Selling Your Home With Less Stress

Even though most of the details of selling your home are usually handled by other people -- hopefully competent professionals -- it still can be a stressful experience.

Major life changes are a "mixed bag" when it comes to the effect they have on your mental equilibrium. On one hand, change can open up new doors of opportunity and give you a fresh lease on life. On the other hand, it forces you to step out of your comfort zone and deal with the element of unpredictability.

While every situation is different and there's no panacea for the stress that accompanies life transitions, here are a few strategies that will help make the road less bumpy.

• Choose an experienced real estate agent or Realtor who will provide the guidance, day-to-day support, and expertise you need to avoid many of the pitfalls and frustrations of selling a house. If you know you're in good hands, you'll have less of a tendency to worry about how things are going. The ideal real estate agent will instill confidence in you, provide you with regular progress reports, and do everything they can to make sure the sales process and other logistics keep moving forward and staying on track. They'll also provide you with good advice on how to effectively stage your home to improve its marketability.
• Go with the flow. Accept the fact that you'll need to keep your home immaculately clean, every day, to make the best possible impression on prospective buyers. There are also plenty of other tasks and challenges you'll have to deal with along the way. Sometimes it helps to remind yourself of the famous serenity prayer written by American theologian Reinhold Niebuhr back in the 1930's: "Grant me the serenity to accept the things I cannot change, courage to change the things I can, and wisdom to know the difference."
• Get enough sleep every night: Nothing undermines one's coping ability, patience, and resourcefulness more than struggling against a sleep deficit. Getting enough sleep, which is somewhere in the neighborhood of eight hours a night, is more crucial to one's physical and mental well-being than many people realize. When you prioritize getting a full night's sleep, you'll generally be able to think more clearly, keep setbacks in their proper perspective, and do a better job of rolling with the changes.