Minute Mindset

Have you ever had a day that was going great until you got out of bed? Have you ever gotten up, felt good about your day, arrived at work to be greeted with, "We got a problem?" Have you ever felt the tension increasing within you? I mean everything you looked at stared back at you with a problem or something that needed your attention

When you are not controlling your day and the events of the day are emotionally controlling you, that is a stressful day! It is amazing what stress can do to you:

• It can emotionally drain you until there is a pounding in your head.

• It can mentally paralyze you to the point that you don’t have the energy to emotionally deal with anything.

• It can physically wipe you out so nothing gets your attention, and if it did, it would only get messed up.

Stress is such an interesting fact of life. Reality is — you can’t live without it. It is a medical fact if you could take all the stress out of your life, you...

Recently I asked a young man named Alex to define the word “relax” for me. He looked at me with puzzlement and just stared at me for a few moments. “I’m not sure what it means,” he said. “It’s one of my great challenges in life. I find it very difficult to relax. It seems my mind is always working, and I can’t seem to turn it off.”

The more we talked, the more he understood what his inability to relax did to him mentally, emotionally, and physically. It made it hard for him to focus, and many times it left him emotionally exhausted and kept him physically tired.

Alex is like so many people today who find it challenging to relax. Each day they find themselves wrestling with all that life is handing them. But the ability to relax is one of the ways you learn to control your stress level.

In working with human behavior, I find most people don’t know how to unwind. You know this as well as I do: Wind anything tight enough, and...