Easy... I torture my characters a little more. Seriously... for me the more stressed I am the morse stressed my characters get, I suppose because I pour my stress into my writing. When I am really stressed my fingers just fly over the keys and I have grooves in them to prove it.
The other thing I do is paint. I love to paint but i haven't done it for years. I wonder if it is the fact that I have been very stressed lately that has driver me back to it.
Now my major stress is in deciding whether to write or whether to paint