Sweep the Stress from Your Life
Spring cleaning is the best excuse for cleaning your personal life and working to sweep away your stresses.
The key to sweeping away your stress is simplifying. After all, the number one stress causer today is a lifestyle that is simply too fast-paced. If you find your life too difficult or impossible to keep up to, the stresses that you are experiencing now will only get worse, not better.
Of course, simplifying the daily frenzy that is modern life is much easier said than done. However, there are some very easy and basic techniques that you can implement to help you maintain your sanity, attain contentment, and achieve a better purpose and balance.
The first step is to master your own environment. This means everything around you. Not only your home, but also your relationships, your activities, and your possessions. Each of these elements of our environments has a direct impact on us and influences our outlook on life and overall happiness.
Therefore, within your first step, you need to rid yourself of all the unnecessary complexity in your environment. To do this, you need to ask yourself a serious question for each element of your environment, "Is this action, person, or possession bringing joy and peace to my life? Follow this question with, "Is this action, person, or possession reducing the complexity of my life." If the answer is no to either one of these questions, then you need to take action to discover a way to either minimize the effect of that element of your environment, or discard it altogether.
This may sound like a very overwhelming task, but it needn't be. Don't plan to do it all in one day. Start small, taking a little step every day, you'll soon have it worked into your routine, and will be realizing benefits as you go, making it extremely rewarding.
To get yourself started, write down five things that bring the most complication or stress to your life. For example:
- Too much clutter in my office
- Too many commitments
- Relationship with Steve is extremely draining
- Tennis practice is becoming a drag
- Too much stuff. Period.
Break each part of your list down into smaller tasks that you can do to gradually clear them or resolve them. Furthermore, so that this doesn't become a complexity in itself, give yourself only this one goal: I promise to take at least one small step every day for simplifying my life.
Even if all you do is put all your bills in a pile (instead of all over your kitchen table), make that phone call you've been meaning to make, or donate that thing you've been meaning to get rid of to charity, you'll have kept your promise to yourself, and you'll be making progress. With every passing day, your life will become just a little bit less complex, and you'll feel great about accomplishing each of your little steps.
