Doesn't involve drugs
Has no unpleasant side-effects
Costs nothing
Is available anywhere
Can be used by anyone
Has been scientifically proven to work
There really is a solution that ticks all these boxes. It's called "mindfulness." In this book, you're going to learn what mindfulness is, how to make it part of your everyday routine, and how it can transform your life.
Telford, Olivia. Mindfulness: The Remarkable Truth Behind Meditation and Being Present in Your Life (p. 9). Kindle Edition.
There are a few strings. As Olivia Telford writes, this activity is free but that means that it is difficult to make a living promoting, explaining, advocating or teaching it. The activity does require personal effort. How much effort is undetermined. You can make use of techniques for improving mindfulness in just a few minutes a day or you can enroll in a month or a year of retreat. What you choose to do and how you choose to do it may change over time. It doesn't require heroic effort or even big effort. As one of my favorite authors, Chade-Meng Tan, on the subject says, you just need a mind. The same author explains the minimum effort needed: one conscious breath.
I moved away from steady promotion of mindfulness development when I got a little bored repeating the simple directions over and over. That happened about when I began this blog, in 2008. Since then, I have read Larry Rosenberg's "Breath by Breath", several books by Jack Kornfield, Sylvia Boorstein's "Don't Just Do Something, Sit There!", Harvey Aronson's "Buddhist Practice on Western Ground" and other titles mentioned in this blog or on my website, such as here:
https://sites.google.com/site/kirbyvariety/meditation-1
I will add that developing mindfulness is far more valuable than fighting stress and anxiety. Doing so increases one's ability to see oneself, life, friends, issues, joys and other feelings better, understand them better and enjoy them better. Hard to believe but what else motivates an old guy to be such a promoter?
