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Most people who try to reduce their levels of stress look to the obvious events in their life like financial issues, job-related issues, sexual performance, etc.

Often there is another source of stress in our lives, and it can be a major drain of our attention and energy, though we try hard to ignore it: unfulfilled goals.

Everyone has them. Yet, most people rationalise them away by inventing justifications for continuing to keep those goals repressed. Excuses run the gambit from lacking of opportunity and education, to something bigger that puts out of reach the notion of achieving those goals.

Is there a goal you have been putting off to some distant future time for some reason? Think about it. Those are the goals that create unresolved stress points in your life that, in turn, can result in damage to your mental and physical health. Some of the more obvious and most common include:

  • Losing weight
  • Becoming more athletic
  • Getting a job, or getting a better job, or getting a promotion
  • Starting your own business
  • Spending more time with your children
  • Travelling

Obviously people have many other goals. Whatever your goal, if you do not direct attention to fulfilling it, it will nibble away at your energy, attention, and patience and can even have a profound influence on almost all other matters in your life.

Hidden or unfilled goals often contributes to the frustration people feel, but can’t identify. When that frustration reaches a boiling or breaking point, people can sometimes act in irrational ways, even dangerous ways.

Financial stress, for example, left unchecked, can result in violence in the workplace, in the family, even result in road rage. Or, it may be a bit more docile but still be manifested in such health issues as irritability, lack of patience or concentration, maybe even be a hidden cause of your hypertension, (high blood pressure).

If that goal is a suitable one, but you just have been dragging your feet on pursuing it, it just might be time to take a more responsible and more mature approach.

Intense, focused, hard effort on acquiring the knowledge and skill, or taking other actions, on those stress-causing goals, even for a short period of time can have a profound effect on your life and the lives of those around you. Pick the one goal that is the most significant stress point for you and focus your mind, time and effort on accomplishing or satisfying it…even if you can only put effort into doing that for a brief period of time.

Many goals can be accomplished by allocating a wee bit of extra time each day, or when appropriate, to acquiring the skills or knowledge or doing some of the actions necessary to achieve that goal. Each of us have only 24 hours each day. So accomplishments require reallocating and reprioritising how we spend our 24 hours. Perhaps you may need to stop doing some activities; perhaps, awaken 30 minutes earlier?

Whatever important goals you have been suppressing or avoiding, once you tackle it, or them, you will discover that your life ,and the lives you affect, can change for the better.

It doesn’t take a long time for beneficial changes to manifest themselves once a person begins changing their repressed, but healthy, useful goals.