The Stress Prescription
Seven Days to More Joy and Ease
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5.0 • 3 Ratings
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- $11.99
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- $11.99
Publisher Description
“A preeminent expert sheds light on how to handle the daily hassles of life. It’s not just a manual for managing stress—it’s a toolkit for preventing it.” —Adam Grant, #1 New York Times bestselling author of Think Again
From world-renowned psychologist and New York Times–bestselling author Dr. Elissa Epel, a simple yet powerful plan to turn your stress into your strength in just seven days
We can’t avoid stress. But we can embrace it and transform it.
Whether we’re facing deadlines, difficulties with family or friends, personal crises, or just the uncertainty of the world—stress is the ocean we swim in. Even our negative thoughts can trigger our body’s stress response so we rarely experience periods of ease and deep restoration.
In The Stress Prescription, Dr. Epel distills decades of research, infused with wisdom, into a practical yet transformative seven-day plan of science-based techniques that can help you harness stress through more positive challenge and purpose.
The seven-day prescription will lead you through these exercises:
Day 1: Things Will Go Wrong . . . And That’s All Right
Day 2: Control What You Can . . . And Put Down the Rest
Day 3: Be the Lion
Day 4: Train for Resilience
Day 5: Let Nature Do the Work
Day 6: Don’t Just Relax . . . Restore
Day 7: Start Full, End Full
Dr. Epel shows us how we can “stress better”—by training our minds and bodies to shift towards a flexible, beneficial stress response that can actually enhance health. You will develop a more robust mindset, build the resources you need to turn stress into strength, and fill your days with more joy, connection, and ease.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
In this levelheaded program, Epel (The Telomere Effect), director of the Aging, Metabolism, and Emotion Center at UCSF, shares tips for how to "face the uncertainty of life." Stress is unavoidable and can "be a good thing," Epel contends, but she notes that too much is detrimental to one's health and lays out seven strategies to change "our response to stress." She expounds on the benefits of building resilience through exposing oneself to small, manageable stressors, such as taking cold showers, and explains that doing so triggers a response from one's nervous system that helps refresh one's cells. Accepting what one can't control is a crucial tenet of living with stress, Epel suggests, telling the story of a woman who agonized over how to help her mother recover from a stroke before accepting that she couldn't control her mother's medical outcome. The "seven day" framework feels somewhat arbitrary, given that the suggestions don't build sequentially or need to be completed within a week, but the guidance is solid. Additionally, the scientific background and anecdotes from those who have gotten a handle on their stress enrich the advice. This is just what the doctor ordered.
