Make your friends a priority, so they are not lost to the black hole of a busy, hurried life.

Don't miss out on opportunities to spend time with friends you value most, because too many of your waking hours are spent on a treadmill of constant doing to keep up with our culture's demands. Good friends are stress relief!

Stress is a natural and normal part of being alive. Stress-free promises set people up for failure. Even when used with good intentions and accompanied by relevant and beneficial ideas and practices, the use of the words stress-free is still ill advised because the approach is infused with an erroneous idea that will never come to fruition. The stress-free idea has become a significant hurdle on the path to real stress management, which is the balance between using stress productively and relieving harmful stress symptoms.

Evolution has geared the human stress response to last about thirty seconds. It's enough time to facilitate fight or flight. Evolution has not adapted our brains or bodies to handle weeks or months of prolonged stress.

If you have ever procrastinated and then found yourself energized to complete a task at the last minute, then you have used the beneficial aspect of the fight or flight response (not the procrastinating part, but the energizing part). You see, with all its negative long term effects, the fight or flight response still gives us energy, and if we know how to use that energy, then stress is potentially good, at least in the short term.

Drop the fear. What you fear most, can be a repeated theme in your life.