Positive Stress-Practices ensures relief for Sobriety and Serenity.

Stress-Practices are Self-Help for Addictions Recovery.

Stress-Practices are your Personal Tools.

Stress-Practices have two faces, a Janus outlook. Seeing in two directions at once.

Janus was a two-faced Greek god who looked to the future and the past, at the same time. Often, our Addictions Recovery must look both ways also.

1. Stress-Practices are the activities we do to produce or counteract our own stress levels. For example, our own Artificial Stress.

Artificial Stress is stress which does not arise naturally, but is put and held in place by our ignorance, fear, and illusions.

Most of us have built-up quite a set of automatic responses including responses to stress. Our negative stress-practices.

2. Our Practices’ positive side is that it can mean our activities to reduce the negative effects of stress on ourselves and our personal addictions recovery program. Stress-Practices can be let go. Learn to Let-Go-Let-God.

Lets look at both views.

These individuals use stress-hardy practices that shows:

A. They believe what they are doing is important.

B. They believe they have some degree of control and power over the outcome of their lives and whatever situation in which they find themselves.

C. They, also, see inevitable life changes as real opportunities rather than just their fate.

Personal practices include our body’s reaction to startle as a sense of threat or an actual threat. The threat doesn’t have to be a very big thing, just late for our appointment, movie, or date. An argument with a cohort or family.

Our personal practices release body chemicals which set-off every cell in our body.

Our total self can become involved. And some of us are constantly under stress.

The toll on our body and mind can be enormous. Our Addictions Recovery could be in jeopardy. But, our personal practices can be altered. We can change them to be less personally destructive.

Here are some positive stress-practices you can put to use toward abstinence, sobriety, and attaining some degree of serenity.

1. Visualize. When we visualize positive, pleasant, pleasing, beautiful things in our lives, our brain/minds let go soothing chemicals that counteract stress.

We can produce this physical reaction actually at will, if we are willing to learn how. Practice can really work. Relaxation techniques, for example.

2. Breathing. Several deep breaths can get you on the way to de-stressing your body. Not easy really.

Your body acts against you. Stress causes breath to become quick and shallow. Stop. Consciously breathe deep. Count to ten.

By practice and attention to your breathing you can turn off the stress-practices your body initiated. And return to a state of inner calm. Remember the Janus faces two directions.

When you breathe deep, as you take in the breath imagine your belly as a balloon slowly filling with air. Purse your lips, as you let the air out. Keep your belly relaxed as the air escapes.

3. Positive Thoughts. Your personal practices are your way to deal with threats. De-stress by thinking of positive personal good stuff. That is what is good stuff to you.

Yes, it can sound kinda simplistic. However, life is really that way. We hold in our consciousness only one thought, one idea at a time. Just don’t have any room there for negative practices.

4. Reform your Stress-Practices. Slow down. A friend said to himself in the midst of a stress storm: “Why such a hurry little man?” He stopped and changed his life.

Are you multi-tasking yourself to an early grave? Relax your body and refresh your mind. Anxiety only makes it worse. Tomorrow will come anyway.

5. Get a new Brain Recording. Change the self-talk tape running in your mental cassette. It is old stuff. Go digital with one that has positive, supportive things to say.

Take a closer look at our meditations and affirmations screens for positive supportive ideas and the words which go with them.

Raise your self esteem.

Saying such words as, I can, I deserve, I will, I am. Can be good self talk.

6. LET GO. Let go can be the best self-help there is. Let go negative stress-practices. Simply let them go.

Change what you can.Let go what you can’t change. You can learn to tell the difference.

That is what awareness is. Make a conscious, sober decision to let go things you can’t make different or better.

7. Stress-Practices Review.

Stress-Practices Review means identifying your stressors, whether from alcoholism, drug addiction, or other substance abuse or addictive behavior, and how these addictions affect your life.

You can learn ways to increase your tolerance to stress or ways to alter, avoid, or accept stressful situations. You may reduce stress symptoms or avoid them all together.

No two people experience stress the same. One’s pleasure may well be another’s pain. Two people, two different stories of stress. Consider a Serenity Life Practice. Reduce Your Stress.

Do Everyday things get your goat? Put THEM out to pasture.

This is at the heart of Addictions Recovery.

The resultant stress from our Stress-Practices can also flavor our lives, it is like the tension of the violin string, too little and the music is dull, raspy; too much, too tight, and the notes are shrill or the strings pop.

Success can be the Kiss Of Death stress or the Spice of life. The real issue is how to manage it.

See our Stress-Management screen and also those on Stress-Relief and Stress-Reduction on the links below. Bookmark or print for ease of use.