How to Calm Your Mind
Finding Presence and Productivity in Anxious Times
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- $16.99
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- $16.99
Publisher Description
A toolkit of accessible, science-backed strategies that reveal that the path to a less anxious life, and even greater productivity, runs directly through calm.
When Chris Bailey, productivity expert, discovered that he had become stressed and burnt out because he was pushing himself too hard, he realized that he had no right to be giving advice on productivity without learning when and how to rein things in and take a break. Productivity advice works—and we need it now more than ever—but it’s just as important that we also develop our capacity for calm. By finding calm and overcoming anxiety, we don’t just feel more comfortable in our own skin, we invest in the missing piece that leads our efforts to become sustainable over time. We build a deeper, more expansive reservoir of energy to draw from throughout the day, and have greater mental resources at our disposal to not only do good work, but to also live a good life.
Among the topics How to Calm Your Mind covers are how analog and digital worlds affect calm and anxiety in different ways; how our desire for dopamine, a neurotransmitter in our brain that leads us to feel overstimulated, breeds anxiety, dissatisfaction, and needless stress, but can be countered by other neurochemicals; how hidden sources of stress can be tamed by a “stimulation fast”; and how “busyness” is as much a state of mind as it is an actual state of life. The pursuit of calm ultimately leads us to become more engaged, focused, and deliberate—while making us more productive and satisfied with our lives overall. In an anxious world, achieving calm is the best life hack around.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
Productivity consultant Bailey (Hyperfocus) delivers a pragmatic guide to reducing stress. He recounts how experiencing a panic attack during a business presentation led him to search for strategies to fight burnout, contending that "investing in calm is the way to maintain and even grow our capacity for productivity." Downtime, he posits, can lessen anxiety and helps to percolate new ideas and break the addiction to stress, which occurs when one becomes reliant on the stimulation provided by such sources of anxiety as negative news stories. He recommends setting aside time each day to not worry about productivity and suggests taking up meditation, which lowers the level of dopamine that the body craves. Bailey is frank about the difficulty of seeking calmness and notes that self-care will likely cause guilt in readers who have an "accomplishment mindset," but he adds that such busywork as refreshing one's email can become mentally equated with accomplishment even though it's more stress-inducing than productive. Instead, he urges readers to take breaks, exercise, and eat more complex carbohydrates, which all increase calmness and productivity. Bailey's discussion of how dopamine and serotonin influence feelings of productivity brings scientific rigor to his observations, which are sensible and occasionally counterintuitive. This practical manual is worth slowing down for.
