by Jenna Pope

Created on: June 10, 2010   Last Updated: June 11, 2010

There are some times when emotional balance is the furthest thing from reality.  The car runs over a nail that punctures one your brand new Michelin tires.  You are late to work.  The children come down with Chicken Pox.  You have to pull a babysitter out of a hat to watch them for the next two weeks while you are working.  You receive notice that your apartment complex is becoming a condo conversion.  You find a fly in your salad, etcetera.

You can’t control any of these scenarios, and you didn’t cause them by anything that you did.  How do you cope and feel emotionally balanced?

Get enough sleep

Contrary to what your schedule may tell you, sleep is necessary to life.  You need sleep to regenerate cells and process what you have learned throughout the day.  Without an eight-hour night’s sleep, you will not be able to cope as well, and you certainly will not feel emotionally balanced. 

These days, busy people in the productive years of life, working and raising a family, generally get less than eight hours of sleep a night.  You need sleep so that you can dream.  Dreaming is what enables your brain to process learning and emotional stress.  Without enough REM cycles, you won’t retain as much of what you’ve learned.  You’ll feel ragged and stressed out and will decompensate mentally and physically.  Dreaming is as necessary as food, air, and water.

Drink less coffee

We are living in the latte generation, loading up on caffeine to compensate for our lack of sleep.  The caffeine gives us the buzz we need to carry on with our day.  But it doesn’t provide us with peace of mind or good judgment or the ability to think clearly.  Being amped up is no substitute for sleep.

Aerobic exercise

Aerobic exercise is a natural stress buster.  Our brains secrete certain hormones and chemicals that lubricate the myelin shafts in the brain to make message transmission smoother and more consistent.  We release dopamine, a brain chemical that provides us with a feeling of wellbeing.  After a stressful day in the dog-eat-dog world of work, hit the treadmill, instead of the couch.  You will feel better after you are done exercising.

Decrease stress

Life moves so fast these days that we are going and going until we finally drop into bed at night.  But we possess the power to change this.  Try sitting down to dinner as

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