You should learn to take charge of your life and recognize that many things are ______ your control. Being tense may cause tremendous and rapid ______ in blood pressure. Alarm or stress chemicals can literally ______ heart muscle fibers.The main factors causing stress are ______ ,______ and doubt, together with the ______ . For some people, anger is the ______ of their stress. The NICE factors—new, interesting, ______ experiences—are recommended in order to calm you down. Like Ben Franklin, you have to set your ______ . To face all the problems you have little control over, you have to learn ______ .
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There's a Lot More to Life than a JobIt has often been remarked that the saddest thing about youth is that it is wasted on the young. Reading a survey report on first-year college students, I recalled the regret, " ______ " The survey revealed what I had already suspected from informal polls of students both in Macon and at the Robins Resident Center: If it (whatever it may be) won't compute and you can't drink it, smoke it or spend it, then "it" holds little value. According to the survey based on responses from over 188,000 students, today's college beginners are "more consumeristic and less idealistic" than at any time in the 17 years of the poll. Not surprising in these hard times, the students' major objective "is to be financially well off". Less important than ever is developing a meaningful philosophy of life. ______ Interest in teaching, social service and the humanities is at a low, along with ethnic and women's studies. ______ That's no surprise either. A friend of mine (a sales representative for a chemical company) was making twice the salary of college instructors during her first year on the job—even before she completed her two-year associate degree. "I'll tell them what they can do with their music, history, literature, etc.," she was fond of saying. ______ Frankly, I'm proud of the young lady (not her attitude but her success). But why can't we have it both ways? Can't we educate people for life as well as for a career? I believe we can. If we cannot, then that is a conviction against our educational system—kindergarten, elementary, secondary and higher. In a time of increasing specialization, more than ever, we need to know what is truly important in life. This is where age and maturity enter. ______ Most of us finally have the insight that quality of life is not entirely determined by a balance sheet. Sure, everyone wants to be financially comfortable, but we also want to feel we have a perspective on the world beyond the confines of our occupation; we want to be able to render service to our fellow men and to our God. If it is a fact that the meaning of life does not dawn until middle age, is it then not the duty of educational institutions to prepare the way for that revelation? ______ While it's true all of us need a career, preferably a prosperous one, it is equally true that our civilization has collected an incredible amount of knowledge in fields far removed from our own. And we are better for our understanding of these other contributions—be they scientific or artistic. It is equally true that, in studying the diverse wisdom of others, we learn how to think. ______ Weekly we read of unions that went on strike for higher wages, only to drive their employer out of business. No company, no job. ______ But the most important argument for a broad education is that in studying the accumulated wisdom of the ages, we improve our moral sense. I saw a cartoon recently which depicts a group of businessmen looking puzzled as they sit around a conference table; one of them is talking on the intercom: "Miss Baxter," he says, "could you please send in someone who can distinguish right from wrong?" In the long run that's what education really ought to be about. I think it can be. My college roommate, now head of a large shipping company in New York, not surprisingly was a business major. ______ That's the way it should be. Oscar Wilde had it right when he said we ought to give our ability to our work but our genius to our lives. Let's hope our educators answer students' cries for career education, but at the same time let's ensure that students are prepared for the day when they realize their short-sightedness. ______
Back in the good old days of ______ economic ______ —in 1950s and 1960s—a person could ______ to do something new, ______ and ______ in life but could also choose to say, “That’s not for me: I am going to ______ it safe in life. I am going to stay in my hometown and have a nice comfortable ______ in a salaried job.” ______ for the vast majority of Americans. ______ over the next 10 years whether we like it or not, and ______ .______.
Lighten Your Load and Save Your LifeIf you often feel angry and overwhelmed, like the stress in your life is spinning out of control, then you may be hurting your heart. If you don't want to break your own heart, you need to learn to take charge of your life where you can—and recognize there are many things beyond your control. So says Dr. Robert S. Eliot, author of a new book titled From Stress to Strength: How to Lighten Your Load and Save Your Life. He's a clinical professor of medicine at the University of Nebraska. Eliot says there are people in this world that he calls "hot reactors". ______ Eliot says researchers have found that stressed people have higher cholesterol levels, among other things. "We've done years of work in showing that excess alarm or stress chemicals can literally burst heart muscle fibers. When that happens it happens very quickly, within five minutes. ______ The heart beats like a bag of worms instead of a pump. And when that happens, we can't live." Eliot, 64, suffered a heart attack at age 44. He attributes some of the cause to stress. For years he was a "hot reactor". ______ He's now doing very well. The main predictors of destructive levels of stress are the FUD factors—fear, uncertainty and doubt—together with perceived lack of control, he says. For many people, the root of their stress is anger, and the trick is to find out where the anger is coming from. "Does the anger come from a feeling that everything must be perfect?" Eliot asks. "That's very common in professional women. ______ They think, 'I should, I must, I have to.' Good enough is never good enough. Perfectionists cannot delegate. They get angry that they have to carry it all, and they blow their tops. ______ " "Others are angry because they have no compass in life. And they give the same emphasis to a traffic jam that they give a family argument," he says. "If you are angry for more than five minutes—if you stir the anger within you and let it build with no safety outlet—you have to find out where it's coming from." "What happens is that the hotter people get, physiologically, with mental stress, the more likely they are to blow apart with some heart problem." One step to calming down is to recognize you have this tendency. ______ Eliot recommends taking charge of your life. "If there is one word that should be substituted for stress, it's control. ______ " "You have to decide what parts of your life you can control," he says. "Stop where you are on your trail and say, 'I'm going to get my compass out and find out what I need to do.' " He suggests that people write down the six things in their lives that they feel are the most important things they'd like to achieve. Ben Franklin did it at age 32. " ______ " Eliot says you can first make a list of 12 things, then cut it down to 6 and set your priorities. "Don't give yourself impossible things, but things that will affect your identity, control and self-worth." "Put them on a note card and take it with you and look at it when you need to. Since we can't create a 26-hour day we have to decide what things we're going to do." Keep in mind that over time these priorities are going to change. " ______ " From Eliot's viewpoint, the other key to controlling stress is to "realize that there are other troublesome parts of your life over which you can have little or no control—like the economy and politicians". You have to realize that sometimes with things like traffic jams, deadlines and unpleasant bosses, " ______ "
Weeping for My Smoking DaughterMy daughter smokes. While she is doing her homework, her feet on the bench in front of her and her calculator clicking out answers to her geometry problems, I am looking at the half-empty package of Camels tossed carelessly close at hand. ______ My heart feels terrible. I want to weep. In fact, I do weep a little, standing there by the stove holding one of the instruments, so white, so precisely rolled, that could cause my daughter's death. ______ She doesn't know this, but it was Camels that my father, her grandfather, smoked. But before he smoked cigarettes made by manufacturers—when he was very young and very poor, with glowing eyes—he smoked Prince Albert tobacco in cigarettes he rolled himself. ______ By the late forties and early fifties no one rolled his own anymore (and few women smoked) in my hometown of Eatonton,Georgia. ______ He never looked as fashionable as Prince Albert, though; he continued to look like a poor, overweight, hard-working colored man with too large a family, black, with a very white cigarette stuck in his mouth. I do not remember when he started to cough. Perhaps it was unnoticeable at first, a little coughing in the morning as he lit his first cigarette upon getting out of bed. ______ It was not unusual for him to cough for an hour. My father died from "the poor man's friend", pneumonia, one hard winter when his lung illnesses had left him low. I doubt he had much lung left at all, after coughing for so many years. He had so little breath that, during his last years, he was always leaning on something. ______ Near the very end of his life, and largely because he had no more lungs, he quit smoking. He gained a couple of pounds, but by then he was so slim that no one noticed. When I travel to Third World countries I see many people like my father and daughter. ______ In these poor countries, as in American inner cities and on reservations, money that should be spent for food goes instead to the tobacco companies; over time, people starve themselves of both food and air, effectively weakening and hooking their children, eventually killing themselves. I read in the newspaper and in my gardening magazine that the ends of cigarettes are so poisonous that if a baby swallows one, it is likely to die, and that the boiled water from a bunch of them makes an effective insecticide. There is a deep hurt that I feel as a mother. ______ I remember how carefully I ate when I was pregnant, how patiently I taught my daughter how to cross a street safely. For what, I sometimes wonder; so that she can struggle to breathe through most of her life feeling half her strength, and then die of self-poisoning, as her grandfather did? There is a quotation from a battered women's shelter that I especially like: "Peace on earth begins at home."______ I think of a quotation for people trying to stop smoking: "Every home is a no-smoking zone." Smoking is a form of self-battering that also batters those who must sit by, occasionally joke or complain, and helplessly watch. I realize now that as a child I sat by, through the years, and literally watched my father kill himself: ______