Reducing Stress

By now this will not be news to most readers, but I carry a lot of stress around with me. About a month back, Jen had a little intervention with me on the topic. She pointed out that since she has known me, my stress levels have been on the rise. It’s a bit of a two steps toward the stress one step back kind of scenario, so it hasn’t been a direct trip to stressland… still it’s been adding up.

I did a bit of research into stress manuals and came up with The Relaxation and Stress Reduction Workbook. It turns out to be a bit of a bible on the topic, and it’s been around for more than 25 years. It’s in its fifth edition, recently revised. This is a great book. One that I heartily recommend to pretty much everyone.

It all but says Don’t Panic in
large friendly letters on the cover.

Here’s how the book is laid out. The first two chapters have background information on stress that are common to everyone. The meat of the book follows, in the shape of a chapter with instructions for virtually every known stress reduction technique.

The real value of the book comes in a large chart that lets you match the effects of stress in your life (e.g. back pain, chronic worrying, irritability) to the specific chapters known to help with those effects (e.g. breathing, meditation, refuting irrational ideas, worry control).

The book gives you enough background on each technique to let you understand how and why it will work, and whether it’s for you. It suggests picking 3 or so chapters and trying them out. As with all these kinds of books there is a point where the rubber meets the road and you actually have to work on your issues; the great thing with this book is that by directing you to things that will work you ideally get good results without flailing around too much.

In any case, I’m still at the early stage of this process, but I am hopeful. Several chapters in this book describe me to a tee. I’ll keep you posted.

If you think it sounds like you should read this book, you should. I am seriously thinking about giving these out to people as gifts. No offense, but I know a lot of people like me who could use it.

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› health     2006-07-13 21:17   ...0