Do you ever feel like you're just doing too much? Like everyone else has a monopoly on your time? Or at the very least, a monopoly on the space in your brain? Do you ever feel like the old saying, "A chicken with your head chopped off?"

Recently a homeless angel came into my life to teach me so many things. My husband and I met a woman in the park and some of us in our neighborhood have taken her under our wing to get her back on her feet. While it's been rewarding, It's not as if there was nothing else going on with me: husband, home, 6 fur babies in the house, business expansion, clients, community participation.

We're all busy and most of those responsibilities bring us joy (I hope they do for you, they do for me) however, even joyful things, when they're too plentiful, can be stressful. You don't want to get resentful or angry, that takes the joy away. So how do you cope with the stress of success and a full life? How do you manage all the good?

You talk about it.
You turn inward to see how you are REALLY feeling.
You set better boundaries around your precious resource of time.
You reconfirm that YOU are important and deserve time all to yourself.
You temporarily escape in a healthy way (getting a massage, mindless tv watching, soaking in a tub—all healthy - drugs, alcohol over consumption, overeating, over anything—all unhealthy).
You continue your grounding and success practices. (It’s been proven that meditation and aerobic exercise, known as MAP (mental and physical) training, boosts moods and reduces negative thinking.)
You eat healthy.
You ride the wave of life.

Any time you push beyond the limitations of your past toward a more successful future, you will have stress. Any time your life changes in significant ways, especially good ways, you will have stress, perhaps even more, because part of the stress will be denying you have stress over happiness! At this point you have two choices; to regress and move away from the new way of being in life, or to move forward in a new way.

Most of us work towards a new way so don’t stop moving forward when your angel comes to push you past your current limits. Sit with the discomfort, contemplate it, practice taking care of yourself, and search for relief. I turn to more prayer these days because I realized I was trying to control and manage, my old way of feeling safe in a chaotic world, and this new way of busyness doesn't have to be like the old chaos. Spirituality is an area of my life that continues to evolve so I found this prayer in a Recovery Devotional Bible and repeated it over and over and over and over and ….

God (remembering that God can be an acronym for Good Orderly Direction)
release my grip,
calm my fears and worries,
help me learn to let go and trust.

Just don’t leave before your miracle of change happens. Continue to move forward. You will have stressless success!

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Soothing the Stress of Success