I have always struggled to live a stress-free life. I worry about almost every aspect of life and living this way has caused me a lot of problems including various bouts of ill health from time to time. I needed to find a way of coping with and reducing the amount of stress in my life and in this article I write about how I have managed to achieve this.

I suppose my main areas of anxiety have been to do with relationships with my friends and with members of the opposite sex, financial, for example worrying about money and also work related stress.

I am the kind of person who is classed as a thinker. I basically think far too much about personal matters. This thinking is very much in a negative manner and is a cycle which I have found hard to break.

About a year ago I was invited to appear on a national radio show to talk about my occupation which is website promotion and offering stuttering treatment, and also strangely enough helping an organisation to do with becoming a foster carer. I was due to talk live on this radio program at around 2pm. All morning as was my way of course, I was thinking and worrying about how I would come across to other people. I was afraid that I would make a fool of myself and would sound like a bit of an idiot. I also, for whatever reason, started to stress about whether I would be able to remember, under the amount of pressure that I was likely be under, the important aspects of my occupation which people would be interested in.

To say that I was becoming rather nervous would have been an understatement - there were a number of times when I picked up the phone to cancel the whole thing - before putting the telephone back down again. I then called up a good friend of mine who has always provided me with sound advice. I explained about the radio show and about my fears. He advised me to think in a much more positive way about the interview and to start some deep breathing exercises. It would, he continued, be a chance to promote my own services and therefore was something to be grateful for.

He advised me that what I needed to do was to keep myself busy. If I am very busy, I would not have any time to think in my usual negative way. He stated that he believed that I needed to find things that would occupy my mind. He thought that I was spending the majority of the time stressing about this and that. If however I had a much busier life then I would not have so much time to think in this manner.

This is something I had realised a few years before but had in truth not acted on. I thought about what my friend had said and then decided to get stuck into some much needed gardening. I am happy to let you know that the radio interview went fine.