Nancy -

I definitely understand anticipatory stress. With all the books I've read on managing stress, with all my yoga and meditation, I was still stressed before going in to New York City to accept my two book awards. I knew logically that it was not helpful to be stressed - and yet I could not quite override my body's natural reactions.

Still, there are ways to ease them.

* eat healthy foods / drink water / avoid caffeine. The more healthy nutrients your body has to work with, the more even keel it will be. So that gives you a solid foundation to begin with.

* get ample sleep. I know this is hard with stress! Do your best. Darken your room. Block all little lights. Make it cool. Make it quiet or use a noise generating machine of some sort. Journal before you sleep to help reduce those circling thoughts.

* Make a list to prepare. The more you feel "in control" of what you can control, the more relaxed you will be.

* Accept what you can't control. There are all sorts of things in life we can't control. It doesn't make sense to worry about them. Just accept they will be what they are, and that life will go on. Yes it could have been rainy on the trip. And in fact it was! That was all right, we drove in the rain. They forgot to call my name for my Gold award. That's OK, Bob went up and reminded them. So solutions are found. Life goes on.

* Long, deep breaths. We tend to shallow breathe when we're stressed. That then creates a feedback loop in our brain telling our body that we should be worried. Instead, take long, deep breaths. That creates a feedback loop that everything is OK.

Lisa,

Congratulations for your awards! It's a shame though that they forgot to call your name for one of them!

Accepting awards must be fun and stressful. There are many people who receive many and they still get stressed out when they are nominated for another one. I remember that when we had to recite things or do other things in front of our class I was extremely nervous and everytime when I began talking it all went away, writing is my only talent so I had confidence in my homeworks when it was us who had to write what we wanted.

Breathing is an excellent way of relaxing. When I remember about doing it works.

You are right about blocking all the lights, when there's just a little tiny bit of lights this stops me from sleeping or it wakes me up. Noise never bother me except when I have trouble sleeping, I'm in one of these phases now so little noises can wake me up.

It's funny that you mention lists of what is coming up because I made a plan to sit down tonight and make one about my big day coming up.

The healthy foods and water is coming soon for me. There's little bottled water with SpongeBob in it, they are 330ml so that should be easy to drink one of these bottles per day, after a while of that I could drink more.

I'm less stressed today (could be because ill finally see The Dark Knight Rises tonight...watching Christian Bale playing Batman is 1 of my fave past time), my first big day is set to Tuesday (wont talk about what ill do until its done...normally i talk about what i do or what im about to do and it never works out...thought i might try silence until its done), I'm actually more excited than stressed about it since fixing the day.

Last night before going to bed I started thinking of maybe doing my big day Monday instead of Tuesday and I decided not too long ago to do it, surprisingly that has me excited instead of nervous!

Last night something came up and that forced me to push my big day but when I was changing the dates on my schedule for that day and the following days I realised that I had made an error with scheduling so for once that something that came up was positive instead of negative, that's a welcome change and hopefully that will mean what I am about to do will work.

It is high today. The big day is finally stressing me out plus my parents are getting to me today and I have been having a bad day today (ive only been up for about 4 hours so the day is still small sadly).

Nancy -

A day isn't bad! A day is simply a day, and every moment of it you can look forward to what it has to offer. Yes, your parents are silly. That's OK! Put them out of your mind. Do you have headphones? Put on headphones! Then enjoy something wonderful on the web. From this point forward, your day will be great.

No stress today. Yay!

Yesterday, I finished sewing all those mini purse-sized tissue covers for my niece's baby shower. Almost 30. That was the priority.

Nancy, I feel for you. Living with unpleasant people is such a challenge. Lisa's idea about headphones is a good one! Escape!

No stress today. I worked hard outside doing some landscaping, so I am too tired and sore to worry about anything!

I don't have headphones but I did listen to the score of Batman Begins not too long after posting here and that calmed me down. I also watched Master Chef and Gordon Ramsay made me laugh so that helped lower my stress too (i think hes hot too so that helped too..haha). Now my stress is low but I have a headache that does not want to go away, took some aspirins before the show started but it did not helped.