To honor National Stress Awareness Month for April 2009 I wanted to offer you one of the most helpful tips for managing stress that I have come across in all of my years of experience in helping people relax…Get a Stress Relief Buddy! Services at the Pittsburgh Center for Complementary Health and Healing such as; Massage Therapy, Reiki, Cellular Expansion and Healing, Counseling and Yoga can greatly help you reduce stress and live a more balanced, peaceful life. However, what you do daily to manage stress is a key factor in your being able to integrate the relaxation that you experience at our wellness spa into your life. And…you don’t have to do it alone. How many times have you been sitting around thinking or even talking with your friends or family members about the fact that you are overwhelmed in life and need to relax? With all of the commitments and extra duties that we all take on in our daily life it is no wonder that often stress and anxiety creep into our lives to distract us from joy. To this dilemma I encourage you to recruit a Stress Relief Buddy. We all have heard about having an exercise/weight loss buddy, someone to encourage you and help you to be accountable to diet and exercise. Having that support system in place has been proven to increases your chances of successful weight loss. So why not adapt that same concept to successful stress reduction. Your Stress Relief Buddy is someone to be a sounding board, someone who is committed to helping you stay stress free in a busy life. Just having someone to sit back and remind you, “No worries, remember we are committed to not sweat the small stuff.”, can be all it takes for you to stop worrying and remember that by staying in the moment, taking a deep breath and CHOOSING to relax can sometimes be all it takes. Another way that your Stress Relief Buddy can help you is by bringing your awareness to negativity that you are putting out into the world. And while, yes, we would all like to believe that we are “glass half full” individuals 100% of the time, it is not always the case when stress creeps into our lives. For example, have you ever been in a rut were you catch yourself saying things like; “It’s going to be a hard day.” or “This project I have is so difficult.” or “I am going to be so exhausted at the end of the week.” If you answered yes, great, this means you are already more aware of how your words may affect your reality, and this awareness is the first step to changing what you are putting out into the world. If you answered no, chances are having a friend or loved one who can reflect what you are saying back to you when their hear the words come out of your mouth will be extremely helpful. Lili and myself tried this recently and I was shocked at how often these negative beliefs were coming out of our mouths. We instantly would correct one another to say things such as, “Today is going to be easy.” Just this small reminder was enough to get us out of our heads and stop what we were doing to realize that we could CHOOSE a different belief. And…we both would see that once we changed our belief about a situation, things DID become easy. It took about 2 days of being a sounding board for the other to recognize when we were saying negative thoughts, but after that we both became much more aware of how we would talk about situations. I will say that having Lili as my Stress Relief Buddy was instrumental in relieving stress for that period of time, and all it took was a small amount of awareness to bring things into perspective. Thanks Lili!