Mindfulness For Dummies, 2nd Edition

Chapter 12

Reducing Stress, Anger and Fatigue

In This Chapter

Understanding how stress works

Reducing stress and anger mindfully

Exploring how to boost energy levels

Difficulties are part and parcel of life – you can’t stop them, unfortunately. What you can stop is the way you meet and relate to challenges. Perhaps you habitually go into denial, or maybe you throw yourself in head first and end up overly tired. If you can face the difficulty in the right way, you can take the heat out of the problem and even use the energy generated by the issue to manage your emotions and activities.

Mindfulness offers you the opportunity to become more intimate with your own habitual patterns of operation. If you haven’t really noticed how you currently meet challenges, you’re bound to have a hard time assessing whether your approach is useful. Whether the way you react is helpful or not depends on what effect your reaction has. If you have no clear idea of the effects, you’re not benefiting from experience – you’re just replaying a record again and again. As this chapter shows, by becoming even slightly more mindful, your awareness grows and something can shift – and the smallest shift can make ...