Recently there has been growing evidence linking a whole host of mental and physical ailments to the effects of stress and anxiety – everything from depress and memory loss to weight gain, heart attacks and even cancer.  Outside of smoking and diet, there is no other single factor impacting our overall health and wellness.  Clearly learning how to manage stress is critical to our own life.

We will never be able to eliminate stress or it's impact on our life, but we certainly can do a better job than just coping with stress.  Here are 5 stress management tips from the highly respected "Attracting Greatness" that will help you improve your mental and physical shape by boosting our ability to manage stress.
1. Staying present.  It sounds simple, but one of the best ways to deal with stress is to stay in the moment rather than lamenting or thinking about either the past or what may happen in the future. A good deal of chronic stress comes from us dumping more stress and anxiety on ourselves.  By using more objectivity and staying in the moment we can keep from blowing situations out of proportion and deal with the stress of the moment rather than carry it with us.

2. Meditation.  We mentioned being objective about situations in our life so that we don't add stress to our lives, meditation is one way to make that possible.  By taking 20-30 minutes twice each day and meditating you accomplish a number of things including: breaking the cycle of chronic stress, training your body and mind as to what true relaxation really feels like and gives us an "in the moment" perspective that helps us manage stress.

3. Stress "Power" Thinking.  What I mean by this is that when you are under stress, give yourself 2-minutes and completely stress out over that situation.  Bring it on full-tilt giving yourself permission to let the stress come with the understnding that after that 2-minutes you no longer think about it.  After the 2-minutes use visualizations such a stream carrying your stress away to help relieve stress.

4. Diet. Your ability to deal with stress depends heavily on how taxed or toxic your system is.  When your body is riddled with sugar spikes, toxic with poisons that stress your liver, kidneys and pancrease, full of yeast or infected with parasites – no wonder we are unable to fight stress when we are struggling just to maintain our basic health. 

We talk about this in detail inside "Attracting Greatness" - the need to diagnose and cleanse our systems is critical to getting more out of life.

5. Sleep.  I put sleep as #5 for a reason.  Lack of sleep is a major factor in our ability to deal with the effect of stress, but the factors listed in #1-4 heavily impact sleep.  It's no good to tell someone to sleep better when they are riddled with stress, are in a state of chemically altered depression, are eating or drinking poorly impacting sleep or dealing with health conditions such as digestive or back problems that prevent them from getting a solid 7-hours each night.  Once you begin working on #1-4, then it's great to discipline your sleeping habits to relieve your stress anxiety.

The effects of stress are massive, your health, happiness and ability to attract positive people and wealth into your life depends heavily on taking action on these 5 steps.  It's time to manage stress and make living life much simpler and rewarding than it is right now.

Stress and work, worry about your finances, relationships that have gone bad, not living up to your own expectations, the constant bombardment of bad news…the sources of stress anxiety in our lives have never been greater. If we are to keep from being completely paralyzed, we must act now and learn how to manage stress more effectively. 

What's most concerning is the damage that sress can do to your mind and body:

• - Increased risk of heart disease
  – Makes you less likely to eat healthy
  – Stress results in chemical changes in your digestive system
  – Reduces your self-confidence and self-esteem
  – Makes you tired, negative and unable to stay positive
  – Is directly related to unhealthy weight gain
  – Impacts your ability to maintain good relationships

The body of research is still growing each month showing more damage to our lives from stress anxiety. 

In this personal development tips book there are 5 pillars upon which we can have an immediate, positive impact on our life achievement and health – our ability to manage stress is key. 

3 Ways To Manage Stress Now

It's worth stating again, not all stress is bad and ANY stress can be managed – so when you hear someone say that you need to fight stress, what we are really talking about is an ability to recognize how certain situations in our lives impact us and lessen the negative impact erasing the very damaging impact that stress and axiety can have on our lives. 

Follow these 3 stress tips and you will be able to take back control in your life.

1. Use meditation and yoga to accomplish to deal with stress.  Meditation will empower you in two very important ways.  First, you will get a better sense for how stress is impacting your mind and body and you will begin to get a feeling for what a stress-free state of mind actually is.  When you succeed with meditation, you are able to co-exist with all that used to cause you stress without feeling the impact on your mind and body.  In other words, you experience a complete state of bliss or peacefullness from which to analyze the rest of your conscious life.

2. Positive affirmations and guided imagery will help you put your state of mind in a new place…a place where you do have control, where you have already achieved the grand accomplishment of complete stress relief.  Use these positive affirmation techniques to make the most effective use of affirmations and visualization.

3. Leverage the mental and physical power of exercise.  Don't think that you immediately have to become obsessed with exercise, what we are talking about here is moderate exercise but on a consistent basis.  That may mean walking for 45-minutes each day, heading to the gym 3-times a week for 50-minutes, or mixing it up with a swim, jog and exercise class each once a week.  The bottom line is that getting your body moving, your heart pumping, your lungs charged with air are all incredibly powerful methods used to manage stress. 

If you live in a chronic stress state that prevents you from having energy, fun and achievement in your life, then you can bet that the impact on your body and mind is far worse than you may think.  Use these 3 powerful techniques to manage stress over the next 2-3 weeks and you will begin to notice how much anxiety you were really under.