Here’s a stress-relief technique that’s 100% free and always available:

Take a deep breath. Let it out. Repeat.

In more detail: Breathe in through your nose for several seconds. Breathe deeply than normal – allow the air to fill your belly and raise your diaphragm. Hold it there for a few seconds. Now exhale through your mouth, blowing it out with sound if that helps. Allow your belly to relax and deflate. Let your shoulders drop. Visualize calm, cool air flowing in and stress flowing out.

Your brain will be more alert from extra oxygen, your muscles will relax, and you will give your mind a few seconds rest from thinking, by focusing on the breathing.

It’s surprising how easy it is to forget to breathe in a relaxed way! On an especially stressful day, you can set a timer to remember to do this every couple of hours.

In honour of World Vegetarian Day/Month, this would be a great weekend to experiment with kicking the meat habit.

What does eating vegetarian have to do with being softer?

It’s kinder to your body – Since cholesterol comes from animal “products”, vegetarians have way lower cholesterol levels, and hence lower rates of heart disease and stroke. Vegetarians also have lower weight, lower blood pressure, and lower rates of cancer and diabetes.

It’s kinder to the Earth – 18% of greenhouse gases come from meat production, versus 13% from cars. In North America, half of all water resources, one-third of all fossil fuels, 70% of grains, and 80 percent of agricultural land are used to raise animals for food.

It’s kinder to animals – Do I need to explain this one? By going vegetarian, you can save around 100 animals a year. If you need incentive, and are ready to find out where your meat comes from, watch this very unsoft video.

It’s so yummy!

I’ve been a vegetarian for 17 years now, but I know being a full-time vegetarian it’s not for everyone. But just like cutting your electricity use or car use, cutting your meat intake by whatever percentage you can manage will help make the world a softer place.

~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~

Want to go longer than a day? Here’s a few more resources:

Vegetarian Starter Kit (Or order a hard copy variation)

Making the transition – with recipes!

More recipes!

The time is right to bring back the handkerchief! When I was a kid, we had hankies in our pockets, and businesspeople stuck them in their suit pockets. Let’s make them fashionable again! Bruce Springsteen of course never thought they went out of style:

If you are, like me, “enjoying” seasonal allergies right now, you know how many tissues you can go through! And as a biology friend described it once, back to school is a time when everyone can get together and share the bacteria they encountered over the summer, so covering one’s mouth when sneezing is only polite.

But most tissues in North America are from clear-cut forests. (Greenpeace offers a guide to percent of recycled material in various brands.) Hankies to the rescue! Use ‘em, clean ‘em and use ‘em again.

I found these organic flannel hankies that should be a lot softer on your nose than those chlorine-filled dead trees!

Or you could go with the bandana look of course. These guys even sell some with your fave baseball team logo.

Hankies have other uses too. You could keep an extra in your pocket to:

• Use as a towel in restrooms. More trees saved!
• Sneeze into on the subway. Your fellow passengers will appreciate it.
• Offer to a stranger in need. I would swoon, swoon I tell you, if someone gallantly offered me their (clean) handkerchief.
• Wave down a taxi or a friend.
• Dab a little lavender oil onto and keep in your pocket for moments when the air around you has that “not so fresh” feeling.
• Use instead of paper napkins (Another tree saved! You’re a hero!)
• Pick up a date in certain clubs (you too know they never went out of style!)
• Keep hair and sweat out of your eyes while you’re rocking out. Clearly.

What else could you use a hankie for? Let us know.

Then get out your hankies! Sport them with pride!

Earlier this month, the mayor of Phoenix declared the city’s third annual Stress Free Day.

Of course, I’d love it if we could be less stressed every day, but it’s great that the city took time to raise awareness of stress as a quality of life issue. It looks like a local health club/spa was the driving force behind the initiative, offering to consult with local businesses about how they could help their employees relax.  Maybe their success will encourage individuals and health businesses in other cities to talk to their elected representatives about raising awareness and providing stress management/stress relief initiatives.

I hope other cities adopt this idea! I’d love to see towns competing to see who has the calmest, healthiest population! Last week, Forbes issued its list of “Most Stressful Cities.” (warning, just reading the article may be stress-inducing!). By inverting the list to ask the question in a more positive way, I can report for you of America’s largest 40 cities, using Forbes’ methodology, here are:

The 10 Least Stressed Out Large Cities

1. Austin/Round Rock, TX
2. San Antonio, TX
3. Nashville/Davidson/Murfreesboro/Franklin, TN
4. Dallas-Fort Worth/Arlington, TX
5. Kansas City, MO-KS
6. Denver/Aurora, CO
7. Virginia Beach/Norfolk/Newport News, VA-NC
8. Houston/Sugar Land/Baytown, TX
9. Jacksonville, FL
10. Columbus, OH

Wow, Texas with 4 out of 10! I lived in Houston for a year, and must admit it was a pleasure to ride my bike year-round. And they do know how to go swimming and BBQ. Phoenix, if you’re wondering, is 14th.

And I’m heading to Kansas City this weekend, so I’ll be sure to investigate their low-stress ways.

What, to you, makes a city and its citizens less stressful? How’s your city doing?

1. Summer’s almost over! Before you know it, it’ll be time for sweaters.
2. You checked your work email over the weekend.
3. It’s been cloudy, so your Vitamin D intake is clearly insufficient. This needs rectifying!
4. You never charged for that night you worked late last March.
5. You’ve only worn that new red bathing suit once. It deserves another trip out of the drawer!

If there’s no lake or ocean near you, or driving there is going to be more stressful than fun, feel free to substitute a day at the park!

Why else do you deserve a day at the beach/park?

Every Friday, I’ll be offering up something fun and/or courageous for us all to try over the weekend. Be sure to comment to let us know how it went!

This weekend’s challenge: smile at strangers.

Depending what size city/town you live in, this may seem like a radical idea. I remember my sister telling me once on the New York subway not to smile because people would either think I was crazy, or a gullible, easy-target tourist!

Smiling has been shown to improve our health and attractiveness, and to improve our own mood.

Here’s how you do it:

I live in a decent-sized prairie town where people are pretty friendly, so I’ll up the challenge by going to the downtown district where we have our share of suits rushing by on Important Business.

Things to investigate:

- Is it contagious? Do people smile back? Does age or clothes style affect the return rate?
- Does it feel good just to do it, even if people don’t respond?
- If people don’t smile back, do you feel judged somehow?

Maybe another weekend we’ll try something radical like saying “good morning” to our fellow world-dwellers…

(Continued from Part I)

Whoa. “Work Softer.” What would that look like? And what if I don’t want to be working at everything all the time? How about just Being? Be Softer. Enjoy a Softer Life. Yes please. Yum.

Almost immediately though, I felt guilty. (Ah Guilt, the charming companion to The Badger*). Who was I to live a softer life? Life is hard. “Everyone knows that.” And if I decided to have a softer life, what about all the people in the world who truly do have hard lives? And what about the planet? Wouldn’t having a soft life mean being totally reckless and greedy and disregarding environmental impact? That’s not what I meant, that’s not what I was after. Could I create a concept of Being Softer that went beyond myself?

I hope so. That’s my experiment here. To find a way to be Softer with myself (gentler), Softer to others (kinder), and Softer on the planet (greener). In short, doing my part to create a softer world, where everyone can experience a softer life.

Interested? Let’s try it together. See what happens. See if, as the coked-up inner Badger warns us, the world crumbles, nothing gets done, we’re taken advantage of, and we end up on the street. Or, as I believe, we end up way less stressed out — calmer, happier, healthier, more peaceful, more content, having more fun, more in touch with the world and universe — and able to pass along all those poz vibes to others.

I’ll be offering techniques, thoughts (my own and others’), resources, suggestions, experiments to try, and opportunities to share your own experiences and findings. I look forward to playing and seeking softness with you!

* Martha Beck calls this our prehistoric “Lizard Brain” sending out constant messages of fear. Julia Cameron calls it our Inner Critic. Some religions call it Illusion.

One day, not so long ago, I was burned out from working on a movie, and trying to recover by lying down on a couch to read some mindless fiction. But I kept hearing this voice saying, “What are you doing on the couch? You should be looking for your next gig! You should be revising your resume, you should be out networking, you should be cleaning the house, you should be figuring out how to make more money…” Perhaps you’ve heard this voice? It’s not very restful.

I was talking to a friend about how frustrated I was that my energy was sapped, when I needed to get going on future projects and ambitions and achievements, and she asked gently, “Is this working for you?”

I stopped, mind officially blown. What kind of question was that? I was On My Way, on a Career Path, heading to Success, checking off a list of Achievements.

I breathed for a moment. And thought. Or rather checked in with my gut instinct, which is much more likely to bring me the truth.

No, I realized, “This” was not working for me. “This” being a lifestyle of multi-tasking, hyper productivity, constantly striving to be Better, to do More, to have More, to achieve More. In fact, “this” was exhausting the heck out of me, draining me mentally, physically and emotionally. I was not, in short, having fun.

But what else was there? I wondered.

I asked myself, “What is the opposite of Work Harder?” Certainly not “Work Smarter,” which is just another form of pressure: figuring out what “smart” is and deciding whether what I’m doing now is “smarter” than what I was doing before. No, being “smarter” or “more productive” is still a voice in my head constantly badgering: asking, yelling, judging whether I’m being Smart Enough, Fast Enough, Tough Enough or Productive Enough.

So that left the true opposite of Harder: “Softer.”

On to Part II