The modern life is full of stress.  It can build up, day after day, until it reaches an overwhelming level.  You may even feel like you’re on the edge of breaking.

It may be stress from financial difficulties, from your relationship, your kids, your work… there are hundreds of possible sources of stress throughout our lives.  The biggest source of stress of all, though, is ourselves.

How, you might ask, are we the biggest source of stress in our own lives?  The answer is simple:  the majority of stress from all of the things I mentioned above comes from focusing on the results of our choices to the exclusion of paying attention to the process.

That leads to the point of this article:  how to stop inflicting unnecessary stress on yourself.

If you want to release a ton of stress in your life, and prevent it from rapidly coming back, the secret is to stop focusing so much on the results of your choices, and more on the choices themselves, and the path along which they will lead you.

One major cause of relationship stress, for example, is focusing on the “fact” that you’re “not as close as you used to be.”  If you want to remove a huge chunk of that stress let go of the comparison, the focus on the results of your past choices, and look at what you can do right now to try to shrink that gap and get closer.

The same thing goes for financial stress… you are in the situation that your past choices have caused, and there’s nothing you can do to change that.  If you let go of your deathgrip on blaming yourself, you can actually look at your currently available choices and how they can lead you to somewhere you’d rather be.

The self-blame game is part of a vicious downward spiral.  It makes you focus on the past, it makes you harder on yourself (and thus less likely to go strongly after a new path), and quite frankly makes you less pleasant to be around, too.

This doesn’t mean that you should blame someone else, it means you should stop worrying about blame entirely.  The situation is what it is, and any energy spent on blame is energy that you cannot spend on getting yourself to somewhere better in life.

Letting go of the past, and any blame that goes with it, lets you also give up your focus on the results that came out of your choices and instead look at what choices lie around you now, waiting to lead you into a better future.

Letting go of the past and blame usually starts with internal quiet… a topic I have mentioned many times previously, and one I will dedicate an entire article to in the near future.

PS – This article springs from Jean’s request in my Group Writing Project In Reverse (it’s in the comments, #6).