By Lorraine Alexander
A few months ago, I happened on the book The Stress Prescription by Elissa Epel, PhD, the co-author of The Telomere Effect, a New York Times best-seller that discovers how stress influences our clock-on-aging. With a generous 4.7 Amazon review, I found The Stress Prescription to be a worthwhile read.
Here's a brief overview:
The Stress Prescription: Seven Days to More Joy and Ease, by Elissa Epel, PhD
Professor, Psychiatry, UCSF Weill Institute for Neurosciences, School of Medicine
Reading this book, I found it remarkably user-friendly, and learned new insights on stress. Open the book to almost any page and indulge in bits of wisdom. The point made most helpful, was learning that traumatic life experiences create a new stress threshold or baseline; this threshold dictates how well or how poorly we cope with stress.
Epel explains thoroughly how stress uniquely affects each of us. The goal is to work toward lowering our baseline to a healthy standard of relaxation. We facilitate this process through daily self-care and mind-body wellness. Additionally, she suggests that we retrain our brains to think differently about potentially stressful situations and outcomes by using acceptance and mindful techniques. Otherwise, our thoughts can turn to negative rumination. |