Making Purposeful Posts

Recently I was perusing the blog of a married couple I know, and I was impressed that they acted on their impressions regarding their use of media by deciding to create a new blog that would focus on helping others with a particular issue. I think it would be great to follow suit. I first created this blog as something of a journal for myself, but I'd like to reach outward and write things that might help others as well. With that in mind, and considering my first post which spoke about my struggles with perfectionism, I have decided to direct many of my future posts to handling stress, perfectionism, and all that good stuff, from an average Joe (er, Jane).

As you can see from the excellently illustrated depiction above (cough, cough), I want to learn about how to be more optimistic, how to "find joy in the journey," "be grateful for having the ride," "come what may and love it," or whatever pithy phrase suits your fancy.

You should know that I am not a mental health professional. Also, I don't currently struggle with any mental health issues or have a personal history of them, and I'm grateful for that. Hence, I am on the lookout for preventative measures that will help me maintain my mental and emotional health. I want to post about what things work for me and for people in my life; I want to discuss things that we do every day to keep our stress at manageable levels. Not only will this have the cathartic benefits that I was looking for in a journal-like blog experience, but I hope it will also help all those out there with similar worry-wart tendencies. If you feel like your stress or anxiety is having a significant negative impact on your day to day life, I encourage you to seek some professional help, because this blog is not it.

Anyway, today I came across an awesome quote from Boyd K. Packer (emphasis added):

To suffer some anxiety, some depression, some disappointment, even some failure is normal. Teach your members that if they have a good, miserable day once in a while, or several in a row, to stand steady and face them. Things will straighten out. There is a great purpose in our struggle in life.

I think this concept is valuable because it's easy to get caught in a destructive thought pattern. When we're stressed out, we sometimes start to stress out about the fact that we're stressed out...and we feel bad because we shouldn't be stressed, we should be happy because of x, y, and z, etc. But I love the sentiment that it's okay to be stressed out every now and then. We're trying to focus on having healthy stress, but having hard days is by no means abnormal or wrong. I also emphasized the word "steady," because I love that it complements the title of my blog even though I didn't realize it at first.

I found that quote while exploring BYU's stress management resources. It looks like they have their own blog, too. It's a great place to start, so I may be pulling some ideas from them and trying them out. I'll let you know how my experimenting goes!