5 Ways to Handle Life's Big Stuff Life Lesson No. 1: Skinned Knees Heal Themselves We scrape our knee and the wound heals. "If you step back and think about it, it's remarkable," Carlson writes in Good Housekeeping. "In order to handle the big stuff in life, we need to trust that our emotional wounds--like physical ones--can heal on their own." Life Lesson No. 2: Measure Twice, Cut Once Before reacting to stressful events, stop and THINK. Take a few minutes to assess the situation and figure out the best response. Silence the extraneous thoughts. Focus on what's most important now. Life Lesson No. 3: Don' Honk At the Slow Guy We have so much to do. We get impatient. We yell. We get annoyed. We explode. We get frustrated. We honk. The solution: Learn to be more patient. Life Lesson No. 4: Learn to Love the Rain It's easy to blame it all on stress. Stress isn't what ails you. "Stress isn't something that just happens to us. It's created by our own thinking," Life Lesson No. 5: Celebrate Silence When someone you love is hurting, you want to help. You want to talk it over. But you should listen--not talk. For life's real crises, there is nothing you can say anyway that will right the situation. So just be there. Listen.