Less Stress More Fun

By MA Annelie Shultz

Stress! It's a fact of life. Regardless of age, employment status, or financial situation, we all experience it.

People need a certain amount of stress to be productive and happy in life.

However, when stress grows beyond that, this book gifts you the tools and skills to build your stress resistance and resilience. It helps you to ma

• Language: English
• Publisher: Choices Enterprise, LLC
• Release date: Mar 18, 2021
• ISBN: 9781950459230

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© 2020 by Annelie L. Shultz, MA

All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying, recording, or any other information storage and retrieval system, without the written permission of the publisher.

Printed in the United States of America

Published in Allentown, PA

ISBN 978-1-950459-22-3

ISBN 978-1-950459-23-0 (e-book)

Library of Congress Control Number 2020923588

2 4 6 8 10 9 7 5 3 1 paperback

MomosaPublishing.com

This book is dedicated to the memory of my parents

To my wonderful husband, Floyd

and to Christine, Karen, and Erin.

Contents

Introduction: What Is Stress?

Section I: Manage Stress

Secret 1: Breathe Consciously to Manage Stress

Secret 2: Eat Nutritionally Balanced Meals to Manage Stress

Secret 3: Sleep Soundly to Manage Stress

Secret 4: Move Your Body to Manage Stress

Section II: Minimize Stress

Secret 5: Manage Thoughts and Actions

Secret 6: Be Who You Are

Secret 7: Use FUN as Your STRESSBUSTER

Section III: Monitor Stress to Keep Your Own Rhythm

Chapter 8: Take Charge of Managing and Minimizing Stress

Chapter 9: Navigating Through Life’s Transitions

Conclusion

Appendix

Acknowledgments

About the Author

Introduction

What Is Stress?

Are you feeling overwhelmed by life’s obligations, burdened with stress, and unsure about which way to turn first? Do you sometimes feel like a hamster running on its wheel, running, running but getting nowhere? Does your to-do list seem longer than your day?

If so, adding stress management to your to-do list probably feels even more stressful. The Seven Secrets to Help You Enjoy Life Again will help you manage stress quickly and with ease.

Many people wish that they had a life with no stress. Do you? You may want to reconsider that. In a stress-free life, there is no reason to get up in the morning, or to do anything, not even to get ready for a special event, party, or date.

For an analogy of the positive benefits of stress, think of a string instrument, like a violin. All four strings need just the right tension, or stress, to sound their special note. Without enough stress on a string, it makes a sickly sound or twang. With too much stress on a string, it will screech or even snap. Each string has its own tune, and together the four strings make music. The stress on the properly tuned strings on a violin is just like healthy stress in your own life.

According to Stanford University Medical School’s extensive research 95 percent of illnesses are stress related. Stress related illness or disease compares to the violin strings wound too tightly. When the bow plays a tight string, the string screeches and eventually snaps. How often are you and your body ready to snap?

With healthy stress, you can play your own song, be yourself, and enjoy your life again.

The Seven Secrets of Stress Management will not extend your to-do list, only fine-tune what you need to do to live healthy and well. With a solid foundation for your body and mind, you can easily manage and minimize stress.

The first four Secrets of Stress Management help you build a solid healthy foundation with good breathing habits so that you can relax and think clearly again, healthy nutrition to feel well and think sharper, adequate restorative sleep to be more productive yet relaxed and enjoying life, and movement for your body to keep it strong and relaxed, not tense. Secrets 1 through 4 are your stress management tools. They help you build a solid foundation for your life, and they also improve your physical and mental health.

Secrets 5, 6, and 7 deal more with your thoughts and feelings.

Secret 5, Manage Thoughts and Actions, simplifies how you manage thoughts and actions and deal with feelings to stay positive and healthy. Negative thoughts, feelings, and actions create much stress in our minds and bodies.

We usually feel stress when our inner expectations of life are not being met by our outside world. We are not getting what we think we want or need. Perhaps other people behave in ways we do not like, or we think they are not correct, or they hurt us. All these feelings create inner stress. Secret 5 will show you how to move through your life in a more positive, low-stress manner.

Secret 6, Be Who You Are, is based on William Glasser, MD’s Choice Theory, A New Psychology of Personal Freedom (Glasser, William. Choice Theory. HarperCollins Publishers, 1998.) According to Dr. Glasser, we have four basic psychological needs, which are based on core principles:

• Love and Belonging

• Power

• Freedom (having choices)

• FUN

How you satisfy those needs is defined by your own uniqueness. Not being able to satisfy your basic needs produces much stress and impairs your physical and mental health. Understanding your personal basic needs is essential to minimize your stress tremendously and feel good about yourself.

Dr. Glasser’s Choice Theory made a tremendous difference in my own life. When our children were young, my husband started his own business. Working extremely hard and long hours, he often came home exhausted.

The demands of housekeeping, growing vegetables in our garden, canning or freezing them for the winter, and caring for the family, as significant as they are, exhausted me. They did not satisfy my basic psychological needs enough. Hence, I experienced such a high stress level that I felt sick and could barely function at times.

Not understanding that I need to satisfy my personal psychological needs I expected doctors to help me. I found myself getting worse from their treatments rather than better. The last one told me, It all comes down to your nutrition. His statement was the turning point in my life.

I contacted a well-trained natural nutritionist, whose free presentation I had attended the month before. Working with her regularly, I began to feel better little by little, regaining my energy and seeing hope for me and my family on the horizon.

But as much as the nutritionist’s healthy program helped me function again physically, I was a long way from feeling healthy and being able to enjoy life. Even regular