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Stress control

Stress Control: Identifying rational and irrational causes of angst

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Lately, I’ve developed an attitude. I’ve come to loathe what remains of my job so much that if there were a reasonable way to cover my health insurance between now and the December 31 canning day, I would go out the door today. Such resentment feels irrational to me: shouldn’t I be grateful that the university is keeping us on through December instead of closing our office, as expected, on June 30? Shouldn’t I be delighted that we all come and go at will, unmolested, and that we’re all being paid for many more hours than we really put in? What, I keep wondering, is the cause of the stress I feel about the job? Have I slipped my trolley? Is there any real reason to hate this job so much I don’t even want to think about it, much less go and do it?

The stress spinning off this resentment keeps me awake at night, causes me to grind my teeth, and drives me to drink. (Okay, not much drink…but for me, two glasses of wine or beer every single day is about 1.5 glasses too many.)

Last night I sat down with a pad of paper and started listing every reason I could think of, sane or not, that might explain my loathing for GDU in general and for my job in specific. Didn’t expect much to come of it: at the outset, I figured my problem is simply unhappiness at being laid off and worry about how I’m going to get by in retirement that will start about six years sooner than planned.

The result surprised me. At the outset, the list consisted of petty, stupid things that really don’t matter much: being rusticated to a decrepit building that was called out of condemnation for no discernible reason; the enduring stench of chemicals used to remove asbestos nine months ago, fumes that have never fully dissipated; some SOB from FacMan turning the thermostat as high as it would go (!) and then bolting the cover to the wall. I mean, really: get over it!

But as I was scribbling these things on paper, more serious issues arose:

• It makes me uncomfortable and unhappy to accept a full-time salary for doing practically nothing. Profoundly uncomfortable and unhappy.

• I’m bored stupid on the campus. Reading academic copy is not one whit more fascinating than reading freshman comp papers; it’s just a variant on boredom.

• I dislike the fraudulence of many degree programs offered not just by GDU but by universities in general. We’ll refrain from naming these, for obvious reasons, but let us observe that too many undergraduate and graduate programs take students’ money and give them precious little in return. Some courses of study turn out graduates with neither the learning and critical thinking skills a traditional liberal arts degree should cultivate nor a salable vocational skill. We have professional programs that turn out not professionals but dunderheads. Although GDU, like most large public universities, does have many highly worthwhile programs, it no longer is easy for a student to distinguish between a worthy program and an academic scam. I don’t like working for an institution that generates much of its income from questionable products.

• And speaking of fraudulence, I’m unhappy with the discovery, made in the course of doing my job, that about 95 percent of academic “research” and publication is unmitigated bullshit, and I resent being made an accomplice to that variety of institutional fraud.

Finally, as the hour grew later and I was nodding off to sleep over the notebook, the real cause of my nausée about the job surfaced. Several years ago an incident occurred whose details I can’t describe here. Suffice it to say that as a result of my doing something my dean had approved, I pissed off an über-dean, who, in a highly actionable way, shafted a woman I had hired. So actionable, in fact, that I gave her the name of a barracuda lawyer and advised her to sue the university. Had she done so, she would be corresponding with us from the Riviera, where she would be enjoying the life of Riley.

What this guy did was so crushing and so demoralizing that at the time I made a considered decision never again do anything even remotely entrepreneurial for the university. Bear in mind: I was hired because of my proven entrepreneurial track record and led to believe my job was not only to establish an office unique in the Western hemisphere but to grow it into a significant enterprise. I decided that I would allow the office to perform the work it had claimed for itself—nothing more—and that I would keep as low a profile as possible. Indeed, I would do as little work as possible, given the kind of appreciation my work had elicited.

There it was: I’ve hated my job ever since that happened. And there’s nothing even faintly irrational about it.

Over the past three or four years, I’ve pushed the incident out of my consciousness. But it hasn’t gone away. The guy pulled a nasty stunt on me and on an innocent bystander, and he should have been canned. In fact, a year or so later he was evicted from that particular über-deanship and shoved laterally into a less influential (but still highly paid) position. A day late, we might say, and a dollar short.

What can I do about this?

Probably nothing. I can’t undo what happened four years ago, and I can’t change the disaffection the incident created. There’s not a thing anyone can do to repair the damage that was done to me and to our operation, and even if there were, it’s too late now.

Still, when I awoke this morning I felt a lot better. Identifying the causes of distress and recognizing that at least one of them is in no way unreasonable helps to create perspective. At least I know I’m not crazy: I really do have good cause to feel some anger and resentment.

Should you put things like this behind you? Well, obviously. If you don’t, sooner or later you’ll drive yourself nuts. But you can’t put an issue behind you until you know what it is. I knew what this one was a long time ago but deliberately neglected it. That probably was a mistake: given that there was no recourse within the institution, I should have left the job as soon as possible. “Putting it behind me” without taking action on it was like burying radioactive waste in a vegetable garden.

Putting a problem behind you probably needs to include doing something, no matter how minimal, to resolve the issue: physically getting away from it, confronting its cause, asking for redress, or finding a way to undo harm that has been done. It may be that you must do something about an issue before putting it to bed; otherwise, you risk chronic angst whose real cause grows more and more undefinable as the years pass.

What about you? Have you encountered an issue that came to affect your thinking, your attitude toward life, or your well-being? How have you dealt with it?

Layoff: The emotional journey

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Over at A Gai Shan Life, Revanche (one of our favorite readers & writers) reports that the predicted layoffs have struck her company and she also is about to join the ranks of the unemployed. We should have quite the campsite, all of us laid-off bloggers dwelling together under the Seventh Avenue Overpass. I propose we call it W-ville. Oh! Sorry. Politics again! 😉

At her site and in a comment to a post below, Revanche describes experiencing a roller-coaster of emotions in response to the anticipation and finally the confirmation of the layoff. Several other bloggers have described wild swings from elation (free at last!) to panic (uh-oh!) to depression (OMG!). Fortunately, she’s managed her money well and has enough to tide her over until 2010, by which time she undoubtedly will have found another job. The panic and depression phases have got to be a lot worse for those of us who haven’t had enough time to shovel out of debt and accrue an emergency fund. But prepared or not, apparently that series of reactions is normal for everyone.

As I remarked some time back, we wouldn’t call it “work” if working were expected to be fun. The vast majority of employees work hard and don’t extract a great deal of personal satisfaction or joy from having to earn a living. But what might be a more or less neutral attitude—i.e., that’s just life—has for many of us turned pretty negative as morale at stressed workplaces heads for the city sewer. Low morale, pinched budgets, and fear make for a toxic environment that anyone in her right mind would be happy to escape. So it makes sense that your first reaction to a pink slip is hallelujah, brother!

The next thought that enters your mind is what on earth am I gonna do? The realization that you’re still going to have to pay your bills and eat, paycheck or no paycheck, is one scary critter. If you’d like to spook yourself a little more, take a look at this interactive feature at Slate.com, an item that will take your breath away. There’s a reason we’re all blogging away at three in the morning: we can’t sleep for worrying. And it’s a good reason.

Then sooner than later, depression sets in. It doesn’t take long to realize that the few employers who have job openings are so swamped with applicants they don’t even bother to respond to your carefully crafted résumé and cover letter. If you’re the kind of person who defines your self-worth according to your job, you feel as though you’re suddenly not worth much. Even if you recognize the important difference between you and what you do, you can’t help but feel that you’ve lost control over your circumstances.

I think there are only three ways to deal with this: plan, plan, and plan.

Plan for your mental health. Lay out some easy-to-follow strategies to keep yourself from going nuts. Most of these are obvious and most are inexpensive: get regular exercise, cultivate friendships, join groups or get more active in the groups you already belong to. Eat well. Stay off the sauce and refrain from using recreational drugs. And especially get yourself out of the house, so you don’t sit around and mope. If you can afford a trip or even just two weeks of informal vacation time at home, give yourself a break during the first days after the layoff.

Plan for the short term. If you have some advance warning—or even if you suspect the ax will fall but don’t know it for sure—build that emergency fund, stock up on food and other necessities. Think through ahead of time how to apply for unemployment, where you will look for work, and what you’ll do until you land a new job. Consider how you might build any current side income streams into bigger or more reliable sources of money. Update your résumé and draft a basic cover letter that you can customize for each job application. And build a list of sites where you can start applying. Don’t forget government agencies, BTW—check out USA Jobs, whose search engine kindly suggests new terms after you’ve entered the keywords that come to mind. If anyone’s hiring, it’ll be the feds.

Plan for the long term. Contact your creditors and try to negotiate short- or long-term ways to ease your loan obligations. Think through whether you can afford to take work at lower pay than the job you just left, and if so, how much lower. Consider whether any alternative kinds of employment would suffice; can you do something altogether different to make a living? Find out whether you can borrow against your 401(k), and if so, how much. Decide how long you can stay in your current circumstances before you have to make a major change, such as renting out a room or subletting your apartment, moving back in with your parents, selling a vehicle, or even defaulting on loan obligations. Think about whether you can relocate, and if so, where. And consider the possibility of going back to school: even though you’ll be racking up student loan debt or borrowing from relatives, at least student loans will keep a roof over your head, you can get health insurance through a college or university, and you’ll be doing something constructive by building new job qualifications.

Some of these are scary prospects. None of us wants to have to think about them. But facing them down and preparing for them does help to rebuild a sense of having some control over your life. I think that feeling of being out of control is the worst contributor to fear and depression. Making some plans, even if they have to be finessed or if they never need to be put into action, goes a long way toward smoothing out the emotional peaks and valleys of the layoff roller-coaster.

Five ways to deal with stress

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Ever have one of those moments when the sky is collapsing on your head at the same time your cat, your dog, your boss, each of your friends, your family members, your banker, a lawyer or two, three doctors, and various functionaries of the police force would like your undivided attention? It’s been kind of like that around here. Every stupid little thing that needs to be tended to plus a number of irrational forces decided to come into play during the week Mrs. Micah and I chose to move my blog and all its bizarre code to a new server. Stress? Let me tell you about stress!

I’ve had all of two full nights’ sleep in something over ten days, and those have come about through liberal doses of Benadryl. Quit dropping a couple of antihistamines before bed-time, and the mental alarm clock goes off at 3:00 a.m. sharp. The internal stress alarm clock has taken to ringing so loud that often pills don’t shut it off. And I’ve now become so sensitized to stress that the most minor hassle has me vibrating like a gong.

Nevertheless, I cling to my theory that pills are not good for you, and that it’s gotta be possible to get a grip without drugging yourself. It worked before, and it’ll work again. So, today I made up my mind to pursue a few fairly simple strategies.

1. Focus on a single challenge or nagging job, deal with it, and get it out of your way.

Select one that’s large enough to make you feel you’ve accomplished something, but not so huge or impossible that you can’t deal with it in a week or so. 

Larger bugabears should be broken down into parts, so that you can address them (to the extent possible) one step at a time. But there’s usually something pestering you that you can get out of the way fairly promptly.

My choice for this weekend is a vast article on the arcane doings of some fourteenth-century French aristocrats, replete with Middle French and medieval Latin: 108 pages of narrative and something over 230 footnotes, many of them archival references. Because I was working on another large, ditzy, and annoying project, I passed it for first edits to our research associate, a young man with a Ph.D. in English who ought to be competent to handle the job. In the wee hours of Saturday morning, our assistant editor in charge of the journal in question sent it back to me, saying the guy had announced he wouldn’t do the job. 

No joke! Quoth he:

I had planned on editing it tonight, but I wasn’t expecting it to be a monograph. It is not even double-spaced. The author set some customized line spacing in this text that looks more like one-and-a-half spacing. Given all the tiny footnotes, this thing is as long as a book.

 

I have to admit that I dread editing this thing. Would you take a look at it and tell me if it’s normal. I don’t want to be a whiner or slacker, but this thing looks like the copyeditor’s equivalent of water-boarding.

If I wasn’t already enjoying the 4:00 a.m. ambience, that did the job. So we agreed that I would edit the first 50 pages and then she (assistant editor) would pass it back to Our Intrepid Hero to read the remaining 57 pages, much of which consists of Latin that he needn’t look at. 

A project like this entails a fair number of global search-&-replace operations, plus you have to pull out the graphics and tables, rewrite the tables so they’re not constructed with hard tabs and spaces, format them to accord with Chicago style, and prepare them for the compositor. Well, of course…since you do that at the start of the job, this will reduce our friend’s workload significantly. Assuming he survives the encounter he will have with me tomorrow morning. 

At any rate: this was a big job. It wasn’t what I wanted to spend the weekend doing, but getting it off my desk makes me feel somewhat better. One headache out of the way = (1 zillion headaches – 1).

2. Try to engineer a break.

Leave the kiddies and the pets with a babysitter and go somewhere else. Ideally, give yourself a weekend (or more) away from the stressful situation. Go to a local hotel or B&B (leave the cell phones at home), go camping, go visit friends in some other town or state. Flee!

Luckily for me, I rarely go on vacation, and so vast numbers of use-it-or-lose-it hours have accrued to my credit. All told, by the end of the year, when I’m to be laid off, I’ll have 32.85 days that must be used or forfeited.

So, this afternoon I decided to give myself a little vacation from the salt mine. I have to go out to the office tomorrow, partly to throttle a certain research associate but also to wrap up a few other tasks. My associate editor can take over the job of riding herd on our crew for a week or two. I have a furlough day next Friday, and so with eight of those vacation days, I can engineer thirteen consecutive days away from the place, during which I intend never to check the e-mail or answer the phone.

This is big. Just staying away from the campus and filtering out everything that has to do with the various hassles and annoyances associated with the job will help a great deal.

3. Spend some time with friends who have nothing to do with the source of your stress.

Don’t discuss your problems with them. Have a good time. 

Yesterday SDXB and I did exactly that, driving halfway—no, make that all the way across the Valley to their peaceful, lovely house beneath the White Tank Mountains, where we enjoyed good company, idle talk, and several restful hours. Good thing to do.

Go to church, volunteer, invite friends over, go to a movie with someone new: find ways to be around people who have something else to talk about but your troubles.

4. Exercise

Take the dog for a walk. If you don’t have a dog, go for a walk with a neighbor, a friend, or all by your self. Learn some basic yoga and do a half-hour yoga routine in the mornings and evenings. Join a gym, if you enjoy that sort of thing. Join a softball team. Play some tennis or golf. Run!

5. Get off the caffeine and the booze.

It’s amazing how much caffeine wires you up. We tend to be unaware of this until we shuck off the stuff and notice the difference in the way we feel. Review what you drink and eat (some chocolates contain caffeine), and change your habits to get rid of the sources of caffeine. This includes soft drinks and tea as well as coffee; decaf, BTW, is not completely free of caffeine. Substitute juices, uncaffeinated soft drinks (read the label!), water, herbal teas. 

Kicking a caffeine habit can give you a roaring headache. Try to ease your way around this by switching from coffee and colas to tea for a few days, and then from tea to uncaffeinated drinks.

I find I sleep better after I’ve quit drinking my favorite potable, French-press espresso-roast coffee.

Alcohol has a kick-back effect that can keep you awake. Don’t have a nightcap or a glass of wine thinking it will help you sleep through the night! Because it’s a depressant, alcohol may make you feel like dozing off at first. But a few hours later—along about one or two in the morning—it’s likely to set off that old internal alarm clock. So when you’re feeling too stressed to sleep, get yourself off that stuff, too.

Do indulge yourself in something else: good food. Fix your favorite comfort food; prepare a fine meal; if you can afford it, go out to eat. The better you eat, the better you’ll feel.

There are many other strategies, of course, such as meditation, prayer, and mindful relaxation during panic attacks. If things are really complicated, it helps to brainstorm a list of everything that could possibly be bugging you, assess the results to decide which are important and which really are nothing to worry about, and then write up a strategy for dealing with each of the real issues in a meaningful way. One at a time.

No Crash Here: Riches in the Department of What Matters

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Spring has sprung in these parts. The weather—never bad this winter, really—has been spectacular for the past several weeks. Everything is in blossom. At this time of year, the citrus perfumes the air like frangipani in the South Pacific islands. It reminds us that our strange, abstract human constructs of “wealth” are so silly as to be meaningless. Does losing a quarter million bucks in real estate and the stock market really matter when far more believable riches surround us?

Click on the image for a full-size view.Click again for a mega-view.Captions show only at the site, not in the RSS feed.

Wonderful as flowers are, I’m planting a lot more vegetables in the garden. That chard borders the pool, and probably will grow there through the summer. Soon its neighbors, the beets and carrots, will be ready to harvest. Meanwhile, yesterday in a part of the yard that gets more sun I put in some cantaloupe and some butternut squash, which I hope will grow from grocery-scavenged seeds.As times grow even harder, food is going to be more expensive; possibly even scarce. So, the flowers will have to make way for things that can be eaten.

The yard already has plenty of that: I’ve been scarfing tree-ripened oranges for the past two and a half months, and now the oranges, lemon, and lime are all covered with new blossoms. Next winter will see another bumper crop of citrus, I think.

Those oranges are sweet as candy. Eat your heart out, Warren Buffett!

“Job Happiness”: The oxymoron of the century

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Recently a PF blogger held forth on a perennially popular topic, how to achieve happiness on the job. Sorry—I failed to bookmark the post and so can’t offer a link, but I’m sure some of you will recall reading it.

Coincidentally, shortly after that post went up, a friend whose research interest is the Latina experience in higher education (she tracks the progress of first-generation Hispanic women Ph.D.’s who stay in academia) told me about an article focussing on a particularly trying period that afflicted a campus where I used to work. Revisiting those events depressed me, but then, foolishly, instead of blowing it off I unearthed some ancient documents and e-mails that pretty much confirmed the article’s reports, a truly depressing exercise.

It’s hard to understand how any of us who worked in that place survived with our marbles intact. Matter of fact, several did not.

That one should quit one’s job and go somewhere else when one is unhappy is easier said than done, especially for academics. Jobs in higher education do not come along often, especially if your degree is in the liberal arts. Competition is fierce, even for poorly paid positions at podunk schools. It took me years—literally—to get out of that place. I applied for job after job, both in and out of education. At one point, I seriously thought of quitting and starting a housecleaning business.

Finally I got an offer for a tenure-track position. Given my three books in print and sterling teaching record, the department promised me a shot at tenure within three years. But: the job was in South Carolina, whose citizens occupied themselves by defending their right to fly a Confederate flag over the state capitol. It entailed a $10,000 cut in pay. The college provided a $2,000 moving allowance; three moving companies gave estimates in the $8,000 range to transport me across the continent.

The prospect of taking a massive pay cut and then forking up $6,000 to move, in middle age, to a part of the country where I knew no one and where the prevailing culture’s values would conflict with mine looked worse than staying where I was.

Yesterday I spent the better part of the day and evening with another friend whose job truly does make her miserable. The operation where she works is so badly managed that the atmosphere has become toxic, and it’s hard to understand how its malignant supervisor has escaped notice from the higher-ups. My friend has decided to leave—wisely, I think. Even though she feels this is not the best time financially, her husband has a good job that is unlikely to go away and that will support them both. Eventually she probably will find something else, after she’s had time to recover psychologically and physically from the grinding experience she’s gone through.

She has put up with a great deal of suffering for a very long time, partly because of financial considerations, partly because (like any target of abuse) she has imagined her unhappiness is somehow her own fault, and partly because she doesn’t quit things lightly.

My take on this is that work is not called “work,” a job is not called a “job” because earning a living is intended to be fun. The whole idea that we can expect to enjoy our jobs may be utterly misguided. If work were fun, we would call it “partying,” not “working.” Clearly, some jobs are less onerous than others. And some people delude themselves that they are having great fun on their jobs. But most don’t.

It strikes me that “job happiness” is a contradiction in terms.You have to put bread on your table. You can’t always just quit because your job sucks.

How to deal with this? Several possibilities come to mind.

1. Find a way to become self-employed, so at least you have only one boss: yourself. Start a side job and quietly develop it into something that can support you, even if you have to cut your standard of living until you can get the business running. A friend of mine made a good living as a cross-country truck driver, but he imagined he should have a life. His coworkers scoffed when he quit his job to start a lawn business. Within a year, he said, he was earning more than he’d made driving big rigs and enjoying life a great deal more.

2. Or seek employment at outfits that do not actively abuse their workers.

3. Restrict the job to the workplace. Leave it behind when you walk out the door, and walk out the door on time. Do not work overtime, and do not take a job where you are expected to devote your entire being to your occupation. Draw a distinct line between “occupation” and “life,” and jealously guard your life.

4. In an unhappy job, do as little work as possible without risking dismissal. Perform the work you must do competently, but do no more than necessary. Take all your vacation time, engineering every three-day and four-day weekend you can manage. Keep a low profile, and get out of the place as soon as you can.

5. If at all possible, move to another job once every few years. Jobs that seem wonderful when you start soon grow old. The challenge of starting with a new company or building a new enterprise at least injects a little interest into the chore of earning a living.

6. Move up or move down. If what you’re doing looks like a dead end, find a way to tunnel out. To move up, take out a loan and go back to school; get training in something that will take you in a new direction. Or consider taking a lesser job, one whose sole purpose is to put bread on the table without requiring that you donate your soul to the devil. One man with a fine higher education, for example, discovered that his entire outlook on life brightened after hequit a career and took a job as a forklift operator.

7. Retire at the earliest possible moment. When your mortgage and your car are paid off, it is amazing how little you need to live on. Get out of debt; build a pile of savings; learn to live frugally; get yourself under an inexpensive, paid-off roof; divest your life of clutter (physical and spiritual); and quit working.

It’s important to build a divide between you and your job. You are not your job! Your value as a human being is not determined by what you do for a living or by how much you earn.Gettingthat concept into your head—and truly believing it—is the real basis for happiness on the job.

Ten stress reducers

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Elevated blood pressure can be a sign of stress, among other things. When I had my little stress attack a while back, my blood pressure was so alarmingly high that the doctors suspected a heart condition; if I so much as lifted my head off the pillow, it went even higher. After the episode passed, the blood pressure numbers went back to normal. But it was scary there, for a few hours. Whenever I go into a doctor’s office, it’s often a little high, especially if I’m not sitting in a chair with my legs uncrossed and my feet flat on the floor. This phenomenon—blood pressure that rises when you go into a doctor’s office—is called “white coat syndrome.”

A week or so ago, GLBL reported at Gather Little by Little that an incident of white coat syndrome led him to buy a blood pressure monitor and keep tabs on himself for a while. This revealed that his blood pressure was higher while he was at work than over the weekend, at home. He put it down to stress.

The work environment can be very stressful, even if you’re not in a high-tension job such as police work, emergency medical or fire services,journalism,or teaching. Certainly one of the elements that led up to my episode—one of the petals of the Poison Poppy, as I call them—was workplace stress, largely resulting from friction with a subordinate. After great effort, I discovered a number of fairly easy strategies to reduce stress, which really comes at you from all directions, not just from the workplace. Here are ten of the best:

1. Reduce caffeine intake

Substitute other satisfying drinks. Some varieties of soda pop are caffeine-free: Sprite, 7-Up, ginger ale, and many brands of root beer. Read the label to be sure. Fruit juices can be combined with soda water or tonic water to make DIY pop, which IMHO tastes better than the canned stuff. Green tea is said to contain less caffeine than black. Sometimes just cutting back the amount of caffeine you take in helps: decaf coffee and tea are not caffeine-free, but substituting them for high-test may help bring down your blood pressure and lower your stress level.

If you go off caffeine cold turkey, you’ll get a headache that may be fairly bracing, but it will pass in a day or two. You can avoid or minimize this by tapering off instead of quitting abruptly. The fact that eliminating caffeine can make you sick should tell you something.

2. Try to de-stress your commute.

Leave earlier so you have plenty of time to get to your destination. Driving in the slow lane reduces the number of people tailgating and jerking around you—you tend to see more of that obnoxious behavior when you’re driving faster in the middle and outside lanes.

Do not listen to the stürm und drang on the news and yak shows. Avoid stations that carry advertising, which also can be stress-inducing and annoying. If your local airwaves don’t carry stations that broadcast the kind of music you enjoy, free of advertising, then get yourself an iPod or MP3 player and bring your own entertainment. Make it something soothing.

Learn some alternate routes to and from the workplace. If you see the freeway backing up, get off and proceed on the surface streets for a while.

3. Keep a low profile at work, and leave work at the office

Refrain from arguing with coworkers or bosses. Let the BS slide off your back like water off a duck’s feathers.

Do your job well and quietly.

Keep coworkers’ and customers’ oddities in the perspective of the large picture. How exactly will their ridiculous behavior change the course of world history?

Don’t bring work home. Make your private time exactly that: your time. And do not work more hours than you are paid to work. If you’re expected to do so, maybe it’s time to find a new employer or a new line of work.

4. Leave the office during lunch hour

Never work through lunch. If you are brownbagging, go outside or to a coffeehouse where you are allowed to eat your own food if you buy a beverage. If you must stay on the premises to eat, take some time to go for a walk. If your company offers a workout room, use it over the lunch hour. Or, if you hate gyms as much as I do and you have an office, close the door and do some yoga during breaks or lunchtime.

5. Learn to meditate.

Use break time or lunch-hour time for brief periods of meditation. Prayer is a form of meditation. If you are religious, spend a few moments at your desk in quiet prayer.

6. Reduce alcohol intake.

Restrict wine, beer, and other potables to one drink a day, max. Alcohol pushes up your blood pressure and interferes with your sleep. If you’ve been in the habit of having a couple of glasses of wine with dinner, you may find you sleep better if you have water instead. Treat yourself to wine on the weekends and on special days only. Nope…for this purpose, every day is not a special day!

7. Find a form of exercise that you enjoy and do it every day.

Walking the dog is exercise. Climbing three flights of stairs instead of taking the elevator is exercise. Bicycling is exercise. Roller-skating is exercise. Gardening is exercise. You don’t have to spend half the day at these activities or exert yourself to the point of exhaustion. A half-hour of walking goes a long way toward lowering your blood pressure and brightening your outlook.

8. Turn off the television.

The constant flow of violence and disturbing imagery flowing out of our TV sets inundates us with stress, if only on a subliminal level. I find I sleep much better if I don’t watch the idiot box at night.

9. Develop a strategy to pay off debt, create a budget, and keep your financial books up to date.

Money worries form a huge part of the stress we all suffer. Getting a grip on these issues, although it won’t instantly solve your financial problems, will at least help you to feel more control of things. And this will ease your stress.

10. Join a group, totally unrelated to your job, that will get you out of the house and into the company of other people. Examples: church, hiking or bicycling group, pet fanciers’ club, hobbyists’ club, Habitat for Humanity, or some other service group.
Try it! You’ll like it!