So many people need stress relief.

Because isn’t it easy for you to let one little negative thing stress you out and ruin your day? If you think about it, I bet you’ve let this happen to you just this week.

Maybe there was traffic or an accident on the highway that made you late to the office (and what’s worse is you couldn’t get your favorite Starbucks drink before work). So now you’re stressed the rest of the day.

Maybe your favorite football team is on a three game losing streak. And you’re depressed that they won’t make the playoffs if the bad quarterback play continues.

Maybe the stock market is down for the year, and you’re stressing if you’re ever going to get your money back.

Or maybe you’re worried that if the Republican or Democratic party’s nominee becomes president, it will be the end of the United States.

That’s a lot of stressing and worrying. Lots of people worry about all of these things plus all of the problems in their personal life. Life is messy.

But did you notice a common factor among all of those situations I listed above? I did and it’s this: All of that stress comes from situations outside of your control.

Your Problem Really Is Control

Your stress level correlates directly with how in control you feel. So the more you feel out of control, the more stress that piles on.

That’s why when you can’t control something and it’s not going your way, it will stress you out to your core. Usually the most stressful aspect is not the situation but the fact that you can’t control it!

That’s what really ticks you off. Because you know you want to more than anything so you can feel ok again.

But here lies the problem with this behavior: Your happiness and future are tipping on the balance of something out of your control.

When you worry about things outside of your control, you give away too much power that you don’t need to.

Why treat yourself that way? It’s cruel and unusual punishment that’s not necessary.

If you’re not trained against it, your happiness will betray you the moment a negative thought enters your brain and causes you to stress. That’s no way to live and it’s not going to make for a prosperous life.

Focus On What You Can Control

So how do you counteract this tendency? When you feel stressed, focus on what you can control in the moment to create an incredible future.

Focus on what you can control is my best stress relief tip.

This works so well because when your mind is distracted with a task at hand, it doesn’t have the capacity to worry or stress. Your brain isn’t designed to focus on two things at once, when it tries it fails.

What does focusing on what you can control look like in real life? It comes in a lot of shapes and sizes.

For you, this may look like:

• Stop focusing on your physical appearance and start focusing on doing hard exercises at least three days a week and eating healthy.
• Stop focusing on your grad school admissions cycle and start focusing on scoring high on your admissions test, improving your GPA, and getting an excellent recommendation letter.
• Stop focusing on getting a promotion and start focusing on giving your all to perform the best at your job.

Or if it helps you to look at my goals for Take Your Success, starting now I’m personally going to:

• Stop focusing on how many email subscribers I have and only focus on treating my readers with the utmost care and respect.
• Stop focusing on how many views a post gets and only focus on creating great content twice a week.
• Stop focusing on my income and only focus on providing the most value to as many people as possible.

By changing your focus to what you can control, you can create more change in your life and start making a difference in getting closer to your dream future.

Focusing on what you can control is the best method to accomplishment and relieving stress.

What about you? What are you going to stop focusing on and what are you going to start focusing on to reach the future of your dreams?

Comment below with your answer to get the process started in a positive direction.