{"id":372,"date":"2014-09-13T08:02:08","date_gmt":"2014-09-13T08:02:08","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/mylessonslearned.co\/?p=372"},"modified":"2014-09-13T08:02:08","modified_gmt":"2014-09-13T08:02:08","slug":"reducing-stress","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/mylessonslearned.co\/?p=372","title":{"rendered":"Reducing Stress"},"content":{"rendered":"<p>I get asked &#8220;how do you manage stress&#8221;? I&#8217;ll be honest: yoga, running, and meditation do not work for me.\u00a0 And life will never be stress free. But here&#8217;s some things I do to help <strong>manage<\/strong> it:<\/p>\n<p>1.\u00a0<strong>Being really organized.<\/strong><\/p>\n<p>I didn&#8217;t used to be this way. For instance,\u00a0now I have one of those closets where the clothes are hanging and grouped by color. It&#8217;s still a small closet, but I know where to go for what. \u00a0I don&#8217;t have clutter on top of my tables. I don&#8217;t have paper all over the place. No unpaid bills lurking with the newspapers.<\/p>\n<p>What this does is gives me <em>good line of sight<\/em> for what I need and makes sure I got everything before I leave. The only time I left my keys in my apartment\u00a0was when they were under the paper. When you can see what you have, you&#8217;re not searching, hunting, buying duplicates, and getting frustrated.<\/p>\n<p>2. <strong>Simplifying.<\/strong><\/p>\n<p>Simplify <strong>what isn&#8217;t that important<\/strong> to you. What I wear isn&#8217;t that important to me. Black, gray, cream, and navy. I could be a librarian. Everything goes with everything else. My jewelry is the same every day with the exception of my necklace. I can get dressed in 5 minutes&#8230;I&#8217;m not looking for the skirt that goes with this top and needs this jewelry. Variety is exciting and interesting&#8230;but for me, it&#8217;s also stressful. Yes, it could be defined as boring. I&#8217;ll take boring over drama. Maybe it&#8217;s important to you&#8230;it makes you happy, builds your confidence. That&#8217;s fine&#8230;.but simplify the other stuff. Having everything be complicated is too hard.<\/p>\n<p>3. <strong>Being choosy.<\/strong><\/p>\n<p>I don&#8217;t accept every invitation, I don&#8217;t go to every event, I don&#8217;t see every movie, I don&#8217;t read every book&#8230;you get my drift. I try to only do the things that I think will be <strong>great.<\/strong> If I hold a high standard of what I do, I&#8217;m going to be pretty happy with my choices. Is there any worse feeling than thinking something was a waste of time?I was once working on an Internet website, and the developer I was working with had a great phrase: &#8220;we need to <em>carefully curate<\/em>.&#8221; I love the idea of<strong> being\u00a0deliberate about your choices<\/strong>.<\/p>\n<p>4. <strong>Limiting social media.<\/strong><\/p>\n<p>I know this is hard for some people.\u00a0\u00a0To someone on the outside looking in, it feels like a lot of one upmanship. Is it going to make you feel good to know every thing going on in other people&#8217;s lives and to have to keep up? I think this stresses people out more than they realize.<\/p>\n<p>5. <strong>Do it now<\/strong>.<\/p>\n<p>That saying, &#8220;don&#8217;t put off for tomorrow what you can do today&#8221;? Absolutely reduces stress. When you tackle that which needs to be done today, you progress. You move the ball forward. When you don&#8217;t, you&#8217;re just procrastinating. I have never seen a situation get better as a result of putting things off. If you feel like you have too much to do&#8230;.it&#8217;s not that. It&#8217;s that you&#8217;re not prioritizing. Think&#8230;what do I <strong>absolutely<\/strong> have to get done today? There&#8217;s your to-do list.<\/p>\n<p>&nbsp;<\/p>\n<p>&nbsp;<\/p>\n<p>&nbsp;<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>I get asked &#8220;how do you manage stress&#8221;? I&#8217;ll be honest: yoga, running, and meditation do not work for me.\u00a0 And life will never be stress free. But here&#8217;s some things I do to help manage it: 1.\u00a0Being really organized. I didn&#8217;t used to be this way. For instance,\u00a0now I have one of those closets [&hellip;]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":392,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"nf_dc_page":"","_jetpack_newsletter_access":"","_jetpack_dont_email_post_to_subs":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_tier_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paywalled_content":false,"_jetpack_feature_clip_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":"","jetpack_publicize_message":"","jetpack_publicize_feature_enabled":true,"jetpack_social_post_already_shared":false,"jetpack_social_options":{"image_generator_settings":{"template":"highway","default_image_id":0,"font":"","enabled":false},"version":2},"jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false},"categories":[16,5],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-372","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-happiness","category-perform-better"],"yoast_head":"<!-- This site is optimized with the Yoast SEO plugin v28.7 - https:\/\/yoast.com\/product\/yoast-seo-wordpress\/ -->\n<title>Reducing Stress - My Lessons Learned<\/title>\n<meta name=\"robots\" content=\"index, follow, max-snippet:-1, max-image-preview:large, max-video-preview:-1\" \/>\n<link rel=\"canonical\" href=\"https:\/\/mylessonslearned.co\/?p=372\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:locale\" content=\"en_US\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:type\" content=\"article\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:title\" content=\"Reducing Stress - My Lessons Learned\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:description\" content=\"I get asked &#8220;how do you manage stress&#8221;? 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