Drop Dead Healthy

My Five Foolproof (for Me, at Least) Methods of Stress Reduction

1. Self-massage. The G-rated kind. I rub my shoulders, neck, and arms daily.

2. Outsource your worry. Find someone to trade worries with you. Or you can try GetFriday.com, an outsourcing firm that will do almost anything legal.

3. Meditate. My trick: I focus on the gently pulsating light on a MacBook in sleep mode, and try to breathe in sync with it. I’m sure Buddhist monks do the same.

4. Get a dog or cat. A State University of New York–Buffalo study found that having pets present lowered stress during stressful tasks such as doing hard math problems or submerging the hand in ice water. Thankfully, my family and I are the occasional foster parents to Daisy, a very cute and drooly basset hound owned by our friends Candice and Ben.

5. Put the serenity prayer to work. I’ve long known the prayer (God, grant me the serenity to accept the things I cannot change/Courage to change the things I can/And wisdom to know the difference). But this year, at the suggestion of several stress books, I wrote down all of my worries, and sorted them into Category A (things I can control) and Category B (things out of my control). My Category-B list was an astoundingly long one, ranging from fear of the super-volcano hiding underneath the surface of Wyoming, which may explode any day now and plunge planet Earth into an era of darkness, to the worry that my sons won’t find their soul mates, to the concern that the super-volcano might kill my sons’ soul mates.