Tag Archives: stress

Can You Laugh at Yourself?

Leave a reply

The most confident people are able to laugh.
They laugh under stress, they laugh at jokes, even if they are not particularly funny (out of respect for the joke-teller – as long as they are not disrespectful jokes), they laugh at themselves when things go wrong or when ‘Murphy’s Law’ takes over their life for a moment, and they laugh at insults.
Do your best at work and in life, but don’t sweat the small stuff. And don’t let anyone put you in a bad mood just because they can’t control their own life, mood swings, anger issues, jealousy, workload…the list goes on. Help them if you can, but do not let others walk over you. No doormat here!

Laugh my friends. You don’t need stress and anger inside you. I leave you with one of my favourite odd-but-true quotes:

“When the vultures start circling, the thought of how silly they look will put things in a truer perspective.” – David Carradine

Content Stress is Best

Leave a reply

As a general rule,

▪ Stressed words in a sentence are considered content words. These include nouns (e.g. kitchen, Peter), (most) main verbs (e.g. visit, construct), adjectives (e.g. beautiful, interesting), and adverbs (e.g. often, carefully).

▪ Non-stressed words are considered function words. These include determiners (e.g.: the, a, an), auxiliary verbs (e.g.: is, am, were), prepositions (e.g.: before, of, in), conjunctions (e.g.: but, and, so), and pronouns (e.g.: they, she, he)

Read the following sentence aloud:
The beautiful mountain appeared transfixed in the distance.

Now read this sentence aloud:
He can come on Saturdays as long as he doesn’t have to do any homework in the evening.

Notice that the first sentence actually takes about the same time to speak well! Even though the second sentence is approximately 30% longer than the first, the sentences take the same time to speak. This is because there are five stressed words in each sentence.