Stress and Cupfakes

Good morning to you!  I am having my morning coffee, mentally going over my to-do list and preparing supplies for my very first "Jersey Shore" cupfake!  It is an ode to "Snooki"!  I think it should be a very fun cupfake and I hope my readers, customers and fans get a kick out of the finished product.

Today I called my post "Stress & Cupfakes" because of all the things we all have going on in our lives both the stressful AND the fun.  I am sure if I were sitting with all of you around a table we could all run off a list a mile long about all the negative things going on in life right now.  I once heard someone say, that if you gather a group of people and all of you put your problems on the table, you'd gladly take your own.  So through all the craziness I am trying to keep that idea in mind.  That no matter what you have going on that is just sucking the life energy out of you, there is someone who probably has it much worse and if we have to choose whose shoes to be in, we should probably just stick to our own.

I find that one of the ways I MUST deal with stress is to completely blank out the things that are driving me crazy.  For me, its to either clean my house or create something.  And no, I'm not always making just cupfakes!  I think when you are creating something, your mind focuses on the task at hand, time goes by and you realize that an hour or two went by and you didn't think about your problems even once.  You may go right back to thinking and stressing about them, but for the last couple of hours your mind had a rest from it all.

Some of the things I like to do to give the mind a break:

Arts & craftsy type stuff (it takes a lot of focus and concentration)
Cleaning up or organizing stuff (one of those mindless kinds of things that keeps your body and hands busy)
writing blog posts!

Some of the activities that actually contribute to my stress
Sitting and reading a magazine (I think its the guilt factor that I should be doing something more productive....I should work on this)
Talking on the phone (I hate the phone)
Dealing with "paperwork". I loathe having papers around and pretty much throw most of it away or take care of it immediately because I just despise looking at it.

So what does all of this mean?  I just took a look at my stress-relievers and realize that I really should have a more than three items on that list!  How sad for me!   I accept and encourage all suggestions!!!!