There are many useful and powerful strategies for managing and mastering stress.

One of the best and most powerful strategies I have found to help clients manage their stress is to break it down into smaller and thus more manageable pieces.

How stress is like a pizza

Picture, if you will, your favorite type of pizza. Whatever it is for you, what would happen to you if you tried to eat your favorite type of pizza in just one bite?

That's right, you would choke.

So how do we eat a pizza? We cut into manageable slices and take a bite at a time.

In this way, something large, a pizza was broken down once into more manageable pieces. Then it was broken down even more to yet even more manageable pieces.

This is what we can do with stress as well.

An example of the power of breaking it down

Here's a bit of a pop quiz. The good news is you will not be graded.

What one piece of information does everyone that has ever gone to school have at their disposal? It's a rather large body of information, yet all of us have it memorized, and in a very particular order.

If you guessed the alphabet, step to the head of the class.

Now pause and consider this - the alphabet is 26 separate pieces of information that are memorized in a very particular order. By breaking this large body of information down into manageable chunks, we are able to create words, sentences, paragraphs, books, and even this article that you are reading.

All done through the power of breaking it down into manageable pieces.