You need to stay focused during the day - starting the day focused is a major leap for most but you need to keep "topping up" because, surrounded as we are by normal crazy people, it's difficult to stay in the zone. So, stop now. Take a deep breath - feel it in your nostrils, windpipe, lungs and stomach... and count down five deep long breaths - breathe in reality and blow all the other nonsense away.

Everyday life can be an enormous struggle. Regardless of how "perfect" someone's life appears, everyone is confronted with real and present challenges - whether it is the unreasonable demands and deadlines of the organization, the challenging sales targets that we know are close to unachievable or the cashflow challenges of the small to medium size business... and I haven't even mentioned the challenges that family life or families in general can throw at us! We live in challenging times - certainly uncompromisingly challenging in comparison to the simple lives we lived when we were hunter-gatherers... that long-gone era when our brains developed to their current peak of perfection!

We're not equipped to live with the complexity that modern life throws at us - certainly not in our "native" state of mind. Yet, if we could not so much overcome as simply by-pass our own neural shortcomings, we would realize that all the pressures of everyday life are passing. Not only are they passing, they're minor wrinkles in a tapestry of life that, if we knew how to manage our minds, would be unwrinkled, smooth and free-flowing.

The problem with which you and I are confronted is self-made, internal and unreal. Yes, life throws real pressures at us - but what do we do as normal crazy people? We heap unreal pressure upon real pressure to make the real pressure close to unbearable. We try to muddle through whilst one half of our mind is whipping the other half that is trying, screaming "It's oh so bloody diffucult" - as if life weren't difficult enough.

A divided mind always fails. Our divided minds are failing us day in, day out. It's what is causing a developed world epidemic of hypertension, what is wreaking havoc - both in economic and health terms - through the daily self-triggering of stress. And it's all completely unnecessary and, in fact, self-delusional. Yes, if you're suffering from stress you're deluded, self-deluded. The effects are real but the cause is imaginary - your own imagination is doing it to you.

Stop, deep breaths, come to your senses, feel what it's like to breathe in and out, to be alive. Be thankful for all the good things you have in life (they pass too!) and do just what you need to do to not just ride life's big waves but to thrive and get to where you want to go. Get a grip on your own mind.