List your achievements
Stress Beaters.
Instrumentals are often easier to listen to than songs with words which you find yourself struggling to remember.

If for any reason you are unable to listen to music, imagine it. When an exhibition of photographs of the great cellist and conductor Pablo Casals was exhibited in America, an elderly gentleman would sit and look at a picture of Casals conducting. After ten minutes he would smile and leave, only to return and repeat the same quiet sitting the next day. After a week, the curator asked him why he liked the photograph so much. Giving him a withering look, the old gentlemen
replied, 'Be quiet, young man. Can't you see I'm listening to the I1
music!
Music can enhance any mood or situation. Tailor your listening to your mood - to soothe or to stimulate you. Even a five-minute break with music can help alleviate tension or lessen your stress levels •through the day.

Alice was a 38-year-old mother of four who wore the harassed look of a woman constantly in demand by her family. Her husband, although kind and supportive, was always at work and she had the task of bringing up the children. She was a good mother; the children were polite and well turned out whenever I saw them.
I was surprised when Alice came to see me asking for a general fitness checkup. She said she was going to start jogging and hoped to run a marathon one day. She sensed my surprise, stiffened and said,'I suppose you're someone else who thinks I cannot do anything either.'This was an unusual outburst and she immediately apologized, but there was no disguising how serious she was. After I had checked her over we sat and discussed why she wanted to do something which, on the face of it, was extremely difficult to fit into her busy life. Her reply was dramatic - 'Because I don't do anything for me any more.' It was the size of the challenge that had made her mind up, since she felt her identity had been consumed by her husband and her family. Their reaction when she told them what she wanted to do simply spurred her on, and it became her main challenge that year.
Alice knew she would finish well down the field in any race she entered, possibly last. That was not the point. She wanted to do something no one could take away from her. It was something for her, not for her husband or family. This was not selfishness; rather, it was a personal achievement that gave her back some self-esteem and pride that was hers alone. She organized friends to look after her children for an hour each evening while she trained, and I watched her progress.We had an agreement that whenever her resolve flagged she would see me and I would encourage her to keep going, but she never needed to. She ran her marathon just over a year after first

188
189