Every once in a while we  become overwhelmed by our circumstances.  That overwhelming feeling of despair may be caused by events that you can’t seem  to control.  Maybe your life is not working out the way you planned or  you think  you should be more successful or richer, or happier.  You may be facing some challenges that seem out of your control. We all have moments, days, even weeks where we feel down about where we are  and where we want to be.  So to help get through those nasty moments, here are six steps you can do to take control back and create a better future for yourself.

What’s  Your Problem?

Get out a pencil and paper and take a little time to work on yourself! Write out these questions  and list everything that comes to mind as you answer them.  No judgement.  No distractions.  Find at least 3o minutes to just work on your life.  Put down the first thing that pops into your mind, even if it doesn’t make any sense to you now.

1.  What problems or challenges are you facing right now?

Write it all down.

2. What is the Solution?

Find the key and use it!

Accept your first thoughts on how to solve each one. Can you visualize solving the problem? What would you be doing if this challenge were already solved?          
Imagine yourself living as if you have already solved the problem.  It’s gone.  It has been solved.  It is in your past. (Do this for each problem)

3.  Now, Make a Plan.

Work backwards.  The problem has been solved, you feel good about how you did it.  What did you do?  Take your time.  What happened?  Fantasize, dream about      it.  Think about how you solved it creatively.  Note every detail.  Write it down step by step.  Make it real by adding practical ideas.  Refine the steps.  Be flexible.

4. Believe in the plan. – Visualize yourself carrying out each step.  Imagine yourself taking control.  How do you feel as each step is completed?  What are you seeing? Watch yourself complete the steps.

5. Anticipate the plan.

You can take a step every single day.  You are on your way! Practice the plan.

6. Hone the plan, work it, make it yours.
Add new ideas and throw out things that don’t work.  Don’t give up. Don’t let it go.  Do it for yourself. How serious do you take the plan? Make it live. Make it a priority. See it, feel it, be it and it will become a reality.  Notice how good it feels to be in control of this plan.

Attitude Is Everything!

Attitude is Everything!

Do this for one full week.  You will see a difference in your attitude and your perspective!  You can solve life’s challenges by taking the time to take action rather than worrying and feeling incapable of changing your circumstances.  I guess that’s why Nike says:  “Just do it!”

I have a friend, whom I have never met.  He is a young man in (where are you from Henrik?)  Oh, yes, Henrik lives in Sweden.

He is 30 years old going on “Wise” man  and he has spent (how many Henrik?) oh, yes, 5 years training himself in the power of Positive Thinking. Here  is what he has accomplished – in his own words:

• Switched from a generally pretty negative attitude to a much more positive one.
• Lost 26 pounds during 4 months in the winter/spring of 2009. I did it by using a program called Turbulence Training, check out the review here.
• Become a lot more present. I used to live a lot of my life in my head, in the past and in the future. Today I spend a lot more time living it in the present moment. It’s a wonderful thing.
• I have become a less shy and more confident person.
• I get things done. I used to be a real procrastinating slacker that never got much done. My effectiveness and productivity have shot up quite a bit since then (although I certainly still have room for improvement).
• I have created a highly successful blog. This blog has – in July of 2010 – 32000+ subscribers via email and RSS and hundreds of thousands of visitors each month. How did I do it? How to Build a Somewhat Successful Blog: 16 Lessons I Have Learned has a lot of answers.

Henrik is a man with a mission.  I have never actually met him, but his blog is filled with interesting lessons and lovely positive thoughts.  His picture is perfect for what he advocates.

So it was terrific tonight when I got home and got a message from Henrik.  My day had not been stellar!  It was one of those days when my computer wouldn’t do anything I asked of it, and although I was all set up for my favorite client, she came in and asked for other things which I could not bring up on my computer immediately, which made me feel the fool and a tad inept when she found a spelling error in the very first title page.

Geez, I felt completely disheartened after trying a number of times to burn a DVD of my work for my client, only to send her home with a DVD with “Nothing” on it.  Duh!

Knowing this, I spent another 2 hours trying to burn a “corrected” version of the DVD.  To No Avail!  Sorry, the computer said, No Can Do because the original can’t be found.  What?!!! It’s a Movie!  You Can Burn a Movie, said I…but no.

Then, I opened my g-mail and Henrik sent me this:

I love Shirley, but sometimes she does things that are not just rotten, they pretty much amount to cruel and unusual punishment. She is always singing or humming songs. Sometimes it’s a wonderful classic, but sometimes it’s a trite commercial that she grew up listening to. And sometimes it’s something as awful as a Captain and Tennille song (and if you don’t know who they are think yourself fortunate).

www.youtube.com/watch?v=tEh7_Ez9TfA

On those days I end up walking around with that darn song stuck in my head, reverberating endlessly. “Muskrat Suzie, Muskrat Sam, Do the jitterbug at a Muskrat land.” What the hell does that mean anyway.

Now she’s gone one worse. She recently gave me a book called “One Minute Brainteasers“. It’s a collection of puzzles and problems to test your IQ. It’s like crack cocaine for the brain. Once you start it’s hard to put it down. And even if you do, the teasers that you weren’t able to solve keep running through your brain every day. It drives you crazy.

For instance, there’s one section that has sentences with a blank in them and you have to find a food word to fill in the gap. But the catch is the food word ends up as a bad pun. For instance the sentence “Is — the list of the top ten Italian cities” is completed by putting in the food word ‘venison’. So when you say it out loud it sounds like “Is Venice On (geddit) the list etc”. Nasty eh!

That’s what I’ve been going through for weeks now since she gave me the book. It is supposed to be good for your brain but it’s driving me mad.

I mean, check out these sentences and see if you can come up with food words that complete them. Just to put you out of your misery the answers are at the bottom of the page.

1) The witness saw the —- up to the victim and stab him

2) The dog tried to —- his bone

3) Her Grandparents always used to give up meat from —- Easter Sunday

4) Even though Tom Hanks often acts like a —— Ryan always enjoys co-starring with him

5) If Rocky Balboa saw Alice B. Toklas’s significant other he’d probably yell “——-”

ANSWERS

1 - Mango (man go)

2 - Berry (bury)

3 - Lentil (Lent till)

4 - Nutmeg (nut meg)

5 - Yogurt (“Yo, Gert!”

People handle stressful situations in very different ways. Some do so with dignity and aplomb – whatever aplomb is – others do so by freaking out and being semi-hysterical. One woman I know reacted to her husband being attacked by a mountain lion by whacking the lion in the face with a very large log, chasing the lion away. Now admittedly that’s a rather unusual circumstance but it just proved what an unusual woman she was.

In contrast someone else I know gets freaked out by anything that strays outside the ordinary office routine. Question something they wrote and they get really bent out of shape and hissy, a state of mind that can last for hours.

Now, we’d all love to be that first lady. Calm, resolute, purposeful under pressure. But sometimes things pile on so thick and fast that we all end up more like the latter guy. Frazzled, panicky, not reacting well. That’s not just bad for your performance at work it’s also bad for your health. Letting stress overwhelm you can increase your risk of depression, depress your immune system and leave you an emotional wreck.

So, here are a few pointers on how to handle or reduce stress and make your life much more pleasant.

1) Prevent it: how often do you see drivers honking their horns and yelling at other drivers because they are stuck in traffic or running late. Think how easy it might have been to avoid getting into that situation if they’d just left a few minutes early. Too many of us create our own stress by putting unnecessary pressure on ourselves, then over reacting to the outcome. So, instead, plan ahead. Leave for important appointments in plenty of time. Don’t wait till the last minute to complete important assignments or jobs, get them done ahead of time. You can’t control every aspect of your life, which is why it’s all the more important to control those areas that you can.

2) Set priorities: too often we get caught up doing things that we have little interest in or have little value for us. At work we may not always have the choice, but often in life we do. So, instead of just mucking through why not write down a list of priorities, things that have real value for you. It will help you focus on what’s important and what’s not.

3) Communicate: I used to work in TV and it never ceased to amaze me how often mistakes were made because someone forgot to tell someone else a critical detail. And these were professional communicators who were sitting in the same room all day! Talking to people not only ensures that you can avoid problems later, it also helps ensure that people understand how you feel about things. Bottling up emotions is never healthy, hiding your feelings achieves nothing. Be open, be honest, be communicative. You’ll be amazed at the difference it makes.

4) Take time out: sometimes we all need a break but too often we fail to take it and end up getting into stressful situations we could easily have avoided. Take a break, go for a walk, get away from everyone around you. It’s a wonderfully simple way of clearing your head and giving you the breathing room you need to get some perspective. Exercise is even better. Working out regularly is a brilliant way of easing stress and staying healthy in mind as well as body. If you don’t have time to do any of that, just step away from your computer or desk and take a deep breath, then do it again, and again. Deep breathing is one of the easiest ways of breaking the stress cycle and giving you some, well, breathing room.

5) Keep your sense of humor; when all about you are in a tizzy and losing their heads, keep a hold of yours and try to find the humor in the situation. Being able to laugh in times of adversity, being able to laugh at yourself, can make a huge difference in your ability to manage stress.

We all have stress in our lives. It may be caused by a cranky boss, stupid colleague, crazy relative or any combination of the above. You can’t change any of those. All you can change is the way you respond to them.

So, next time one or all of them starts driving you crazy, remember those five points. They could make all the difference.

So, I read this study the other day that said that swearing can make you feel better. I thought. No shit! And instantly I felt better. Ain’t science amazing!

But it’s true. Researchers at Keele University’s School of Psychology did a fiendishly clever little study that found that swearing can help ease pain and even increase your tolerance for pain.

They got 64 undergraduate volunteers (those crazy kids will do anything) and got them to stick their hand in a tub of ice-cold water and hold it there as long as possible. They did this twice. First time around they were told to keep repeating a swear word of their own choosing. Second time around they were asked to keep repeating a word they would use to describe a table. Why a table I have no idea!

Anyway, that’s not the point. The point is that they found that when the students were saying “dammit dammit dammit ” they were able to keep their hand in the ice water longer than when they were just saying “desk desk desk”.

In another interesting finding they noted that when the students were swearing their heart rates were higher than when they weren’t.

So why is this happening, what does it all mean? I don’t friggin’ know. Gosh, that felt good.

The researchers don’t really know either to be honest but they think that it could be because when you curse you are triggering the brain’s natural “fight or flight” response and that heightened response to a perceived threat – even something as relatively benign as ice-water – helps increase our tolerance for pain.

So, next time a doctor or nurse comes at you with a syringe to give you an injection start cursing like a drunken sailor. Then tell them you are just exercising a scientifically-tested, non-pharmaceutical pain relief method. And if they don’t believe you, well screw them! See, didn’t that feel good!

Working Out at Work

Years ago, when I was still a TV producer, we had a gym at work. It was great. On what passed for relatively quiet days I could sometimes slip away and have a quick workout, either on the stairmaster or lifting weights. Sometimes I even wrote a script while peddling on a bike. It was a great way to ease the stress and tension of the job and stay healthy at the same time. And it is a lot cheaper and less messy than heroin.

Now a new study, in the Journal of Occupational and Environmental Medicine, is saying just how and why that kind of at-work workout is good for you.

The researchers randomly assigned 841 Danish officer workers (the researchers were Danish too, so this wasn’t just some ploy by folks in Arkansas looking for a way to wangle a free trip to Copenhagen) to two exercise groups. One group did a variety of all-round exercises such as walking or running etc. The second group did strength training, focusing mostly on the neck, shoulders and back.

There was a third group but they didn’t do any exercise at all so forget them.

Anyway, both the aerobic and the strength training group both saw improvements in their cardiovascular health, including a decrease in both blood pressure and body fat. This wasn’t some small decrease either; in both groups the decrease in blood pressure was enough to cut their risk of a stroke by 25 percent. Pretty impressive stuff.

Both groups also reported fewer problems with back and shoulder pain, about a 30 percent reduction. Again nothing to turn your nose up at.

Now, there have been many studies that show having a place to exercise at work can help reduce disability, decrease the number of sick days employees take and even increase productivity.

This study didn’t look at any of those, it just focused on the health benefits to the workers. But the findings were pretty impressive.

And you know what, even though they didn’t measure it, I’m guessing that people felt better not just physically, but also emotionally. When you break away from whatever you are doing at work and jump around or lift weights or just do some physical activity, it can be wonderfully freeing.

It is amazing how often a problem you were struggling with when you went into the gym is no longer an issue when you come out. It’s also fascinating how often you can find come up with creative solutions to issues after a workout. Just by stopping thinking about a problem, concentrating on something else, your mind is able to come up with a creative solution that it couldn’t when you were just staring at the computer screen.

It’s good for the brain, good for the body. Goddamit, it’s good for you. OK.. enough with the swearing jokes.