MOST OF US ARE AWARE that stress is unhealthy, but what can be done about it? You can't keep going on vacation. The lack of money would be stressful. People have invented hundreds of ways to deal with stress, but they all boil down to the same thing: Focus on the stress and try to get rid of it. We take time-management seminars, learn meditation, and put ourselves on grueling, boring workout routines. Some people try to force themselves to be happy. Some do things they don't enjoy, using up their valuable time, in order to "battle" stress. The attempt to get rid of stress causes more stress.

Have you ever gotten depressed over the fact that you have been depressed? Or angry at yourself for losing your temper? Worried that you worry too much? Upset with yourself for being upset? Battling stress increases your level of stress.

What about the two most common ways of dealing with stress: Drinking alcohol and watching TV? These might temporarily give you a break, but you always end up back in your life the following morning with the same circumstances you had when you started, and usually not in better spirits.

The good news is you can have more fun and less stress by thinking of stress as simply a bad mood and then concentrating your attention on getting into a better mood. Don't battle the bad mood; create a good mood.

A good mood is the antidote for stress. Stress is basically a bad mood. Let me repeat that: Stress is a bad mood. When you think of stress as simply a bad mood, it becomes much easier to deal with. Bad moods occur when the challenges in your life are more than you're able to handle.

When you can meet your challenges and make progress toward what you want, there's a sense of accomplishment and satisfaction that leads to well-being and good self-esteem. Making progress toward your goals puts you in a good mood.

THE FIRST TACK

The first thing to look at if you're stressed-out is: "Can I possibly minimize the challenges in my life? Is there some way I can bite off a little less?"

The problem is, a lot of us are in a position (either voluntarily, or because of the circumstances in our lives) where we can't minimize the challenges we have. The only option left to us, then, is to increase our ability to handle the challenges. In other words, if we can match ourselves to the challenges we face, we can reduce the stress that way. That's the approach we will now explore. You can bring yourself up to the challenge by bringing yourself up — by getting into a better mood.

FIRST, THE BAD NEWS

Do you have a healthy respect for bad moods? Do you know what we do to ourselves when we allow our circumstances to put us in a bad mood?

When you're in a bad mood, your perception of life is distorted. Negative emotions impair your ability to perceive what's really happening. You tend to magnify some of what's happening, and minimize or ignore other things (all the while completely convinced you see things accurately).

When you feel angry, for example, you tend to focus on what's making you angry. And you tend to ignore what's good about the situation. It's not just you. Everyone does it when they get angry. That's just human nature when it's angry.

Fear and worry are also bad feelings, and they likewise affect our perception. Fear tends to focus the mind so much on the threat that we overlook some good options. It's like the man who fell to his death because he had a left-handed parachute on. Did you ever hear about that tragic accident?

The man's parachute worked fine, but when he couldn't find the pull-cord where it normally was (on the right side), he panicked and frantically focused on pulling that cord, ripping to shreds the right side of his jacket and even his own skin trying to pull the cord.

Had he been sitting on the ground, no doubt he would have quickly realized the pull cord was on the left side.

Instead, he was in the air, and his fear focused his mind so completely that perfectly good options became unavailable to him.

Bad moods — negative emotions — limit and distort your perception.

At the bottom of the negative emotions is apathy. The distortion here is extreme. You tend to treat things that are really important and should be attended to as if they don't matter at all.

In a bad mood, you're looking at your life through a carnival mirror. Yes, it's your life you're looking at, but it's so distorted, when you try to make decisions or come up with solutions, they don't work very well because you aren't seeing things truly. It would be like wearing glasses with the wrong prescription. You would be seeing the real world, but it would be distorted. You'd have a tendency to misjudge distances and run into things.

If you look at the world through a bad mood, any solution you create will likely be inappropriate for your life. And a bad solution tends to cause more stress. First, the stress causes the distortion. Then the distortion causes more stress. It's a counterproductive cycle: Stress leads to more stress.

Bad moods also effect your ability to think. You aren't as intelligent when you're in a bad mood, and you're prone to do irrational, counterproductive things.

Stress may even do damage to your brain. Recent research by Robert Sapolsky (a neuroscientist at Stanford) exposed rats to prolonged stress or injected them with the same hormones their bodies produce in response to a threat. In both cases, the rats lost brain cells in a vital region of the brain (the hippocampus). Dr. Sapolsky points out that although humans haven't undergone the same kind of direct experimentation, there is indirect evidence that humans also lose brain cells in the same way rats do when they experience prolonged stress.

BAD MOODS ARE BAD FOR YOUR BODY

A bad mood affects your body. Anger, frustration, worry and depression — all effect your body's ability to heal itself. They weaken your immune system. The scientific evidence for this is overwhelming. As Dr. Howard Friedman (professor of psychology at the University of California, Irvine) put it, "Depressed, anxious, angry or hostile people are twice as likely to suffer from heart disease, asthma, arthritis and headaches as are happier, more relaxed individuals."

Researchers have been finding that what makes people "catch a cold" is not what we thought. When they measure the amount of virus in the blood stream, it seems to have nothing to do with whether the person gets sick or not. Some people with lots of virus in their system did not get sick, and some with very little did get sick. One factor that was related to getting sick was stress. If the person experienced negative emotions, it was a good predictor of upcoming illness. The more negative feelings a person had during a given week, the more likely they were to "catch" a cold.

Apparently bad moods weaken your immune system enough to make your body a nice place for a virus to raise a family.

A weaker immune system means we get sick more often, we're sick for a longer period of time, and we don't recuperate as well as we could from injuries and illnesses.

Bad moods also affect your level of energy. You've noticed this, haven't you? When you're in a bad mood or really stressed out, there are times when it's an effort just to get out of bed.

So the stress drains us and we don't get as much done. And when we don't get as much done, we're not as capable of meeting our challenges. Once again we have a snowball effect: When we feel bad and we don't have enough energy and our bodies are down, we can't get as much done and we're sick more often, and that, in turn, causes more stress in our life.

YOUR CHARACTER

Now if that isn't enough bad news, researchers have discovered a link between bad feelings and ethical behavior. Your mood affects your character.

When we're in a bad mood, we're more likely to:

1. lie
2. avoid facing problems squarely
3. be sneaky

In an experiment by the psychologists Eliot Aronson and David Mettee, students were given a personality test. It was a fake personality test, but the students thought it was real. Then they split the group at random into three groups. They told one group, "My goodness! The test showed that you're wonderful, mature, thoughtful people."

They really put down the second group: "Well basically, the test results show you're rather immature and shallow and kind of self-centered."

The third group was told nothing about the test results.

Then all the students were put into another situation. It was actually the second half of the experiment, but the students thought it was an unrelated, separate experiment. There was a card game to learn. The game was rigged, and there was absolutely no way you could win unless you cheated. If you cheated, you could win a lot of money. If you didn't cheat, you were guaranteed to lose.

Here's what they found: People who felt good about themselves (the ones given the compliments earlier) were reluctant to cheat, even with the temptation of lots of money.

But people who had been made to feel bad about themselves — people who were in a bad mood — cheated easily and often.

So when you're in a bad mood, you've really threatened your own integrity. You've brought your worst into the world. You will do things you'll regret.

We've all been angry (which is one kind of bad mood) and said something we wished we hadn't said. Out of our anger, we've hurt people intentionally (something that doesn't make us feel good about ourselves). And we've all been afraid of something (another kind of bad mood), and because of the fear, we avoided doing something we wanted to do — something that would have made us proud of ourselves.

Here again, you can see the downward spiral: You're in a bad mood and you do things you're ashamed of, which adds more stress (negative emotion) to your life.

THE COMMUNITY AT LARGE

Being in a bad mood is also harmful to every one of your friends and family — and the community at large. When you're in a bad mood, you're not very pleasant to be around. And you're more likely to say snippy little nasty things to people and bring them down. You're not available to people when you're stressed out, so you really don't have it in you to help anyone. In a bad mood, you probably wouldn't even notice people around you needed help.

Our families suffer. We snap at them; we can sometimes be mean to them. These things not only make us feel bad later, but we make them feel bad.

It is likely to affect not only your family and friends, but strangers. If you've ever been in a bad enough mood, you might have cut someone off on the freeway, or glared at a grocery clerk who made a small mistake. It's bad for the community at large.

Okay, no more guilt. Bad moods are bad.

It's important to have a healthy respect for what a bad mood does. That's the first place to start. When we know what stress does to us, the motivation to do something about it becomes very strong.

When we battle stress by trying to get rid of stress, it creates a negative, self-perpetuating cycle. Battling stress creates more stress. Battling stress is a stressful thing to do. Have you ever seen one of those Chinese finger-pulls? The harder you try to get out of it, the more tightly it grips your finger. Well, that's kind of what stress is like. The harder you try to fight stress and not be upset, the more stressed-out you are.

Stress weakens you and makes you unhappy and less productive.

Luckily, being in a good mood is a total antidote for all of that. Good moods are nearly magical in the power they have for you.

THE GOOD NEWS

When you're in a good mood, you think more clearly. You see things with more perspective. You're able to reason better. You actually have more access to your intelligence when you're up. In experiments, people improved their ability to solve even difficult problems when their mood improved.

In a good mood, you're smarter. You see more options. You're more able to put two and two together and come up with innovative solutions. And the solutions you make (in a good mood) have a tendency to solve problems because they're based on reality. When you work at life in that frame of mind, it is easier to make gains. Real progress becomes more likely.

A HEALTHY BODY

A good mood is also tremendously powerful for making your body healthier. And now with cancer and a lot of other diseases, they're finding out really how much our frame of mind affects our body. Feeling good boosts your immune system. In one study, David McClelland, Ph.D. (a researcher at Harvard), sat a bunch of people in a room and showed them films of Mother Theresa doing her work. That's all they did. They just watched. Then McClelland tested one of our first lines of defense: the immunoglobulin A in our saliva. The level of that substance had increased from watching the film. The film made them feel better, and the immune system responded by increasing its potency.

A funny movie had the same effect. It put people in a good mood, and the immune system responded positively.

Research at the Pittsburgh Cancer Research Institute found that when a person's mood improved, the activity of their killer-cell activity increased. Their immune system became stronger. Dr. Sandra M. Levy (associate professor of psychiatry and medicine, and author of the study) said, "We found that when these patients moved away from hostility and depression to become more optimistic, their immune systems began to function better." Researchers at Ohio State and Stanford have performed similar studies and gotten similar results.

When you have a stronger immune system, you don't get sick as often. When you get sick, it's not as bad. If you got an injury, you would recuperate faster. Your mood affects diseases from cancer to arthritis to heart-disease. The more often you're in a good mood, the better your health will be.

On top of that, you've got stamina and endurance when you're in a good mood. You can just go and go and go, as long as you're up and happy. If you've ever had the occasion to go from a bad mood to a good mood suddenly — maybe gotten good news or something — you probably remember getting a burst of energy. In a good mood, you have more energy and your body is healthier.

YOUR SHINING CHARACTER

When you're in a good mood, your character shines. When you feel good about yourself, you're much more likely to be honest. You're more likely to face the music and tell the truth even though it's difficult.

When you're feeling good about yourself, you're more likely to conduct yourself in a way that makes you proud. And when you conduct yourself in a way that makes you proud, it makes you feel good about yourself. This is the other side of the coin: A self-perpetuating upward spiral.

When you feel good about yourself, it not only affects you (being smarter, stronger, and prouder of yourself), but you have a great effect on the people you love. When you feel good about yourself is the only time when you're really in a position to help anybody else. We don't help people when we're down. We actually drain them. But when we're up, we're able to give a pat on the back, or see when something needs to be taken care of, and we can help and support the people who are close to us. We lift up everyone we touch. In a store, we're more likely to smile at a tired clerk. At home, a change in one person's mood impacts the whole family.

THE ANSWER

The big question is: "What can you do to get in a good mood?"

The first place to start is with your body. Second, your world. Third, your mind. And fourth, your relationships.

YOUR BODY

You start out by asking yourself: "How can I make my body feel better?" It's really hard to smile if you feel nauseous. If you don't feel good, it's tough to be in a good mood.

Zen masters say, "When a person becomes enlightened, she sleeps when she's tired and eats when she's hungry."

One simple thing you can do is sleep. I operated for years on not enough sleep. I thought that was just the woman's world to never have enough time to sleep. Then I realized I was stressing myself out and being a grump to everyone.

Sleep makes a difference. Make sure you're well rested. When you're tired, treat yourself to a nap.

Treat your body well. There are many ways to do that. Improving your nutrition is a good one. Caffeine and white sugar put a stress on your system. I don't care how much alphabet soup someone has behind his name, if he says there's nothing wrong with sugar, he's wrong. It's bull. You can prove it to yourself by going for a week without white sugar. Then, on an empty stomach, eat something very high in sugar, and pay attention to your heart rate. You will notice a dramatic increase for about twenty minutes. Then you'll notice a growing feeling of irritability and sluggishness. And for the rest of your life, you will notice the same feelings after eating sugar.

By doing this experiment, you are isolating the experience of sugar. You are training yourself to notice something you've never noticed before. When you eat sugar, the experience is all mixed in with other foods, other moods, things happening in your environment, etc. Plus, there is a delay between eating it and its effects.

If you're under a lot of stress, you might be a little better off getting more natural sweeteners or perhaps a decaffeinated coffee.

One of the best things you can do for your body is to take a walk. Absolutely. It's The Gateway to Sanity. This is the first thing to think about when you feel stress. Get in your mind an equation that stress equals a need for exercise. The equation will serve you well.

Of course, when you're down, you really don't feel like exercising, do you? Neither do I. That's all right; just start out slow and easy. As you start to move, you will feel a little better. You'll feel more like moving. Pretty soon, you'll find yourself going at a good pace and feeling much better. But don't worry about that in the beginning. Start out gently. Go at the pace you feel comfortable with. Don't worry; you'll be feeling better soon enough.

If you're uptight and not thinking very well, going for a leisurely walk has actually been proven more tranquilizing than a tranquilizer. It mellows you out and gives you some perspective.

On the other hand, if you need a little pep-up — if you need to be charged up a little bit — go out and walk vigorously. Researchers have found the symptoms of clinical depression significantly improve from the simple therapy of getting out and walking briskly.

Any brisk exercise can be stimulating (as long as it's not too hard). Three very good things about walking is it doesn't require any equipment or money or partners. But any form of exercise, if you'll do enough to make it aerobic, boosts your metabolism, so it gives you energy. You actually kind of kick-start your body.

News flash: Moderate exercise will lead to better gains than strenuous exercise, especially in mature people. So the old macho huff and puff and really get out there and exert yourself isn't right. Extreme exercise, extreme overdoing, is not good for your body. You're much better off at a moderate level. Make it pleasant and have fun at it.

MAGIC POTION

When you walk briskly enough to get your body pumping at an aerobic range, two wonderful things happen — exactly what you need to combat bad moods.

First of all, your body produces enkephalins. These are mood elevators and mood stabilizers. When you go for a walk, you make your body release chemicals that improve your mood and stabilize it.

Secondly, when you go for a walk, your body produces endorphins, which is a coined word meaning endogenous morphine. Your body medicates itself in such a way as to ease your physical and emotional pain.

When you go out and walk briskly, you'll come back in a better mood and with less physical and emotional pain. And it's all perfectly suited to your body, so unlike drugs, there are no unhealthy side-effects.

Treat your body well. Sometimes, getting a manicure makes my mood better. A hot shower or tub-soak can make you feel better. Just ask yourself, "Is there anything I can do for my body that will put me in a better mood?" When you're in a better mood, you're better off, and the people you love are better off. And it makes you more able to deal with the challenges you face.

If you can't make the challenges smaller, you can make yourself more able to handle them. You will definitely be more able to handle them well rested and feeling good.

YOUR WORLD

The second thing to work on is to do something good for your world. It can be as personal as cleaning your purse, or as public as writing to your representatives.

Look for small things when you're down. Look around your house or workspace. Sometimes a room needs to be painted or a junk-drawer needs to be cleaned out or a promise you've made needs to be fulfilled.

It bugs me when I have thank-you notes I need to write. When I write the thank-you notes, I feel better. Any time you do something that makes the world a little better, it leaves you in a little better mood for having done it.

It also validates that you can cause an effect. Part of stress and depression is that you're struggling with something and you're not making happen what you want to make happen. Your conviction that you're helpless is the reason you come down. When you make a difference someplace, when you cause an effect to happen, you raise yourself up because now you've reminded yourself, "I can bring about a result I desire."

If you want to do something good in the world beyond your front door, one of the greatest mood-elevators in existence is volunteering. Volunteering produces what's called a "helper's high." People feel so good about themselves when they volunteer, it has become a research-subject in itself. It has been found that volunteering makes people healthier. The evidence suggests they may actually live longer because that good feeling is so healthy.

FEED YOUR HEAD

The third way to bring yourself up is to learn something. Especially, learn something that will make you more able to handle the challenges you face. If you are an engineer and want to increase your income by getting into a supervisory position, for example, studying human relations would bring you up because it brings you closer to your goal.

Learning brings understanding, and understanding will improve your mood. Not being able to understand something that's happening will bring you down. A lack of understanding is a tremendous drain on your well-being.

Learn something that will bring you up. This might mean taking a class at the college, reading a book, finding a counselor, or doing anything that will help you learn more about what's troubling you.

I have a personal recommendation for you: Learn about cognitive therapy. Read Learned Optimism: How to Change Your Mind and Your Life by Martin Seligman, and Feeling Good: The New Mood Therapy Revised and Updated by David Burns.

Changing your way of thinking will make a big difference.

SOCIAL ANIMALS

The fourth way to get into a good mood, and maybe the best way, is to communicate. Specifically, talk with a trusted friend. When we hold our problems and our frustrations inside, it eats away at us. It's like a pressure. If something bothers you, it is a stressor. And if you can't talk about it with anyone, it increases the stress.

If you can't talk to the person you're having trouble with, or you can't do anything about the situation that you're in, the one thing you can always do is find a friend and just sit down and get it off your chest. Get it said.

As human beings, we have a distinct need to be heard and understood. We can keep things inside us for years, and the moment we finally say it, there's a weight off our shoulders to know, "I'm not alone. Somebody knows besides me."

If you can't find a friend you feel safe talking to (sometimes there are things we really aren't free to talk about) then go to a bookstore and get a blank journal, and write your thoughts down.

James Pennebaker, Ph.D. and his colleagues at Southern Methodist University have found that getting things off your chest not only makes you feel better, but it measurably improves your health. And they have further discovered that writing in a journal is almost as good for you as talking with someone.

The key to making it feel good and be good for you is to talk (or write) about emotionally troubling issues. One thing especially good about a journal is: You can say anything you want in a journal. There's no one red-penning you at all! You can tell it just like it is.

Communicate with a trusted friend, even if it is yourself.

The other side of this is communicating the good stuff. Think of someone you want to acknowledge and write them a note. Let them know what they've meant to you, and why you're glad they're in your life. When you get the good stuff off your chest, it makes you feel better, and in this case, makes your world a better place to be too.

NEXT TIME YOU FIND YOURSELF stressed-out and you notice you're focusing on what's wrong and how to get rid of it, give yourself a gift and forget about that for a moment, and realize it would be a lot more fun and a lot less stressful if, instead, you concentrated all your efforts on doing everything you could to get yourself into a good mood. When your focus is on getting rid of stress, it increases the stress you feel. Instead, think of stress as simply a bad mood. Then shift all your attention and effort toward doing what will make you experience healthy good feelings. It works better; it feels better; and it makes life easier. Let the good times roll!