Stress Beaters.

1
important tasks. It may also prevent promotion, and make you feel unwanted and at a dead end in your job. Remember, you may be seen as the weak part in a large team simply because you have regularly failed to keep your word.
^        To yourself.You may not think that breaking promises matters where other people are concerned, but breaking one to yourself does. Diets, exercise, New Year's resolutions or any broken vow - we all fail from time to time, but if we repeatedly excuse ourselves until 'the next time', we are learning how to fail, and this becomes a habit. Be tough on yourself sometimes, and remember how you feel when other people let you down. Learn to keep your promises to yourself and it becomes easier to keep any you make to others.
I once jeopardized the trust of a patient on two separate occasions by forgetting to visit him when I said I would. The first time was not my fault, the second was, and I had a very frosty reception when we did meet. At such times you must be honest, and admit to having broken your word. Covering up a broken promise with deception simply makes things worse, and the other person will guess what is going on anyway. Think of your word as being your most valuable possession. You would not give gold away - why do it with promises?
Never sell your promises cheaply. Just as keeping a promise encourages trustworthiness and reduces cynicism hi other people, breaking them repeatedly will shatter their belief hi you. Although we all have changing circumstances, don't make a promise you know you cannot keep.

Don't exaggerate
Eeyore should be Prime Minister. His ability to understate whatever life throws at him would give him an enormous amount of protection against stress. Saying'There is an element of damp'while getting half-drowned in the rain is a good example of how to deal with stress - not by thought but by words.
Language is the basis on which we are understood - everything else is secondary. It amazes me how it is tortured, strangled and generally disembowelled when we talk about life's problems. Since I listen every day to people doing that, it quickly becomes obvious how different we all are when trying to describe stress. There are people who need a crisis every day in order to generate excitement in it, while others bear enormous amounts of stress with quiet fortitude.
One of the things that puts doctors on alert is when a patient who does not normally come to see them turns up at the surgery. Because they are not 'regulars' they are listened to with more attention than Mrs Bloggs who turns up three times a day, seven days a week. The Mrs Bloggses of this world are sometimes ill long before doctors believe them, since they have been saying they are unwell for 20 years. In short - they cried wolf once too often.
If everything in your life is a crisis - from burning the toast to finding the right colour shoes to buy - and you tell the world this loud and long every day, who will believe you the day you feel suicidal? The person who says the same thing but restricts dramatizing their words to suitable occasions is believed more readily. Like it or not, this is real life and is how people act.
This point was dramatically brought home to me when I saw a woman who told me - for the first time in 20 years - how she had been brutally raped as a teenager. Her quiet, strong words were more forceful and eloquent than anything she could have said had

134
135