A guest blog from my colleague Elizabeth Gordon, professional organizer, on the importance of getting the clutter out of your life

The beginning of the school year is an exciting time. New classes, new faces and a chance for new experiences. But what is going on in your physical environment that may be affecting your personal and/or professional life? Clear that clutter for some renewed energy!

There is so much I can say about clutter. Just looking at a pile of junk is enough to raise your blood pressure and heart rate, increase stress and anxiety and make you feel depressed. Things that are neat and orderly have the exact opposite affect. You will feel lighter, have more energy and have peace of mind.

By now you have started to build an awareness of how stress and anxiety can infiltrate you life and influence how you experience your life. The use of these tools can assist in building your ability to recognize when stress is effecting you as well as giving you specific guidelines to help manage and release your stress.

The final tool that can be of great benefit in reducing streets in your life is the use of meditation.  I know, some of you read that word and want to leave the room.  But meditation doesn’t have to be a difficult process that involves hours of your day or a trip to an ashram to escape.

Keep your sunny side up. It sounds like an old maxim shared by our grandmothers to buoy their sprits when things got tough.  But there is some truth to this adage that can be a powerful weapon in the war on stress.

Optimism is a powerful tool that can affect our long term mood and in turn relieve stress and anxiety.

You may not be aware of it but at almost every moment of your day, especially if you live in a big city, there is noise in the background.  Cars honking, radios blaring, the continuous hum of traffic in the background.

All this stimulus and input can be stressful on your mind and body.

Stress is a crafty little devil and even though you are focusing on taking better care of yourself with the first three steps of the program, stress has other places that it likes to hide out.

Stuff happens in our lives and in any moment we have two choices we can take it all inside and feel bad about ourselves or we can talk to friends, family, and loved ones and get things out of our system.

Today’s stress reduction tool is about getting back in touch with all of the fun things that you enjoy in your life.  Remember back before life became all about deadlines, projects, and bills.

What were the things you used to enjoy?

Welcome to day two of your stress reduction toolkit.  Hopefully you started your day off with a healthy breakfast and maybe even got in a little bit of morning exercise to kick start your day.

Today we are going to look at step two in reducing stress in your life.  For many people when they,” kick start” their morning they do it with a big cup of coffee.

And yet that very same cup of coffee that you are using to pick you up contains large amounts of caffeine, which can set up the body for stress and tension over the long hall.

Ever have one of those bad days where nothing seems to go right? The alarm goes off late, the washing machine is on the blink, and a major project is due in just a few hours. Now imagine stringing these separate incidents together day after day, hour after hour, until it feels like every waking moment is overwhelming.

For some people this reality is known as living with stress.

I know I share a lot of methods on meditation and relaxation but sometimes it is the simple tasks of daily life that can bring us back to our center.

For me the task is cooking.

Anxiety and fear have taken hold.  Many lives these days are influenced by decisions not based on reasoned sense but on the fear that has been created all around us.  But how much of that fear is real and how much of it is inflicted upon us by our own sense of lack and self-doubt?