Monday, 1:45 PM. Your stressful day is about to become a world-class stressful day.

Why?

Because you’re standing behind The Little Old Lady From Hell!!

You’re at your local pharmacy because you need to pick up a prescription for your daughter who has the flu. You promised you’d be back in the office by two. But that’s never going to happen. Not if the three people ahead of you have anything to say about it. One of them is The Little Old Lady from Hell (LOLFH), an elderly woman on a walker, wearing a hearing aid, who, at the moment, is looking at a package of Maalox as if it has just magically materialized in her hand!

Next, LOLFH begins to question the pharmacist assistant, who is trying to be helpful. The guy in front of you anxiously turns to see if another register is open. He is drinking a Red Bull and bobbing up and down on his feet. This doesn’t make you feel any calmer. The third person ahead of you is on her cell phone, yakking away with her hair stylist–directly in your ear!

You nervously glance at your watch. If you’re not back in the office in ten minutes, your boss is going to be furious and you’ll miss a crucial conference call.

Meanwhile, LOLFH keeps nattering away about antacid pills. This makes you feel good and stressed. You feel like you’d like to pour the entire bottle down her throat, snatch the cell phone out of the woman’s hand, fling it into the street, and Crazy Glue the bobbing Red Bull guy’s feet to the floor.

But this isn’t Dodge City in 1870. You can’t take the law into your own hands. So you’re stuck, stuck in the line from Hell, behind three people whose only function in life is to make the Subway tuna salad you bolted down on the way over here start doing a Tango in your tummy.

Besides your stomach upset, you feel other things happening in your body. Like your heart racing, tenseness and pain in your shoulders and chest, flushed face, a sudden urge to pee-even blurry vision. But these physical symptoms are nothing compared to the thoughts racing through your mind. Thoughts like:

“Why do I always get in the wrong line!?”
“Why doesn’t the counter person tell the LOLFH to wait until she takes care of other customers!?”
“Why the hell can’t I take an extra ten minutes at lunch without getting reamed out by my boss!?”
“What if I can’t make it back on time!? Will I be fired?!”

Welcome to the world of stress. If this or a similar experience has ever happened to you, then you know firsthand what stress is. And you don’t need-or want-a scientific explanation. You just want that stress to be gone!

Chances are good that if you’re like the rest of us, you encounter stress and anxiety provoking events on a daily, even hourly basis. And we’re not even talking about the big stuff. Like getting “pink slipped” at work on Christmas Eve, or missing the plane to a vital client meeting, or finding out that you, your spouse, or child have a life threatening disease with a 50-50 survival rate-and little or no health insurance.

And speaking of health, there’s so much stress out there that the medical statistics are mind-boggling: Over 75% of all doctor visits in this country are stress-related. You may be a victim of stress and not even realize what it’s doing to you, both physically and mentally.

That you will feel stress is a guaranteed, never-ending fact of life. And so your only hope is to learn a way to get through life with the best possible and most effective stress reduction strategy you can find.

So what’s the answer? Can you escape from stress? Is there some secret tool, technique, or method to reduce stress?

The answer to the first question is “no”: Stress is a constant companion for all of us. But-and here’s the good news– the answer to the second question is definitely “yes!”

There is a secret tool to reduce any kind of stress. Something so simple that you may not believe it at first. And it’s this:

The fastest, most efficient way out of stress is through it.

Yes. I’ll repeat this again. Make it a screensaver. Put it under a refrigerator magnet:

The fastest, most efficient way out of stress is through it.

“How do I do that!?” you say, “My stress is so dense I need a jackhammer to break through it!” Fortunately, the way “through” stress doesn’t require a jackhammer; all it requires is your willingness to deal with stress in a new and constructive way. One that is simple, painless, and, as you will find, might change your life forever.

This tool is called “meditation.” And given the state of the world-and our national economy-there has never been a better time for you to learn how to use it. There are numerous meditation programs out there to check out and chose from. One of them 8 Minute Meditation Stress Relief, specifically targets stress and uses meditation in 8 minute periods-the time between two TV commercials. It’s what you might call “an eastern tool that gives you western results-a way out of your stress.

By going through it.

Victor Davich is the author & creator of “8 Minute Meditation”. TIME Magazine calls it “the most American form of meditation yet.” Victor’s other best-selling books & audios empower over 90,000 readers with unique Eastern Tools for Western results. Anyone can learn to meditate, and anyone can reduce their stress with these simple Stress Relief techniques.