A Stress Free You
Your Online Gateway for Stress Relieving Information

“Expect the best! It lies not in the past.
God ever keeps the good wine for last.
Beyond the nobler work and sweeter rest,
Expect the best!” – William P. Merrill

An old story is told of a king in Africa who had a close friend with whom he grew up. The friend had a habit of looking at every situation that ever occurred in his life (positive or negative) and remarking, “This is good!”

One day the king and his friend were out on a hunting expedition. The friend would load and prepare the guns for the king. The friend had apparently done something wrong in preparing one of the guns, for after taking the gun from his friend, the king fired it and his thumb was blown off. Examining the situation the friend remarked as usual, “This is good!” To which the king replied, “No, this is NOT good!” and proceeded to send his friend to jail. Read the rest of this article…

“To live is the rarest thing in the world – most people exist – that is all.” – Oscar Wilde

A farmer had an old mule that he had named Slim that had helped him faithfully for many years. One morning the farmer woke up thinking about old Slim and decided that he would put him out to pasture to enjoy the rest of his life. So the farmer put on his clothes, went out to the barn and looked at old Slim and said, “You’ve been a good mule and I’m going to put you out to pasture. From this day on all you have to do is eat and sleep.” The farmer removed the mule’s halter, opened the gate and slapped the mule on the backside and told him, “Okay Slim, get out of here.”

For the next few days the farmer would see the mule wandering the pasture from time to time, but a week or so later he didn’t see the mule anywhere. He searched his farm from end to end but still couldn’t find Slim. There was an old, abandoned well in the far corner of his farm so he decided to search for Slim there. Read the rest of this article…

“Half our life is spent trying to find something to do with the time we have rushed through life trying to save.” – Will Rogers

The following was allegedly taken from a Florida newspaper:

A man was working on his motorcycle on his patio and his wife was in the house in the kitchen.  The man was racing the engine on the motorcycle and somehow, the motorcycle slipped into gear.  The man, still holding the handlebars, was dragged through a glass patio door and the motorcycle dumped onto the floor inside the house.

The wife, hearing the crash, ran into the dining room, and found her husband laying on the floor, cut and bleeding, the motorcycle laying next to him and the patio door shattered.  The wife ran to the phone and summoned an ambulance.  Because they lived on a fairly large hill, the wife went down the several flights of long steps to the street to direct the paramedics to her husband. Read the rest of this article…

“An inch of gold will not buy an inch of time.” – Chinese Adage

There’s a story I heard quite a few years ago about a man that got a new, very demanding job. As a result he would bring his work home every night. He would sit down to dinner, shovel his food into his mouth and then rush off to his study to complete the work he had brought home with him.

After a month or so of watching her daddy retreat to his study every evening, his young daughter asked her mother, “Why doesn’t daddy ever play with me anymore, doesn’t he still love me?”

Her mother placed her young daughter’s hand in her own and smiled. Then she said, “It’s not that. Your daddy loves you very much. It’s because this new job of his really takes a lot of work. He’s got so much work that he has to bring it home to finish it at night.” Read the rest of this article…

This weekend is Superbowl XLIV. I’m sure that many of you are disappointed that your favorite team isn’t one of the teams competing in one of the most watched events of the year. I have to admit that I am a little disappointed that the Chargers aren’t competing. But that’s a completely different story.

I love sports stories and since the Superbowl is upon us I’d like to share one of my favorite football stories. It’s about the Green Bay Packers Coach, Vince Lombardi and a very famous lineman that played for him. It illustrates how helping others succeed can help us in ways that we don’t even expect.

During a practice session that wasn’t going very well Coach Lombardi singled out a guard and belittled him for his failure to “put out”. It was a typical hot, humid late summer day when Coach Lombardi called the big guard over and opened up on him with both barrels of his vocal guns. Read the rest of this article…

“The state of your life is nothing more than a reflection of your state of mind.” - Dr. Wayne W. Dyer

Have you watched the movie “Yes Man”? If you haven’t I highly recommend it. It’s about a guy named Carl, (Jim Carey) who is stuck in a really bad place in life. In fact he’s so badly stuck that he almost drives away all his friends. After having an epiphany, Karl decides to attend a seminar that is built around saying “Yes” to everything. The first thing he says yes to is a homeless man that wants a ride to a city park on the other side of town. After allowing him to make phone calls on his cell phone and running down his battery he ends up out of gas and without a way to contact anybody in the middle of a far away park. He walks to the gas station and then his new life begins.

Now I don’t want to spoil the movie for you, and although it’s not for everyone, I do recommend that you watch it. It goes through Karl’s transformation by saying yes to life’s opportunities. By saying yes his whole attitude toward life changes, which in turn changes his life. Read the rest of this article…

“Do not fear the winds of adversity. Remember: A kite rises against the wind rather than with it.” – Unknown

A man found a cocoon of a butterfly. One day a small opening appeared; he sat and watched the butterfly for several hours as it struggled to force its body through that little hole. Then it seemed to stop making any progress. It appeared as if it had gotten as far as it could and it could go no farther.

The man decided to help the butterfly, so he took a pair of scissors and snipped off the remaining bit of the cocoon. The butterfly then emerged easily. But it had a swollen body and small, shriveled wings.

As the man continued to watch he expected that the butterfly’s wings would enlarge at any moment and expand to be able to support the body, which would contract in time. Read the rest of this article…

“Our minds are as different as our faces. We are all traveling to one destination – happiness – but few are going by the same road.” – Charles C Colton

In the March 1997 edition of Bits & Pieces there is story about Economics Press Novelist Sinclair Lewis who was supposed to deliver an hour-long lecture to a group of college students who planned to be writers.

Lewis opened his talk with a question:

“How many of you really intend to be writers?”

All hands went up.

“In that case,” said Lewis, “my advice to you is to go home and write.”

With that, he left.

Are you living life to the fullest? Are you living life with a purpose or are you still looking for ideas on what your life’s purpose is? Read the rest of this article…

“We are what we do repeatedly do. Excellence, then, is not an act but a habit.” – Will Durant

A while ago I read about a New York social psychologist who was studying rat behavior. He was trying to discover a way to more accurately determine social behavior. He took a rat, put it on one end of a maze and put cheese at the other end. Fairly quickly the rat found the cheese. The psychologist then changed the maze; put the rat and the cheese back in and to no one’s amazement the rat found the cheese.

Then the psychologist changed the game. He put the rat back in but didn’t replace the cheese. Being conditioned to find the cheese, the rat went looking for it and looked disappointed when he didn’t find it. The psychologist repeated putting the rat in the maze with no cheese a few more times and within a short while the rat would no longer look for the cheese.

With this information the psychologist made this observation. The difference between rats and man is that rats, when given different information, will give up. They take what happens to them and use it to give themselves a way to evaluate what they want to do in the future. Read the rest of this article…

“It is not enough to be busy, so are the ants. The question is: what are we busy about?” -Henry David Thoreau

A couple of decades ago, a movie titled “Short Time” played in the movie theaters. It wasn’t a big box office hit, but it was amusing and it did make a point about living life to the fullest.

The movie was about a 50 year-old detective who was about to retire from the New York police force in eight days. Like most detectives, he worked all the time and definitely wasn’t living his life to the fullest. As a result of his dedication to his work he’s divorced and his ten year-old son, who he really wants to be a part of his life, lives with his ex-wife. He wants to retire to have more time to spend with his son. As you can probably imagine, this man doesn’t have the most positive mental attitude and, with eight days left on the force, he just wants to finish his time and play it safe. Read the rest of this article…