makes the things we can’t change less troublesome.  Take steps to understand the sources, then you can take steps to manage it.