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You Can’t Avoid Stress, But These 5 Habits Can Help You Handle It

The instinct to minimize a bad situation is understandable, but it’s the wrong move.

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Hate to break it to you, but there’s no such thing as a stress-free life. There’s just life, with varying degrees of things going wrong at inconvenient times, and how you handle it.

The Mayo Clinic has been saying for years that stress is a normal physiological response, not a personal failing. And still most people feel like they’ve done something wrong. Like they just aren’t doing life right. The APA’s 2024 Stress in America report found that a substantial majority of U.S. adults report physical and emotional symptoms of stress regularly—which means you’re not uniquely bad at coping. You’re just human. The stress will never go away. It’s all about damage control, and learning how to execute before you completely fall apart.

Stop Pretending It Isn’t Happening

The instinct to minimize a bad situation is understandable. No one wants to be the person catastrophizing all the time. But there’s........

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