“We’re all running around without a clue as to what we’re running around for,” said Fred Luskin, director of the Stanford Forgiveness Project and lecturer at the School of Education, at a workshop held yesterday afternoon.

Luskin, who focused on reducing day-to-day stress, said the most basic way to relieve stress is to “complain less and appreciate more.”

While many stress gurus advocate deep breathing, yoga or meditation, Luskin said that these techniques only help alleviate physical stress and miss deeper issues that can lead to anxiety.

In order to delve into these deeper issues, individuals must ask themselves if they are living for any specific purpose, Luskin said.

“Do you keep to that purpose so that when there are natural setbacks you have some goal in mind?” he asked the audience.

Second, Luskin said, “We complain too much about everything. If we could just shut up, our stress would plummet.”

He added that people often feel that they must choose between building wealth and achieving happiness, a dilemma that can cause confusion and strain.

“We are condemned by an obsessed consumer culture to believe that our well-being depends on gaining or accumulating more,” Luskin said.

But after our material needs our satisfied, he said, the things that ultimately make us happy are friends and family, meaningful work and a purpose greater than ourselves.

“If you remember the service you do in your daily life, then you have a different take on it, instead of always just trying to make it easy on yourself,” he added, referencing the Thomas Jefferson quote, “If there is real justice in the world, we will suffer the most.”

Americans have much to be thankful for but do not act like it, Luskin said.

He joked briefly about wealthy people who host his talks at enormous beach homes and throw lavish banquets. At one such event, Luskin said he overheard several attendees gathered around the food complaining about everything that went wrong during their summer vacations.

“We live in such a perverted area that every other person you know is re-modeling their kitchen for $50,000 dollars,” he said.

Luskin said he first began working on issues related to stress at the School of Medicine, where he was researching ways to decrease risks of heart disease, which has always been linked to high stress levels.

When an individual experiences stress, his or her body produces higher levels of the hormone cortisol, which in turn leads to arterial blockage and higher rates of heart disease, Luskin explains on his Web site.

While Luskin told patients that their heart ailments could be attributed to stress, many said they didn’t have time to address the problem.

“We are addicted to what we do out of habit,” Luskin said. “We do not want to make changes, even if our habits are killing us.”

Luskin and his colleagues provided one week of “forgiveness training” — a workshop that taught students how to manage their emotions like anger and be more forgiving — to 17 Catholic and Protestant men and women from Northern Ireland who had immediate family members murdered as a result of sectarian violence. After the seminar, attendees reported a 20 percent reduction in symptoms of depression and a 35 percent decline in symptoms related to stress, such as dizziness and headaches.

In addition to his work at the Forgiveness Project, he currently works as a senior fellow at the Stanford Center on Conflict and Negotiation.