I am always feeling stressed. My boyfriend says it is just a cop-out for me being an angry person. Is that true? I have tried to exercise to release tension and to get enough sleep to stay relaxed and healthy, but my stress always comes back. What am I doing wrong? ~ Stressed Out

Have you ever watched an animal at rest, completely relaxed, who springs to alertness and readiness if startled? We are no different than animals. If everything is calm and under control, then we are just fine. But have something change outside of us and that startles or threatens us – a sudden traffic jam, someone who is in a bad mood and takes it out on us, a bad experience at work with our supervisor. Up goes our blood pressure and heart rate, and we are likely to feel exasperated and angry.

Probably the biggest difference between us and an animal is that once the immediate threat is over, the animal goes back to his original state of relaxation, but we stew over the event and have trouble letting it go.

While stress is always a response to change, not everyone has that reaction. It is therefore not an inevitable result of living in this complex and busy world. This is good news, for it lets us know that if someone else can stay calm, we can, too. What makes the difference between someone who becomes stressed and someone who does not? It is very easy to have an unconscious expectation or demand that life stay the same, and that we have no problems. When change occurs, therefore, or if we do encounter a problem, our "stress" reaction is actually a mini-panic attack or tantrum.

Stress is the result of not knowing how to accept change in a healthy, adaptive way. All of us like to feel in control of our lives, but the truth is that we are not. Far greater forces are at work.

While we have the power to choose our reaction to what happens, we do not have the power to determine what happens. A simple example is that you can choose to scratch an itch on your nose, but you cannot choose to create or eliminate that itch. The desire to be "in control" is therefore a cause of stress. When we learn to "let go" of control and focus instead on our ability to choose our reaction, we eliminate the stress in our lives, for we are not fighting reality. In physical situations, we instinctively know this. You would not grab a hot frying pan and think "I do not want it to be hot!" You would immediately let go of it, accepting the reality.

We can learn to do the same thing in every situation. We can train ourselves to instantly accept the reality of what is before us. Rather than having to fight or run, we can go limp inside in acceptance. Only then do we have the ability to take our true power in the world - not the control of what is outside of us, but rather the control of our reaction. We can contemplate and determine what we want to do. If we are in a traffic jam, we can tighten up and get angry or we can accept that although we certainly do not like being there, that is the reality. Then we can deliberately choose what to do, given our ultimate helplessness about the external situation.

No matter how hard we work at this, however, all of us will have times when we do get stressed. You are very smart to use exercise to release the tension. When we are startled, adrenaline is produced to fuel our "fight-or-flight" response, and we need to do something to release that adrenaline. If we do not, it stays in our body and wreaks havoc. The "anger" your boyfriend is noticing is the result of the adrenaline keeping you ready to deal with a "danger" that you do not know how to come to peace with. While exercise is an excellent outlet for that adrenalized energy, as you have noticed, it is not enough to completely release it. Deliberate, mindful "letting go" will help you when exercise is not enough. MYH

• Take charge of your breathing. Take long, slow, deep breaths. Hold them and feel your chest expanding. Feel the tight muscles in your chest getting stretched by the fullness of your lungs. Release your breath slowly, through your mouth, and pause before you inhale again.

• Take charge of your tension. Identify where you are tight. Deliberately relax. Tell yourself that all you can do is be right here, right now.

• Take charge of your self-talk. Don’t try to blame your helplessness on yourself. That perpetuates the illusion that you should have been able to be in control and prevent a difficulty. Sometimes we need to go through an experience in order to have the wisdom of hindsight. How many of us are psychic and can read the future?

• Stay calm and ask yourself what you can do that will feel good and right, given the reality of the situation – as opposed to focusing on what "should" have happened.