Before I get started, let me tell you my brief background of the stress over the course of my life.  I was the only child in a broken home and was raised by an alcoholic mother that left me on my own when I was 15.   After that I was in the ARMY, a Deputy Sheriff, Counselor for teens with addictions and behavior problems,  Car sales consultant, unemployed,  Divorced and re-married, and the most pleasurable stress of being a father to six great kids and a husband to the most amazing wife ever.   In the last 37 years I have had to deal with anything from life and death decisions to what do I wear to dinner tonight!  Im not a doctor and i don’t have a degree in social services.  I am just offering helpful ideas that have helped me and my family get through rough times as we manage life’s challenges. I always say that you can make a tool box of helpful life tools and the more you have , the easier it is to find the one that fits what needs worked on!   So with that said lets start and remember that all the advice wont work for everyone.

   Lets start with one thing that I feel helps me out alot with stress that builds up.  It may sound to simple but it has worked for me and others that I know.  “WRITE IT DOWN”  See, told you it sounded simple! Most people wont go to the harware store with out a list of things they need to complete a job, so why not make a list of things needed work on stress?  What I do is take a moment and sit down with a piece of paper or a keyboard and start with what is on my mind the most. Example, if the monthly bills are bugging me the most at that time, then I write down “the bills” and leave space below it.  Then I move on to the next thing in my head like “house cleaning” or “work”  and keep jotting down the things that are bottled in me.  You don’t have to organize them or give them any priority, just put whats in your head on paper so you can see it.  Now that they are all in black and white I can focus on each one separately by going back to the top and looking at what I put down.  Now i think about that topic only for a few minutes then start putting dow ideas that will help resolve the problem or at least make it more managable.  Example, if the monthly bills are a stress then i may write down to work on a budget or even just tart working on the budget right then.  I may even ask my wife t help me if I cant get it or have a good idea.  having someone else look at the list you made can help some times for more than one reason.  There are times we need fresh ideas that we just cant come up with our self.  Other times it ma just help a wife or a freind understand what we are faced with and they can understand our behavior better even if they dont have an solutions for the problems.  But I find that once I have some of my stressful problems on paper in front of me that I can think more clear on ways to handle them.  I also have something to refer back to if I get distracted during this time.  Distracted? Six kids?  I cant imagine a distraction happening!  I have also learned while doing this that I can reflect on how I have reacted to other problems based on what I was stressing over.  Other times I have found that one was over shadowing another and causing something simple to become larger than what it ever needed to be.  Now, I know that you cant fix everything by simply writting it down, but you may be able to manage stressful problems better when you can work on them one at a time instead of all at once.  Try it, it may just work for you.  Maybe even try it together with some one that you trust because there are times that two minds are better than one and others can see things in a different light than we can.