Stress is just a part of life. It affects your overall well-being. You won’t always have control over your circumstances, but you can control your response to them. It helps to have effective techniques to relieve stress, but unfortunately, there’s no one-size-fits-all method. Besides, what works when you’re at home may not be usable when you’re working or running errands.

So, it helps to know of multiple stress relief techniques that work for you. This will allow you to choose the technique that will work best in whatever your current situation may be.

All-Purpose Stress-Relief

The best stress relief techniques can be practiced anywhere, don’t cost anything, take little practice to master, and bring about immediate relief.

Here are five common techniques that fit those requirements:

1. Visualization

Visualization simply involves imaging yourself in your “happy place.” It’s like a short vacation in your mind. To practice visualization, simply close your eyes and imagine yourself in a peaceful setting. Focus on each sensory experience, and let yourself feel as if you’’re actually there. For example, picture yourself sitting on a beach. Hear the waves, smell the ocean, and feel the warm sand beneath you. After a few minutes, just open your eyes and return to the present.

2. Meditation

There are many different meditation techniques. You may develop a mantra to repeat mentally as you take deep, slow breaths. Or practice mindfulness, which focuses your awareness on the present moment, leaving no room for rumination about past events or for worry over the future.

3. Release Muscle Tension

Recognizing and addressing muscle tightness and tension allows you to relax more easily. Progressive muscle relaxation is the group-by-group relaxation of all of your muscles. To practice, take a few deep breaths. Then, tighten and relax each muscle group, starting with your toes and moving up to your forehead.

4. Just Breathe

Focusing on your breathing calms your brain and your body in just a couple minutes, and nobody else will know you’re doing them. So, breathing exercises can help reduce your stress even if you’re in a stressful meeting or a crowded theater. Here are two simple breathing exercises:

• Inhale through your nose and count slowly to three as you fill your lungs with air. Hold for one second, then count slowly to three again as you breathe out through your nose.
• Breathe in through your nose while imagining you’re inhaling calm, peaceful air. Visualize that air dispersing throughout your body. As you breathe out, imagine that you’re exhaling tension and stress.

5. Go for a Walk

Taking walks will treat you to a change of scenery, getting you into a fresh frame of mind. They also include the benefits of exercise. Whether you take a break from a frustrating task by strolling around the office, or you decide to meander through a park after dinner, walking will reinvigorate your body, mind, and spirit.

At-Home Stress-Relief

These three stress relief techniques will help you relax when you’re in the privacy of your home:

1. Physical Touch

Physical touch, such as snuggling with or hugging a loved one, is an underrated way to reduce stress. Snuggling releases oxytocin, which is nicknamed the “love hormone.” Oxytocin raises happiness levels while lowering stress levels, decreasing blood pressure, and reducing stress hormones.

2. Aromatherapy

Aromatherapy helps you feel energized, more relaxed, and more present in the moment. And certain plant extracts and essential oils affect brain waves and reduce stress hormone levels. Aromatherapy can involve candles, diffusers, and body products.

3. Be Creative

Creating artwork has a meditative effect. Being creative is easy for children, but it’s not too late for adults to start. Try painting or drawing, or color in a coloring book. Anxiety levels decline when people color complex geometric patterns, which makes coloring an excellent stress-reducing activity.

Long-Term Stress-Relief

It’s important to create a lifestyle that will help you face challenges and combat stress in a healthy way.

These six habits promote stress resilience and increase general wellness:

1. Eat Well

An unhealthy diet brings greater susceptibility to stress. Comfort food, high-sugar, and high-fat foods provide temporary stress relief, but only compound long-term stress. Refined carbohydrates, such as sweets and salty snacks, cause blood sugar to spike. When blood sugar levels inevitably crash, many people experience increased anxiety and stress. A healthy diet helps combat stress. Foods like fatty fish, leafy greens, and nuts and seeds help balance energy, reduse tension, and regulate moods.

2. Take Time Off

Leisure activities are a great way to reduce stress. Including downtime in your schedule will help you feel your best. Leisure time will make your work time more productive, because when people feel good, they function more efficiently.

3. Speak Positively to Yourself

Self-talk matters. Self-criticism and self-doubt are never helpful and only serve to stress you out. Talk to yourself in a compassionate, more realistic manner. Instead of calling yourself names or doubting your ability to succeed, engage in a gentler inner dialogue. This will help you develop a more positive outlook and successfully manage your emotions.

4. Practice Yoga

Yoga combines physical movement, meditation, light exercise, and controlled breathing, all of which provide physical, psychological, and spiritual benefits. You’ll definitely reap benefits from doing yoga once. But consistently incorporating yoga into your life will yield long-term benefits. To get started, enroll in a class, explore an online program, or find a yoga app.

5. Be Grateful

Expressing gratitude makes you conscious of everything you have in your life to be thankful for. Ponder all of the good things, even if they seem insignificant: It’s a sunny day. You safely got to work. Make it a habit to express what you’re thankful for. Start a gratitude journal, or discuss gratitude with your family as you sit together at dinner.

6. Exercise

Physical activity improves mental health and helps manage stress. There are many ways to incorporate physical activity into your day—join a gym, take a class, or exercise outside.

Finding your optimal stress relief strategies will take time and practice. But it’s important to have techniques to successfully navigate the unavoidable ups and downs of life.

Negative patterns are habits and behaviors that hold us back from accomplishing all that we want and make it hard for us to develop and have self-realization. Regardless of who we are or what we do, we all possess them as they are part of everyday life. Our success and well-being depend on us releasing these unproductive patterns, it doesn’t matter who we are.  I am going to help you understand why we have bad patterns and how we can use skills to release them.

Negative patterns. Below are a few examples of negative patterns. You may possess some of these:

• Having negative thoughts
• Not paying attention
• Avoiding responsibility
• Blaming and criticizing others
• Agreeing to all assumptions
• Not embracing transformation
• Not valuing yourself
• Complaining
• Overthinking
• Not eating healthy
• Addiction
• Being indecisive
• Lack of self-control
• Withdrawing
• Ineffective communication
• Being disorganized
• Procrastinating

Prepare a list of your negative patterns and be ready to be truthful. You can seek opinions from friends if you want to spot them, but I’d also suggest practicing mindfulness so that you can pay much attention to your thoughts and habits without discriminating or judging them.

Other times these negative patterns are just part of us but we do not want to embrace them and therefore decides to project them to others. Due to this, we need to develop self-acceptance and take responsibility for the bad and the good things in our lives. Mindfulness helps us to accept rather than live in denial.

 Why we have negative patterns?

Negative patterns give us feedback on our personal growth and self-development. Instead of seeing them as faults, we can see them as benefits, something we can benefit from.

We can learn through self-awareness how to identify something better for us when we have negative patterns. Just like muscles, our personalities also use resistance to grow.

Are you one of the millions of people who are overwhelmed by the number of choices and options we face on a daily basis these days?

If you’re feeling overwhelmed, you’re not alone. The proof is in the countless number of self-help books and articles about simple living. And, while one would think that a book about simple living would be, well.. simple, they are often not. Some of them boast as many as 1,500 ways to simplify life. That’s around 10 times the amount of tips that the average person can read, process, remember and utilize in everyday life.

To make matters worse, a lot of these books will tell you that getting rid of most of your stuff will simplify your life. But, if you live a complicated life and have a cluttered mind, getting rid of the clutter in your environment is only one way to deal with the problem. It’s certainly not a total solution. In other words, an organized sock drawer may make you feel better about your sock storage decisions, but won’t have much effect on the rest of your life.

Simple living is less about how much stuff you have and more about making better decisions

You can live a minimalist life with a clutter- free environment and still have a cluttered mind. Today we have so many choices and options that it is easy to get overwhelmed by it all, which leaves most people at a standstill, choosing to make NO decision. Before we take any action, we make a decision, and before we make a decision we are given a number of choices. So in order to simplify life, it makes sense to limit your choices so that decisions are easier and more actions are likely to be taken. Here are just a few of the benefits you’ll receive by limiting your options:

You’ll be less overwhelmed with daily life

Imagine that you’ve decided to subscribe to a streaming service, such as Netflix, only to discover that they offer 30 different plans which they think will fit the needs of their customers. It’s not likely that you’ll read through all 30 plans and choose one. Instead, you’ll go find a service that offers three plans, and then choose one of those. You actually do things similar to this all the time in various aspects of your life and don’t realize it. So, starting out with fewer options saves you some time and stress.

You’ll make better decisions

Decision fatigue is a very real thing. Ray F. Baumeister, a social psychologist, conducted a series of experiments on undergraduates. The results showed that making decisions requires mental energy, and that we have a limit to that energy.

The undergraduates were asked to perform tasks which required them to make a decision and use willpower to accomplish. They were less able to make decisions and fight off temptation during the next task.

Basically, the findings were this: you’re less able to make good decisions after you’ve already made a lot of decisions.

The fewer options you have, the more objective you’ll be

With fewer options, you’ll be less likely to be tempted by an overly indulgent choice.

Consider a buff and. If you’re on a diet, a buffet with many options will make the decision to eat healthy food a hard one. But, picking the healthiest food out of three options is far easier. Having fewer options makes decision-making a lot easier.

How to limit your options and simplify your life

Now that you know about the benefits of having fewer options, here are three ideas you can use to simplify your life:

1. Cut down on the options you have in daily life

There are number of decisions you make every day, such as what you wear, what you eat and what route you take to get to work. So, take time to think about how to simplify them.

When it comes to choosing what to wear, there are several ways to simplify this decision. You could plan your outfits the night before, or plan them for the week. Or, you could find a simple signature style combination. Steve Jobs liked a black turtleneck and jeans, Mark Zuckerberg likes gray T-shirts, and the Queen of England is partial to picking a dress with a brooch that matches it.

When it comes to making decisions about food, you have some options to simplify this process, as well. Planning your meals for the week cuts down on indecisiveness. And prepping your meals for the week ensures that you’ll stick to your plans.

2. Think about what’s most important to you

Let’s say you’re trying to make a decision between two job offers. One is an hour and a half commute and pays more. The other is closer to home and pays less. So the choice here is about whether the long commute is worth it to you for the extra pay.

Many of the decisions in our lives come and go. But if we know what’s important to us and what’s negotiable, they’re easier to make.

3. Use your imagination

One easy way to decide on what you want to eat is to imagine what each one of your  choices taste like. You can also imagine how your stomach will feel after you’ve eaten it. Will you be pleasantly full, or full of indigestion? Does the orange chicken or the pepper steak jump out at you?

This works with other decisions, as well. If you choosing between working for someone full time and freelancing, think about how you’ll feel. If the thought of drumming up your own business is stressful, rather than exciting, it’s easier to make the decision to steer clear of it.

You’ll be surprised how often this exercise helps you through daily decisions.

Our lives are full of decisions. But, we tend to overwhelm ourselves with so many choices that we choose to make no choice.

Confucius said: “Life is really simple, but we insist on making it complicated.”

When we get overwhelmed by our choices and make no choices, we make no decisions and therefore take no action. Taking no action could lead to an unfulfilled life.

But, what if the act of streamlining the decision-making process could lead to an action that actually gives you the life that you want? You’ll never know if you don’t try. Try these three ideas today. If nothing else, they’ll make make life easier.

A certain personality type has caught my attention recently. To be perfectly honest, it’s been driving me crazy. Whenever I hear people discussing their insatiable urge to travel and to see the world before they start their real job or apply to graduate school, I want to set them straight.

I’m a millennial. I’m sad to see that my generation is being completely brainwashed by the propaganda of the hash-tag lifestyle, like those simple clickbait listicles that feature chic pictures of sexy, young people perched on the edge of waterfall designed to convince my generation that life will only be worth living if we travel. Instagram influencers play along, perfectly framing and filtering every single picture they share while they explore the world on their daddy’s dime.

Honestly, I believe that the only people with an incessant desire to travel are people who already have, or want to have, a life that’s perfectly mediocre.

You won’t ever make an impact on the world by being a traveler. Traveling isn’t actually doing anything at all. You’re just seeing when you travel. You’re just enjoying. You’re just leeching off of other people who actually have lives that are worth living, and who are doing jobs that are worth doing.

Accomplishments and Travel

No great things in this world have ever been accomplished through traveling just for the sake of #travel. Did Albert Einstein decide one day, “I need to take some time off to do some sightseeing. Maybe I’ll try to do something with significance in a few years…”? No, he didn’t!

Did John D. Rockefeller, one of the United States’ greatest businessmen of all time, pass his time by staging perfect photographs of structures in faraway locations? Of course, he didn’t! He worked. He built things. He created. He actually did impactful things. The moment he became an adult, he began working his way up!

People who are obsessed with traveling are quietly conceding that they don’t have anything actually worth creating or doing. You can’t create when you’re on the move. You can only create if you stay in one place. This allows you to focus on accomplishing your goals. An obsession with travel means that you don’t have any significant and worthwhile goals, so you’re going to settle and “YOLO” your way through your mediocre life.

“Enjoy your youth” and “You’ll only be young once” are adages that people have misappropriated to justify their months, and sometimes even their years, of laziness and idle labor. I agree, each of us will be young only once. But all of us should spend our youths making provisions for our futures.

Running Away

But being obsessed with travel means that you’re afraid to try anything new, so you’re running away. You’re running away from acquiring a stable income, from building a prosperous future, from the possibilities of the differences you could make in the world. You’re running to far-off lands where you take menial and meaningless jobs that you wouldn’t accept at home to earn just enough money to sustain your lifestyle that isn’t actually growing any part of you.

None of this is to say that an occasional vacation from time to time is a negative thing. Taking a week or two off work every year to rejuvenate yourself has been proven scientifically to help you become healthier and more productive. But an insatiable desire to “travel the world” for months or even years after high school or college is not healthy. Everybody who promotes doing so is sucking the millennial generation into a giant pyramid scheme in which nobody will come out ahead except for those promoters and their chosen travel bloggers. Don’t sacrifice your youth to your present desires. Invest it in your future!

You’re worth far more than the fleeting pleasures that #travel offers. You’re worthy to make a significant impact on the world, and people will remember you for that.  You will absolutely not be remembered for traveling.

So, let’s get to work!

The phrase “star-crossed lovers” has been used often throughout the centuries. But the questions remain the same: Is it really in the stars? Or is it just in your head?

Hippocrates, Chaucer, and Shakespeare all seemed to acknowledge the concept of a predestined, inescapable, unalterable fate between two lovers, like a knot firmly tied by the gods. The concept of having control over your own fate is a tantalizing one. But add modern science and a touch of wishful thinking, and you may realize that you are prey only to your own intentions.

When it comes to relationships, we should consider looking to the planets to lead the way, but there is a catch. The astrology most people interact with on a daily basis is confined to just “sun signs,” and that’s where the confusion comes in. You can’t determine somebody’s personality out of just 12 choices. Your “sun sign” is just one aspect of a far more complex birth chart that also includes your moon sign, your rising sign, lunar nodes, and positions of the planets in the “houses,” among other factors.

The Four Elements and Sun Signs

When considering compatibility in romantic relationships, there are four elements involved. General compatibility exists between people who share complementary sun sign elements. The Fire element signs are Aries, Leo, and Sagittarius. Earth element signs are Capricorn, Taurus, and Virgo. Air element signs are Gemini, Aquarius, and Libra. And Water element signs are Pisces, Cancer, and Scorpio. So compatibility exists between water and earth; water and water; fire and air; fire and fire; and so on.

Your sun sign is based on the date you were born. It’s the sign people generally refer to when they read daily horoscopes. For instance, if you’re a Leo, that means that the sun was crossing through the Leo constellation at the time of your birth. The sun sign is your identity, your sense of self, and the way you express yourself when you feel content and at ease.

Compatibility between two people’s sun signs indicates basic affinity. Signs of the same element are compatible. For example, a Sagittarius and an Aries will both bring fire, representing action, intention, and enthusiasm, to the relationship. But sometimes attraction is sparked in somebody different from you. Tremendous passion can build between a Leo and a Scorpio, for example, because the differences between the signs can be quite thrilling. Tension can build higher levels of excitement in a relationship.

Moon Signs

Your moon sign is determined by the position of the moon at the moment of your birth. It governs your innate, essential needs and is representative of your family (especially your mother) and your home environment.

Regarding relationships, compatibility between moon signs is positive. For instance, if your moon sign is Pisces, a water sign, you might find that your needs are met very well by a Scorpio, another water sign. In more committed relationships, moon signs are especially significant. The moon sign is your instinctive nature. It reflects how you prefer to meet your needs and what you’re emotionally comfortable with. If you’re seeking a long-term relationship, your moon sign should be compatible with your partner’s.

Rising Signs

Your rising sign, also known as the Ascendant, is determined by the sign of the Zodiac that was rising or “ascending” on the eastern horizon at the moment of your birth. This sign is generally understood as the first impression you present, or what people notice when they first meet you. It’s like a mask, or how you express yourself new situations.

Regarding relationships, since the rising signs of two people governs their initial attraction to each other, this is one area in which compatibility between the elements is not necessary. In fact, a degree of tension can be a positive thing. As the old expression goes, “opposites attract.” So somebody who has their ascendant in Aries may be attracted to a Capricorn, and vice-versa. The rising sign is opposite to the partnership house, or the marriage house.

Nodes

Lunar nodes aren’t classified as signs. Rather, they’re the mathematical, astronomical points at which the orbit of the moon crosses the sun’s path on the celestial sphere, the “ecliptic.” The nodes exist on an axis and are determined by the exact position of the moon and the sun at the moment of your birth. The southern node shows the accumulation of habits and knowledge from your family lineage, like what you have, what you’ve accomplished, and the things you already know. It represents past-life connections The northern node represents where you’re going, what you need to move toward, accomplish, and achieve. It demonstrates what you’re trying to fulfill in your life. The two nodes are on an axis, so they’re always opposites.

In regards to relationships, the nodes should be associated. If your nodes overlap, there’s a good chance your paths will cross. The nodes dictate the idea of fate, and if there’s karma to be worked out in this lifetime. Romeo and Juliet, for example, certainly would have had nodal associations.

With all that said, don’t outright dismiss a potential romantic relationship based on somebody’s sun sign, their moon sign, or their ascendant. They may have other planets or elements that line up with yours. It’s an involved and complex science. The more you study it, the more precisely you can reach conclusions.