Let’s face it, we all have bad days. And sometimes those bad days can turn into bad weeks, bad months, and if we’re not careful, bad years. Before we know it, we can be sucked into a downward, overstressed spiral towards anxiety, depression or even worse. For some, this may seem too painful to even read, but if the truth is told, there are people hurting everywhere, whether it’s you or me, a family member or someone we know.

In the midst of crisis, heartache, misery or difficulty, it’s essential for us to take the right steps to maintain our sanity and wellbeing on a daily basis. In fact, it’s important for all of us, whether we’re feeling great, just okay or horrible, to make a habit of practicing wellness. It’s just good living.

Tips for Feeling Better Today

1. Do some Exercise. I’ve written about it over and over again, but the facts are clear. Exercise has amazing benefits for the body and the mind. No excuse or amount of doubt is going to change that. A brisk 30 minute walk can do more for your perspective than sitting in misery, even if you don’t feel like it. If you want to start feeling better, get off your rear and do something!

2. Practice Relaxation. There is an amazing, calming benefit for the mind and body when you learn to relax effectively. Even if you take just a five-minute break away from the busyness of your day to be alone and quiet, you’ll reap the benefits of this soothing activity. Mark Hyman, in his “UltraMind Solution” book calls it “finding the pause button” – a designated time when our bodies heal, repair and renew during a state of purposeful relaxation. Try a relaxing hot bath in Epsom salts, lavender and baking soda.

3. Make Prayer a priority. There’s really no substitute for communing on a daily basis with the God of the universe. To me, prayer does just that. Many people think prayer and meditation are the same thing. They can certainly be combined, and from my Christian perspective, the two compliment one another. Check yourself daily and make sure that you’re tapping in to the joy, peace, power, strength and wisdom that come from knowing God intimately through prayer, just as King David did in Psalm 63.

4. Learn to Laugh. Spend some time distracting yourself from life by doing something with a friend who will make you laugh. Watch a funny TV show or listen to something comical on the radio. Laughing, just like exercise, releases pain killing endorphins into the bloodstream, which is a natural way to feel better.

5. Get Inspired. When dealing with difficulty and feeling lost, lonely, afraid or depressed, it’s essential to find some inspiration. If we get too down, we can become hopeless – like a flat tire, in desperate need of a shot of air to start rolling smoothly again. One effective way to do this is to read something inspirational, such as the Bible, or a book that addresses your particular situation, one that provides you with some hope and solution for what’s plaguing you.

There’s no magic bullet to feeling better. Sometimes it just takes time and distance for things to improve. No matter what the situation, it’s important to be proactive in the pursuit of wellness. When dealing with clients, I often find that many have a good grip on certain aspects of wellness, but fail to stay on top of some of the most basic things that keep us well. Learning to master the above tips will provide some much needed relief during difficulty or challenging times.

As always, feel free to contact me if you need some help practicing wellness. Also, feel free to leave a comment or question below.

Related posts:

1. Eggs & Oatmeal for Fat Loss & Wellness
2. Are You Running on Empty?
3. The Serenity Prayer

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Boundaries defined

I’m not going to get complicated here trying to define what boundaries are, so I’ll attempt to draw you a mental picture. Here are a couple of examples to think about to help understand what boundaries are. Try to imagine each situation. One thing should be pretty clear upon contemplating each of these “boundary” examples. At first, it seems simple to figure out the boundary or boundaries for each, but if you think about it, each example can have more than one boundary – in fact, each may have several, depending upon the circumstances and the desired outcome.

Example 1. The Island

You’re on a small island in the ocean, all alone and you can’t swim. What are your boundaries?

In this situation (with the desire to stay alive) it would seem that the only clearly defined boundary is the coast or shoreline. On an island you would have the freedom to explore wherever you like, as long as you stay away from the water, since you can’t swim. But, what if there are also dangerous creatures on that island? Perhaps there are snakes that nest in or around the base of certain trees in the wooded areas of the island. How would this affect your boundary lines? Instead of having the freedom to roam all over the island, you’ll need to stay out of the woods, to avoid being bitten by a poisonous, life-threatening snake. Or, what if you taught yourself to swim? How would that affect your boundary?

My point is simple, every situation or circumstance comes with its own set of boundaries. And many times, these boundaries are situational and relative to the person involved.

Example 2. The Recovering Alcoholic

For a person addicted to alcohol or “alcoholic” – boundaries are going to look very different than for one who does not have a drinking problem. As a recovering alcoholic, some of the boundaries may look like the following:

• Avoid any pubs and bars.
• Avoid the beer and wine isle in the grocery store.
• Avoid social situations where alcohol is being served.
• Avoid friends who drink during social drinking hours.
• Avoid those who don’t support your being a teetotaler, who insist on your social drinking, instead of being abstinent.

As you probably already realize, the above “boundaries” can vary among recovering alcoholics, depending upon the degree of wellness and time elapsed. For a ten year reformed alcoholic, perhaps it’s okay to associate with friends during a social drinking hour. However, for a newly recovering alcoholic, the above boundaries must be carefully observed, to avoid temptation, which could lead to relapse.

Whether a non-swimmer on an island alone, an alcoholic trying to recover, or a person with other issues – good, established boundaries play an essential role in maintaining a healthy and happy life. Even the most well-adjusted, healthy individuals have established boundaries in place, whether they realize it or not. Boundaries are an essential part of their achieving healthy balance, success and happiness in life.

Your Take Away:

On a more personal level, what are your boundaries? If your life is currently riddled with problems, distress, discontent or crisis, it may be that you have boundary issues or “B.A.D.” Meanwhile, take the time to think about your current troubling situation. Make a list of the boundaries that are in place in your life. Are they working? If not, then maybe they need to reordered or changed.

Related posts:

1. Do You Have Boundary Issues?

Let’s face it, we’re all dealing with some kind of difficulty nowadays. Today may be one of your good days, or like many, it may be one of the bad ones. At any rate, here’s a simple little question to answer for yourself that should make things better, if you take it to heart –

Will This Matter a Year from Now?

You see, much of the sadness and frustration that we experience in our lives can easily be overcome, if we would simply and actively seek to put things into perspective. I wrote another article on the half-empty, half-full perspective a while back. I would suggest you use the link and go read it. For now though, as a quick tip to make your life a bit sweeter, a bit more pleasant today, think through the question – “Will your present trouble or difficulty matter at all a year from now?”

If we taint the current troubling situation with negativity and hopelessness, then the answer to that question might actually be “yes, it WILL matter a year from now”. But I believe that if we choose to see the grander scheme, the bigger picture, the good in our lives – striving to put things into perspective, our current trivial worries will melt away in light of the huge blessings that God already has working in our lives.

Your Take Away

Don’t let your current frustration, worry or trouble rob you of today’s blessings and happiness. Seek to dwell in the light of God’s promises, His blessings and hope. Doing so will ensure (or at least greatly increase your chances) that today’s trouble truly will not matter a year from now!

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Okay, so maybe in the overall scheme of things, laughter may not be the BEST medicine, but it surely will make life better and happier. Not only that, but you and I are much more fun to be around if we’re laughing and jovial.

How much time do you spend laughing it up? I know, if you’re having crisis moments or lots of difficulty, laughter seems a million miles away from your current stress situation. You’re probably thinking to yourself – oh, if I could only bring back the laughter.

Well, there’s a man named Norman Cousins who did some extensive research on the physical benefits of laughter and happiness. He even established a “Humor Research Task Force” to do some worldwide clinical research on humor. Do you know what his conclusion was?

Laughter, Happiness and Joy are the Perfect Medicine for Stress

In fact, here are some of the benefits that he concluded come from laughter:

• Stress reduction
• Mood elevation
• Lower blood pressure
• An Immune System boost
• Better Thinking & Memory
• Healthier Heart
• Better Sleep & Relaxation
• General Feeling of Satisfaction

Interesting, huh? Now, you’re probably thinking, “I’d like to laugh more, but with my situation, I can’t!”

Well,I say, now is your chance to be proactive in the midst of difficulty, crisis and stress. Do something and start laughing it up. Several weeks ago, I wrote in a blog about how exercise releases endorphins, which are nature’s pain killers in the body. Did you know that laughter also releases these powerful endorphins? In essence, endorphins, when released in the brain, affect the body a lot like morphine does. Endorphins create a feeling of well-being throughout the whole body and help relieve pain. Hence the benefits that I listed above.

My SUPERCHARGED suggestion for you today is NO MATTER WHAT YOUR CIRCUMSTANCE – Practice making laughter a real part of your life. Watch a funny movie. Spend some time with an upbeat, positive – happy go lucky friend. Allow some of that infectious joy and laughter to rub off on you. Fight to find a way to make your stomach hurt with a good belly laugh.

The Bible says in Proverbs 17:22 – “A cheerful heart is good medicine.”

Today, determine within your heart that you’re going to do whatever you can to laugh more, at every opportunity. Do this and watch the sun shine light into the midst of your crisis and stress.

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Managing Stress

Stress kills. But before it does so, it will knock your life out of whack. In my case, in the midst of striving to learn to be a fit and healthy person – I severely neglected the mental, emotional and spiritual side of the equation. I was eating right for health, but was not properly nurturing my soul. I soon found myself overstressed, anxious and quite literally, out of balance. I constantly felt physically ill and soon found myself worrying and stressed about everything – namely work, relationships with others AND my health. It seemed that my life was spinning out of control. The interesting thing is that the more I tried to control it – the worse it got and the worse I felt. I adjusted my diet a hundred different ways; I increased and changed the dietary supplements I was taking; I did research, perusing the internet looking for solutions for everything, including work and my health; I went to the doctor repeatedly to find out what was wrong with me; and I’m even ashamed to say, I began drinking a glass or two of wine in the evenings just to relax (which I rarely did before). Ultimately, I developed a very severe case of gastritis that was misdiagnosed, resulting in a lot of pain and unnecessary intestinal surgery.

I tell you all of this to demonstrate how lack of balance in my life completely threw things out of whack and caused me a lot of sickness, pain, worry and frustration. In case you didn’t get it,

Life without Proper Balance Isn’t Healthy Living

Life IS a juggling act. And quite frankly, most of us are NOT very good jugglers. I know I wasn’t. In the midst of my attempts, I was dropping things left and right. No matter how hard I tried to fix things, they continued to get worse and I just got sicker and more frustrated. I was missing the big picture. For those of you who are visual, look at this diagram that I created below, which I believe to represent proper balance in life:

Ideally, this is where we should be – having proper balance in life between these three main areas (Body, Mind, Soul). Imagine the above as a wheel that rolls perfectly, because all areas are in balance. If you were able to inflate or deflate one of the above areas, indicating a lack of balance, the wheel would cease to roll smoothly.

Many of us, due to neglect to our “life circle of balance”, if you will, have a deflated ball or circle, basically like what you see below – deflated, unfulfilled (lacks air or inspiration) and won’t roll or bounce. Take a look:

What you see above was representative of my life a few years ago. To put it simply, when you have a life out of balance, chances are some or many of the following issues may describe what you will experience:

• Poor health, malaise or sickness (headaches, nausea, acid stomach, ulcers, or worse)
• Anxiety or Panic
• Obesity, weight gain or even weight loss
• Insomnia or perhaps you sleep too much
• Relationship problems (have trouble relating to others)
• Depression
• Self-doubt

These are but a few symptoms of a life out of balance. And, if your personal life balance is representative of the deflated, uninspired diagram above, just imagine how it must affect everything in your life.

If your life is like mine was, like the above wheel or ball that won’t roll or bounce, here are three fundamental things to remember that may help inspire you. They are not so much about action as they are about your perspective. You may not be able to change your situation right away, but these may actually add some air (inspiration) to your life (tire, ball, wheel) so that it at least keeps rolling forward:

1. Stop focusing on your problems and worrying yourself sick about them. Worrying will not change one thing about your situation, in fact, it will only make it worse. Here’s what Christ Himself said about it in Matthew 6:27 – “And who of you by worrying and being anxious can add one unit of measure (cubit) to his stature or to the span of his life?”
2. Change what you can. Ok, so you can’t control everything, but there are things about your life that you can control. Many times in life we obsess and worry about things over which we have no control. Stop doing that and refocus on what you CAN control and change.
3. Focus on the good, the positive, the right things about your life. One of my favorite verses in the Bible is from Philippians 4:8-9, ” Whatever is true, whatever is worthy of reverence and is honorable and seemly, whatever is just, whatever is pure, whatever is lovely and lovable, whatever is kind and winsome and gracious, if there is any virtue and excellence, if there is anything worthy of praise, think on and weigh and take account of these things [fix your minds on them]. Practice this and the God of peace (of untroubled, undisturbed well-being) will be with you.”

If you practice the above three suggestions, your ball will begin rolling in no time. Meanwhile, keep working on solving the problems in your life.

Before you know it, balance will return and success, renewal and joy will abound.

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Over the past several blogs, I’ve written about how easy it is for our thinking and our perspective to change to the negative. I wrote about how a negative perspective is like wearing sunglasses at night and how negative thinking keeps us in a state of constant turmoil and crisis.

Don’t Sweat the Small Stuff by Richard Carlson

Recently, I came upon Carlson’s book, which is full of simple, yet practical advice for dealing with some of our everyday problems. I’d like to share one of those particular thoughts with you here -

Great advice – I encourage you to remember the above little exercise, the next time your thinking starts getting obsessively negative, before it starts spinning out of control. Oh, and there’s one more thing that’s been awfully helpful to me over the years that I’d like to leave with you –

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My child, don’t lose sight of common sense (wisdom) and discernment.

Hang on to them,

for they will refresh your soul.

They are like jewels on a necklace.

They keep you safe on your way,

and your feet will not stumble.

You can go to bed without fear;

you will lie down and sleep soundly.

You need not be afraid of sudden disaster

or the destruction that comes upon the wicked,

for the Lord is your security.

He will keep your foot from being caught in a trap.

These are deep and comforting words for all of us who take them to heart. How many of us, in the midst of our crisis or personal problems become completely scared and uncertain of what the future holds? How many of us feel completely turned upside down and troubled by the looming chaos that surrounds us? The truth is that when we spend our time and energy focusing on our crisis or problem situation, we become more and more frustrated, confused and distraught.

Your Crisis is like a Dark, Lonely Road

Imagine for a moment that your problems or crisis represent walking at night down a dark road. It can be scary, lonely, depressing and make us horribly anxious. Nobody would enjoy this type of situation. Now let me ask you a question. If you were all alone, by yourself on a dark road and lost, what would help you?

If your answer is a light, a map, a car or even someone to guide you, then you’d be correct.

Do you think it would do you any good in this situation to just keep wandering around, stumbling and trying to focus on the darkness?

In my time of coaching people in crisis, I find that many people often lose sight of what’s most important as they become carried away and even obsessed with their problems. This is easy to do when our lives seem to be spinning out of control. Our knee-jerk reaction is to focus on the crisis and try to fix the problem, often making things worse as we lose site of the bigger picture. Not always, but oftentimes, we end up in crisis or in difficult (dark) situations because we weren’t prepared, kind of like a child wandering out by himself before sunset and then finding himself all alone in the dark night – lost, unknowing and without guidance.

Can you identify with this?

Shine Some Light on Your Crisis or Difficulty

In the above Proverb, God reminds us to not lose sight of wisdom, common sense and discernment. He then tells us that clinging to truth, wisdom and what’s right will refresh us and protect us. His promise is that as we walk through life, staying focused upon what’s right, good, wise and truthful – He will guard us, keep us safe and will protect us from stumbling along the way. Sounds like a strong dose of bright, redeeming LIGHT to me – just what everyone needs, but especially those of us in crisis or a difficult situation!

Here’s the point -

Being in tune with God’s truth and wisdom is like walking down a dark road carrying a bright lantern to light your way. You may not be able to see very far ahead, but as long as you carry that light with you, your path will continue to be visible. You won’t stumble or fall, because you’re surrounded by a circle of light. When you happen upon a pothole, cliff or dropoff area (all problem situations), you’ll see them before stepping, because your path is illuminated or lit up.

God’s Promise – Peace & Safety

In the above verses, we read God’s promise. He uses words like “you will sleep soundly”, “you need not be afraid”, “the Lord is your security” . . . These are things that we all could use, whether in crisis or not. Wow, what a comfort to know that as we trust in God and His truth and protection, while clinging to His wisdom, that He’ll protect us and even keep us from falling into a trap.

In today’s difficult and troubling times, we would all do well to meditate and seek to be grounded in God’s eternal truth and wisdom, knowing that He will guide us, protect us and give us peace and security for the future. Could anything top that?

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I’m sure you’ve had occasion to meet someone (probably on a regular basis) who always seems to operate in the negative. They either spend the majority of their time talking about what they won’t or can’t do, or what they don’t or can’t have because of this or that. There are always excuses, always reasons and most of time these reasons and excuses are due to the blame game or their own negative thinking. To them, life is difficult, trying, a burden and most of all – unfair.

Now don’t get me wrong. I’m not saying that these “negative thinking” people have no reason to complain or be negative and pessimistic. In fact, you will probably find that negative thinking people truly do have more to be negative and complain about than those who have an inspired, positive, optimistic attitude. This leads me a bit to the “chicken and egg” approach about the situation. Which came first?

Does Negative Thinking Cause Crisis or Does Crisis Cause Negative Thinking?

It’s a good question, don’t you think? How many negative thinkers out there create their crisis world by their negative thinking or pessimism? Well, I wish I could tell you the answer for certain by quoting statistics, but I can’t. But, what I can tell you is that I suspect negative thinking and crisis are pretty well “bound at the hip” so to speak. Wherever you find crisis, it’s likely that you’ll also find negative thinking or at worst, a pessimist. Or will you?

Show me one negative thinking pessimist who’s not in crisis of some sort! I dare you. Find me one.

I, however, can find you a person in crisis who’s not a negative thinking pessimist. The difference though, is that this person is much more difficult to find.

Why is that?

It all boils down to a little thing called PERSPECTIVE.

My question for you today, (person in crisis), WHAT IS YOUR PERSPECTIVE?

Remember, many times our thinking dictates our reality. No matter what your situation or crisis, don’t let negative thinking rule. Take the high road.

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