I liked this quick list of ways to reduce stress from BYU Magazine
FIVE WAYS TO STRESS LESS
By Riley M. Lorimer (’08)
Stress is one thing that nearly everyone has in common. We worry about our jobs, our families, our schooling, and myriad other concerns every day. While no one has the magical cure for stress, Michael L. Maughan, Coordinator of BYU’s Stress Management and Biofeedback Lab offers a few tips to keep your stress under control:
1. Exercise. Just moving your body on a regular basis, whether it’s walking or some other form of more structured exercise, will go a long way to relieving stress.
2. Eat nutritious food. It may sound simple, but your body needs energy to confront the challenges of everyday life, and a well-balanced diet will help provide that energy and lower your stress level.
3. Get adequate sleep. When you don’t get enough sleep, your tolerance for everyday stressors decreases. Little things that wouldn’t normally bother you start to wear on your nerves.
4. Hope for, rather than expect, things to happen a certain way. When you set up expectations for people and situations, you set yourself up to be disappointed, which causes a great deal of stress. So instead of expecting things to go your way, hope that they will and be prepared to deal with the reality that they might not.
5. Do something permanent each day. Going through the motions of life can be stressful, because you can begin to feel like you do things one day (wash dishes, clean, complete tasks at work) only to wake up and do them again the next day. To combat this, do at least one thing every day that will last. Write in your journal, teach a child a skill, give service, read something new and share it with someone, make something that can be used and enjoyed, or create a work of art. You will gain a sense of satisfaction from doing something that will last beyond tomorrow.