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Best Strategies to Relieve Stress - Positive Thinking and Contentment

By Tess Thompson

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You may use all types of relaxation techniques and stress relief products for temporary stress relief, but inner calm can be attained only when you convince yourself that life must move on regardless.

Positive Thinking

Life takes unexpected turns, and there is no way that anyone can predict what will happen next. When grief and pain arrive, they can bring along traumatic experiences that can last for months. It is sometimes not the experience itself, but rather the perception of it that causes emotional stress.

Evaluate events with an open mind, without any bias towards yourself or others. Faulty perceptions create cobwebs around cognitive abilities. The resultant stress further hampers our ability to see the positive side of events. It is only with objective evaluation of a situation that we can turn our minds to look at things in a positive light.

Try to think positive and see how easily you are able to unearth the positive aspects of events. Managing stress is about mental peace, which is attainable if you shed the negativity that surrounds you. Positivism is a state of mind characterized by certainty or acceptance. Using affirmation to attain a positive frame of mind is another technique that you can use.

Contentment

Contentment is necessary for attaining a positive state of mind. If we put it simply, happiness is satisfaction of mind. By reverse-inference stress is a feeling of being displeased and discontent. The normal tendency is to measure happiness in terms of money and the luxuries that it brings along. Contentment comes from understanding that life situations cannot possibly be always favorable to you. For instance, wealth may not always come to the most deserving, and there is always an element of chance (some people call it luck, fate or destiny). In our pursuit of wealth, we undermine inner instincts and virtues and do not realize when the craving for material possessions leads to greed and consequently to corruption. There is an old saying that "a man’s riches consist not in the extent of his possessions but in the fewness of his wants".

If you ever falter in your efforts to relieve stress caused due to the non-fulfillment of your desires, remember what George Bernard Shaw once said: "Man has to face two tragedies in life: one when his desire is fulfilled and the other when it is not."

Relaxation techniques can help in providing relief from emotional stress, but only to an extent. Relaxation techniques are actually meant for preparing the body to relax, since physical tension does not let you receive new ideas. However, relaxing the mind and accepting the situation, thinking positively, and taking positive action towards the next steps can help you move ahead.