Originally, stress was not a word that was intended to relate to our emotions or daily lives.

Stress was brought into the context of our lives when some physicist was observing pressure, or in physics, “stress” that was being put on an objected and literally thought: “I feel like the object under pressure like I’m going to snap. I – I feel stressed.”

Of course, the feeling existed beforehand, but I believe our frequent use of the word stressed, whether that be saying we are “stressed” or what have you adds to the stress we feel on a daily basis.

It’s a vicious cycle – when we feel the need to perform our best we feel stressed. But we hardly perform our best when we are stressed.

Besides cleaning up our speech a little and being conscious of the words we use, this is important because once you use a word to define something it becomes a very integral part of your beliefs which begin to shape you as a person, here are some things to commit to daily to decrease your interaction with stress:

Taking one breath – no matter what happens you carve out time to simply take a good deep breath in and exhale.

Establish things you’re invested in making happen to make sure today is a good day. That could be breakfast and dinner with your family, drinking 8 cups of water, we all have things that make us feel better.

Identify what those things are, and do them. That is how we establish the life we want to live.