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Learning to reduce stress may be the best investment you can make in your health and well-being. Stress affects everything from our physical and emotional health, to our relationships with co-workers and those we love. We need to find ways to reduce stress before hurts us, and those around us. So, what are the best ways to reduce stress?

Well, the very best way to reduce stress - the fastest, most foolproof, and most natural - has nothing to do with long walks, soothing music, or bubble-baths. These are all pleasant activities, and will ease some of your stress away, but there is a far better way of reducing stress that is much more effective, and you don't need to change your environment, or take time, off, or do anything differently than what you're currently doing. You can use this method in the middle of your busiest day, and it will work instantly, every time, and without fail.

To use it, you must first understand where stress really comes from.

Stress doesn't come from your environment. Not your job, your boss, your spouse, your kids, or the worst traffic jam since the invention of the wheel. Stress doesn't come from outside you at all. It comes from within. Stress is a creation of your thoughts.

Stress comes, not from the things that happen to or around us, but rather from how we think about those things. If we feel stress because we're in a traffic jam, for example, it's not the fact that we're sitting in a largely immobile car that stresses us - in and of itself that's a fairly benign experience - but our own thinking that tells us we have a terrible problem, we'll be late for our appointment, why didn't we leave earlier and so on. Our own internal dialog, our own thinking, is what creates the stress for us, not the fact that we're stuck in traffic.

If we change our thoughts, if we refuse to allow our inner voice to wreak havoc with our peace of mind, we are instantly liberated from our stressful experience. Instead of worrying that we are stuck in traffic, we can refuse to acknowledge those thoughts, and instead focus our attention on a song on the radio, the view outside our car, or simply on the good fortune that we experience in our life generally. It really doesn't matter, so long as we refuse to give our thoughts free reign to worry us about being stuck in traffic.

And this method will work regardless of the reason for our stress. If our boss yells at us we needn't berate ourselves for our failure as an employee, or dwell on how unfairly we've been treated; we can let these negative thoughts go, and fix our attention on the many positive things in our life. We have the absolute freedom to do this: we create our thoughts, and we are their master, not the other way around.

We should see the first signs of stress as indicating that our thinking has gone awry, that we're thinking negatively about outside events and creating stress for ourselves as a result. We should then change our thinking, and experience peace and harmony instead, despite what may be going on around us.

If you try this method of examining your thoughts when you begin to feel stress, and letting go of the negative ones that are causing you to feel this way, you'll find that you are able to reduce the stress you experience in your life quickly, almost effortlessly, and without fail. The very best way to reduce stress is to use it as a warning sign that your thinking needs to change. Change your thinking, and the stress you've been creating for yourself will evaporate along with the negative thoughts that brought it into being.

Learn more about this author, David Riel.
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