Too blessed to be stressed

This year Fair Trade fortnight runs from February 26th to 11th March and as well as being a time of 'special' markets and coffee mornings it is a time when I am reminded that my life, and that of my family is really blessed – we have a car, computers, holidays, enough food. Things we take for granted, assume as our right, things we forget to be grateful for.

It is physiologically impossible for us to be stressed and thankful at the same time we cannot release stress hormones whilst focussing on being grateful (blessed) hence the saying “too blessed to be stressed” so if you are feeling under pressure and don't know how long you can keep the lid on your stress levels maybe its time to change your focus. Here are some techniques which people use to go from stressed to blessed:

• Keep a gratitude journal   Writing helps us to clarify our thoughts and writing daily is an excellent way of getting in the habit of being grateful. Your journal can contain as much or as little information as you like though you should aim to have 5 things each day for which you are grateful. This can be written as a list, a piece of prose or even be a collage.
• Pray   Research may have demonstrated that prayer does not cure sick people, but whether you have faith or not the act of saying out loud the words “thank you for...” each day is a wonderful way of focussing on the positive and in doing so reducing your stress levels.
• Thank other people   Focus your thoughts on a person who has done something for which you are grateful and write/ email / tell them. Tell them what it was they did, how that made you feel and what personal need their action filled.
• Donate some of your time to helping others less fortunate than you   There are many ways to do this including: writing letters for Amnesty International, mentoring a teenager / young parent, helping out at a soup kitchen.
• Remember to smile   When good things happen smile, its simple and its a good message both to your brain and to others that things are good and that you are grateful. So when the sun shines and the sky is blue, when you see the first snowdrops of the year, when your children are demonstrating their own personalities, when someone helps you... smile.

Gratitude is not a new idea, many philosophers and religious teachers have celebrated it, major religions consider gratitude to be an important emotional state and scientific study has indicated that performing daily gratitude exercises results in higher levels of alertness, enthusiasm, determination, optimism and energy as well as less stress and depression. Better still research has found that that people who feel grateful are more likely to feel loved and that one act of kindness encourages another, leading to a positive cycle of reciprocal kindness.

So what are you grateful for today?

Sarah Pineger