Sermon Resources on stress management

The American Institute of Stress notes that 75 to 90 percent of visits to primary care physicians are for stress-related complaints . . . A Harvard study shows that people who live in a state of high ...

Nassim Nicholas Taleb, a best-selling statistician, argues that it is not even mere resilience we need, but what he calls antifragility . He groups things into three categories. First, fragile...

In the story of grace, the lack of hurry makes room for presence.

A common question I’m hearing from folks these days is whether it is beneficial (or a moral imperative) to pay attention to the news. The Catholic nun and social activist Dorothy Day asked the same qu...

In grad school, although I was studying to become a clinical psychologist, I started working at a Baptist church. I discovered then that I loved to preach . . . until one weekend when the sermon wasn’...

Mess creates stress.

Learn to master time, and you will be able—whatever you do, whatever the stress, in the storm, in tragedy, or simply in the confusion in which we continuously live—to be still, immobile in the present...

Leadership Trauma is Taking a Toll The word is out. According to Barna, as of March 2022, the percentage of pastors considering quitting full-time ministry within the past year sits at 42 percen...

“Thirty years ago,” Anne Lamott writes in her book Bird by Bird, “my older brother, who was ten years old at the time, was trying to get a report on birds written that he’d had three months to write. ...

A clock would make a poor bank. No customer would ever be able to deposit a moment to save for later because, at the end of the day, every second would be spent and the clock would be bankrupt. While ...

Would you like a no-stress life? A wise person would not accept that option, no matter how tempting it might sound. A stress-free life would be fatal. If we do not have change, challenge, and novelty ...

A study from Yale said the best way to deal with stress is to do a small act of generosity for someone else.

[Here is] a malady of modern times: unremitting and increasing levels of stress. The statistics on mounting stress and its detrimental effects on body, mind, emotions, and health shout at us. The Amer...

Although we use the word stress in a negative connotation, it actually is a value-neutral concept. In the medical sense, stress is the body’s response to any change required of it or any demand impose...

Reality is the leading cause of stress among those in touch with it.

Excessive stress occurs when the demands made on an organism exceed that organism’s reasonable capacities to fill them.

If stress happens too often or lasts too long, it can have bad effects. It can be linked to headaches, an upset stomach, back pain, and trouble sleeping. It can weaken your immune system, making it ha...

In his highly book, Inside Job , Stephen W. Smith shares the importance of finding balance, even as life seems to pull us in different directions: Overextending yourself is stretching your physic...

The American Psychological Association’s 2010 Stress in America survey finds that three-quarters of Americans experience stress at levels that increase their risk of developing chronic illnesses, incl...

Excessive, untreated stress can actually kill you. When you’re stressed, your body produces the hormone cortisol; which is designed to get your rear in gear as part of the fight-or-flight mechanism. H...

“The mind can go either direction under stress—toward positive or toward negative: on or off. Think of it as a spectrum whose extremes are unconsciousness at the negative end and hyperconsciousness at...

In times of stress, the best thing we can do for each other is to listen with our ears and our hearts and to be assured that our questions are just as important as our answers.

What you allow to occupy your mind will sooner or later determine your feelings, your speech and your actions. Thoughts . . . have a real impact on how you feel and behave.”

Make a point of watching quality documentaries: a study by the BBC and the University of California, Berkeley, found that viewing nature programmes increased feelings of awe, amusement and joy while r...

In his highly insightful work, Inside Job , Stephen W. Smith shares the importance of finding ways to rest and relax as part of a healthy, balanced life: I once read a book in which the author sa...

Research by Gallup shows that the more hours per day you spend doing what you’re good at, the less stressed you feel and the more you laugh, smile, and feel you’re being treated with respect.

Mind-management is a skill that needs to be learned and constantly upgraded as we grow from childhood into adulthood. For every new experience we need a new set of mind-management tools.

As adults, we develop all sorts of coping mechanisms to handle stress. Maybe you like to read a book, meditate, knit, watch TV, or exercise. When I was in New York, I used to go for a long run at the ...

I would even argue that the vast majority of the stress we experience is self-induced. That is, we feel stress when there is no real external threat to us, only some challenged belief, value, or expec...

A study in Berlin even found that the part of the brain that processes fear and stress (the amygdala) was healthier in people who lived within a kilometre of a forest. To help soothe your spirits and ...