Reducing the amount of stress in your life is helpful in creating a calmer, more peaceful life for yourself. Here is one simple trick to lower your stress.
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One Simple Trick to Lower Your Stress
Ready for the trick? One easy way to Lower your stress is to start finishing your “incompletes.” This idea comes from Jack Canfield in The Success Principles (my favorite book ;)).
Basically an “incomplete” is any project or task that you haven’t completed yet but is probably still taking up mental energy in your mind from having to constantly remember that you still have to finish this thing.
Your incompletes might look like an unfinished work assignment, a coat with a button that fell off that you need to sew back on, the tv series your friend told you about that you promised to watch, a meeting you have later this week, remembering to pick up cat food, a leaky faucet that needs to be repaired, or reading that book that you started but never got around to finishing.
These might sound innocent enough – and very easy to procrastinate on – but the more incompletes you have, the more background stress you’re going to have in your mind at any one time. The best way to deal with this is first to do a brain dump and write down everything you can think of that needs to be done. If you have a to do list, you can include that too.
Then, the best way to get through your list is to just start knocking items off one at a time. You can do a little at a time, or you can even schedule a “Completion Weekend” to finish a bunch of things whenever you have a block of free time.
If you’re going about your day and you remember you have to do something, WRITE IT DOWN. Once it’s out of your mind and onto a list (preferably with a reminder on your phone if it’s for a specific time) you no longer have to spend any mental energy thinking about it. And even better, if the task takes 5 minutes or less, just get it done now so you don’t even have to keep thinking about it.
A lot of people have a huge list of niggling “one day” tasks that they usually don’t get around to, but what if you actually completed all of them? How much less stress would you have if you were finally DONE with some of the things that you’ve been meaning to do for years?
Pick one task, and get it done today. Good luck. 🙂
If you’d like more ways to quiet your mind and lower your stress, check out our Slow it Down class.
