Table of Contents

Take the Stress Out of Your Life is not just a book, it is an entertaining and interactive program consisting of a book and two CDs ( more cd info ). This program will minimize your stress, maximize your health, improve your relationships and work performance, and enable you to find more joy in every day. Stories of patients and students demonstrate how to deal with stress and inspire us to make important changes.

Introduction

Stress is one of the rampant illnesses of our time, yet far too many people don’t take it seriously. This chapter explains the many conditions caused or aggravated by stress, and shows why treating it is one of the easiest and most effective ways to improve your health and lengthen your life.

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1. Quick-Start Guide: Reduce Your Stress in Six Minutes

A mini-chapter to give you an instant taste of success. This introduces an easy six-minute relaxation meditation on the accompanying CD, and encourages you to note your state of stress before and after.

2. Good Stress/Bad Stress

People think of stress as a mental issue, but it is absolutely physical. Stressful events flood our bodies with very physical hormones that cause very physical changes. This chapter explains why we all have this system, why stress can be good or bad, and why it is vital that we learn to manage it.

3. Learn to Relax

Being able to relax is essential to everyone’s good health, yet how many of us get any training in how to do it? This chapter remedies that and introduces simple diaphragmatic breathing exercises, some using the accompanying CDs. You’ll probably find that you will use these techniques every day.

4. Learn to Enjoy Your Day

Most stress is caused by worrying about the future or fretting about the past—two things that aren’t part of our momentary reality and that we can’t control. Learning the technique of mindfulness—being in the present moment, observing our thoughts, and letting them go without feeling forced to act on them—is central to achieving long-term peace and happiness. This chapter introduces a number of meditations and mental practices for recognizing thought patterns and developing healthier ones.

5. Put Mindfulness into Practice

There are a variety of hints that can make mindfulness easier and a more natural. Through these practices we can actually change our brain to minimize our stress and put more joy in every day.

6. Change Your Thoughts

We tend to think that our emotions are caused by external events. We forget about the in-between step: our interpretation (often irrational) of the event. By becoming aware of our cognitive distortions and learning the technique of reframing, we can transform potentially stressful situations into beneficial ones, without any change in external circumstances.

7. Slow Down

The “Type A” personality that feels the need to talk fast, drive fast, and multitask at all times may be associated with higher rates of cardiac events, high blood pressure, and, of course, stress. The exercises in this chapter introduce ways to slow down life that, paradoxically, can result in more free time, not less.

8. Keep Life in Perspective

The techniques and stories in this chapter—focusing on such subjects as gratitude, purpose, humor, objectivity, and impermanence—will help you see your troubles as minor bumps on the road of life.

9. Improve Your Lifestyle

Your day-to-day life has a lot to do with your overall state of stress. Being overworked, eating poorly, or abusing caffeine or alcohol all contribute to stress. Regular exercise is almost a literal outlet for stress. And being overweight leads to poor health, which is one of the top causes of stress. In addition to these obvious areas, this chapter introduces proven stress-reduction techniques such as finding balance, practicing voluntary simplicity, delegating tasks, living with ethics, and finding social support.

10. Improve Your Communication

Much stress centers around relationships, but we can turn this from an area of conflict into an area of support by remembering some simple practices such as empathy, integrity, attentiveness, and giving effective feedback. Equally important, we can finally learn The Art of Apology. This chapter includes specific hints to improve your communication and decrease your stress.

11. Deal with Anger and Frustration

Anger and hostility are among the biggest risk factors for heart disease. Holding a grudge is one of the surest ways to ratchet up your stress. If you can practice forgiveness instead, and not obsess or stew over perceived slights, you will do yourself an immense favor. This chapter provides tips for cultivating compassion and loving kindness.

12. Take the Stress out of Decisions

For some of us, the times of greatest stress involve making decisions. Yet the thing about a decision is that you can’t tell what the right choice is—if you knew that, there would be no decision to make! This chapter introduces techniques to “depressurize” decision-making so that the best choices can be made in a low-stress manner.

13. Improve Your Sleep

Nothing alleviates stress like a good night’s sleep. Conversely, insomnia can set off a vicious cycle by creating stress, which causes insomnia, which creates more stress. It is very difficult to successfully manage stress without sleep being part of the equation. Fortunately, recent studies have found that certain behavioral practices around bedtime are even more effective than the newest sleeping pills in inducing restful slumber. This chapter covers the ones that work best.

14. Change Your Environment

Sometimes the problem isn’t you—it’s your world. Certain jobs, places, and living situations can produce unbearable levels of stress, and changing them will be the best thing you can do for yourself. This chapter explores some of the biggies—but also cautions against always seeking an external fix instead of developing internal coping strategies.

15. Combine Strategies

This chapter provides tips on the most effective ways to incorporate the strategies introduced in previous chapters, along with the CD meditations, into daily life.

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16. When It’s More than Stress

A tight chest, racing heart, or anxiety usually are caused by stress, but not always. Sometimes asthma, hyperthyroidism, or another condition are to blame. This chapter will explain those conditions, and help differentiate between garden-variety stress and more specialized conditions such as anxiety disorders, clinical depression, obsessive compulsive disorder, and post-tramatic stress disorder.

17. Conclusion

Stress management is a lifelong practice, but one that can bring significant pleasure to you, your family, and your friends, as well as improving your workplace and community. You owe it to yourself to start today.