Allen Elkin

Feeling and expressing gratitude goes a long way toward alleviating your stress in daily life. Intuitively you know you should feel and express gratitude, but you may put it into practice less often than you think.You may look at exercise in the same way: You know you should do more of it, but you just don’t. Sometimes you need to be reminded and encouraged.

Some types of jobs trigger more stress than others. What follows is a list of ten jobs or work settings that are judged to be some of the most stressful. These particular jobs were chosen because of the degree of dangers or hazards involved, the demands of the job, the amount of control the person has over what he or she does, the levels of responsibility required, and the number of hours worked.

Believe it or not, your own thinking actively plays a role in creating your stress. At the heart of this distorted thinking are thinking errors, mistakes or distortions in your thinking that can result in excessive stress.See if you fall prey to any of the following thinking errors and find out what you can do to fix them.

A worker in a high-stress job typically faces tough demands but has little control over how the work gets done. Workers in these jobs report significantly more fatigue and exhaustion, trouble getting up in the morning, depression, nervousness, anxiety, and insomnia or disturbed sleep than workers in lower-stress jobs.

Stressed? Imagine that. You'll probably feel better if you can release that stress-producing thought and replace it with a relaxing, calm image. Here's how to put your mind at ease: Find a place where you won't be disturbed for a few minutes and get comfortable, either sitting in a favorite chair or lying down.

This three-pronged model of dealing with stress provides you with a useful tool to help you understand the many ways you can manage and control your stress. You have three major choices. 1. Manage your stressors The events that trigger your stress can range from the trivial to the dramatic. They can be very minor — a hassle such as a broken shoelace, a crowded subway, or the world’s slowest check-out line.

Identifying the symptoms of stress is an important first step to reducing tension in your life. Once you identify the signs of stress, use your imagination and the proven tool of progressive muscle relaxation to put your mind and body at ease.How to measure your stressRecognizing stress symptoms and how often they occur can help you deal with stress.

Having a belief in something greater than your immediate experience can be a powerful force in helping you create inner peace and cope with the stress in your life. We live in a universe that is both mystifying and, at times, overwhelming. We attempt to give meaning and purpose to our all-too-brief lives.Faith in something bigger, something cosmic, can help some people come to grips with the unknown and perhaps unknowable.

Research has shown that people who feel gratitude are happier, report more life satisfaction, and report less stress. Grateful people are less likely to be depressed, anxious, lonely, and neurotic. But it also appears that grateful people don’t live in a world of denial. They don’t ignore the negative parts of their lives.