Dan’s Top 10 Stress Books

Full Catastrophe Living

Based on Dr. Jon Kabat-Zinn’s renowned mindfulness-based stress reduction program, this book shows you how to use natural, medically proven methods to soothe and heal your body, mind, and spirit. The title?  Oh, that’s from the classic book Zorba the Greek.  Zorba is a Greek full of a salty zest for life.  At one point, his intellectual benefactor asked him, “Zorba, are you married?”  Zorba snorts, “Married? Wife, kids, house . . . the full catastrophe!”  When all of our lives are pulled about by the catastrophe of daily living, we need mindfulness to ground us, we need the deep breathing and quiet to enrich the quiets place in all of us. 

Why Zebras Don’t Get Ulcers

Dr. Robert M. Sapolsky has chapters on how stress affects sleep and addiction, as well as new insights into anxiety and personality disorder and the impact of spirituality on managing stress.
As Sapolsky explains, most of us do not lie awake at night worrying about whether we have leprosy or malaria. Instead, the diseases we fear-and the ones that plague us now-are illnesses brought on by the slow accumulation of damage, such as heart disease and cancer. When we worry or experience stress, our body turns on the same physiological responses that an animal’s does, but we do not resolve conflict in the same way-through fighting or fleeing. Over time, this activation of a stress response makes us literally sick.

Buddha Brain

Jesus, Moses, the Buddha, and other great teachers were born with brains built essentially like anyone else’s, but used their minds to change their brains in ways that changed history. With the new breakthroughs in neuroscience, combined with the insights from thousands of years of contemplative practice, this book shows readers how to have greater emotional balance in turbulent times, as well as healthier relationships, more effective actions, and a deeper religious or spiritual practice. It’s full of practical tools and skills readers can use in daily life to tap the unused potential of the brain and rewire it over time for greater peace and well-being.

Spark

This book offers a fascinating investigation into the transformative effects of exercise on the brain, from the bestselling author and renowned psychiatrist John J. Ratey, MD. Did you know you can beat stress, lift your mood, fight memory loss, sharpen your intellect, and function better than ever simply by elevating your heart rate and breaking a sweat? The evidence is incontrovertible: Aerobic exercise physically remodels our brains for peak performance. This is one of the few books that got me off my ass and into the gym.

How to Train a Wild Elephant

This is a short book and easy to read.  Jan Chozen Bays, M.D., a physician and Zen teacher, has developed a series of simple practices to help us cultivate mindfulness as we go about our ordinary, daily lives. Exercises include: taking three deep breaths before answering the phone, noticing and adjusting your posture throughout the day, eating mindfully, and leaving no trace of yourself after using the kitchen or bathroom. Each exercise is presented with tips on how to remind yourself and a short life lesson connected with it.

The Relaxation and Stress Reduction Workbook

This book details easy, step-by-step techniques for calming the body and mind in an increasingly overstimulated world. It’s based on the latest research, and draws from a variety of proven treatment methods, including progressive relaxation, autogenics, self-hypnosis, visualization, and mindfulness and acceptance therapy. In the first chapter, you’ll explore your own stress triggers and symptoms, and learn how to create a personal plan for stress reduction. Each chapter features a different method for relaxation and stress reduction, explains why the method works, and provides on-the-spot exercises you can do to apply that method when you feel stressed.

Stress-Proof Your Brain

Our brains have evolved powerful tools for coping with threats and danger-but in the face of modern stresses like information overload, money worries, and interpersonal conflicts, our survival reflexes can do more harm than good. To help you adapt your nervous system to the challenges of today’s world, neuropsychologist Dr. Rick Hanson presents Stress-Proof Your Brain. Join him to learn research-based techniques and meditations that will literally re-shape your brain to make you more resilient, confident, and peaceful, including: – How to replace your brain’s unhealthy reactions to stress with protective and self-nurturing responses- Techniques for using memory to soothe and release painful feelings of sadness, guilt, anxiety, inadequacy, or anger – Guided meditations for calming chronic worries, developing gratitude, building inner strength, and more.

Stress Proof Your Life

Stress proof your life is for people who struggle to find time for a shower, much less a bath. The ones who worry that stress is affecting their health and relationships. Or they would worry if they weren’t so knackered. Some people are really good at avoiding some stresses without realizing that they are slaves to another kind. Elisabeth Wilson looks at the sources – occupational, genetic and environmental – and reveals 52 brilliant techniques for creating a stress-free zone. When your batteries are blown and burnout is imminent these top tips can help you regain control.

Getting Things Done

If you’re like me, my biggest source of stress comes from the pressure to get lots of things done everyday.

In Getting Things Done, veteran coach and management consultant David Allen shares the methods for getting things done. Allen’s premise is simple: our productivity is directly proportional to our ability to relax. Only when our minds are clear and our thoughts are organized can we achieve effective productivity and unleash our creative potential* Apply the “do it, delegate it, defer it, drop it” rule to get your in-box to empty.

Upward Spiral

Lawyers help others but take very poor care of themselves. In their quest to max out their earning potential and afford the best material goods our economy has to offer, lawyers lead a narrow, grimly serious existence without emotional rewards. They work inhuman hours yet always feel pressured for time. Since they never stop, breathe, and relax, they are frequently tense, irritable and ready to bark. Author Harvey Hyman, himself a former trial lawyer, gives us the latest science, wit and wisdom in a book I highly recommend.

Stress Management for Lawyers

When you practice law, stress comes with the territory. Such stressors as time pressures, work overload, conflict, and difficult people can rob you of a satisfying career and personal life. It doesn’t have to be that way, however. You can take effective action and this book, written specifically for lawyers, shows you how.

 

Good Ways To Treat Depression: And Why People Don’t Do Them or Give Up Trying

Depression sufferers are often told to embrace what I call the three “G”’ Trifecta: Get therapy, Get on antidepressants and Get some exercise.

Each of these tactics has empirical support. So there’s a lot to recommend about them. But as I will discuss later, lots of people have a hard time embracing these approaches or sticking with them. First, let’s take a peek at what’s good and promising about these three treatment routes.

Why these approaches are Effective

-Therapy

Many studies show that ‘talk therapy” helps folks with depression. In particular, cognitive behavioral therapy; a form of counseling in which a psychologist compassionately confronts a depressive’s pessimistic thinking and tries to teach him or her more optimistic an productive ways of thinking about their. Research has shown that there’s a powerful connection between pessimism and depression: the more negative your thoughts, the more likely you are to get sucked down into the well of depression. Other studies show that lawyers are much more pessimistic than the general population. As such, CBT is a very good treatment option for many in the legal profession.

-Medication

Antidepressant medications are often an effective way to treat depression for lots of people. It seems to alleviate the brutal physical symptoms – – loss of appetite, inability to sleep and chronic fatigue – – so that one can benefit from therapy. It’s tough to get much insight from therapy when you’re feeling so crappy.

However, recent research has discovered that it often takes two or three attempts before the right medication is found that will relieve a person’s particular depression.

-Exercise

Sweating it out has been proven to lift not only one’s general mood, but alleviate depression. Probably the best book I’ve read on the topic is Spark by Harvard physician, John Ratey, M.D. who writes:

“Antidepressants are curious because we think we’re changing brain chemistry when we take them. The science shows us that exercise does the same thing. By exercising, we’re improving the brain’s plasticity. And while it’s hard to get depressed people to get up and move because, well, they’re depressed, you have to sell them on the value of it. Once they get it, they go with it.”

Why People Don’t Do These Things, or Don’t Stick With Them

If these remedies are so effective for so many, why don’t more people who struggle with depression do them, do them more often or stick with them?

– I Don’t Want to Talk About It.

There are lots of reasons why educated and intelligent people don’t go to therapy.  Here are a few of them:

People (lots of them men) don’t go because they just don’t want to talk about what ails them. Culturally, men are often not given permission to be vulnerable and emotive. There’s a limited range of feelings that the culture says are okay for men to vent: anger, irritability and humor. –

Sufferers sometimes can’t find the right therapist and give up.

Those around them do not believe in therapy. I know a lawyer with depression whose wife thinks therapy is a bunch of hand-holding baloney and a rip-off at $125 per hour (Buffalo rates, mind you). As such, he feels discouraged, doesn’t want to hear his wife complain about the cost and doesn’t go.

People are just too fearful of what the consequences would be if they admitted they had depression: “Will I lose my job?” As such, they often deny to themselves or others that something is wrong. – Procrastination: “Maybe it will go away”.

Shame: people feel they will be labeled “defective”, “weak” or “mentally ill.”

Or, for many, they just don’t know any better. The misery they endure is their “normal”. They can’t see how their maladaptive, pessimistic thoughts about life could be anything other than reality – – “That’s just the way life is.” They may even feel bitter when they see others having fun or being happy. They feel cheated. Why can’t I have more happiness in my life? They may feel that happiness is something doled out by the unseen hand of God or lady luck. However it is dished out, they’ve feel they’ve been given a pittance. Not surprisingly, they have no confidence that they have the capacity to create happiness within themselves. “No”, they think when they imagine to themselves that they have good things to look forward to, “That’s not how my life seems to turn out’. This disempowered state is a vicious circle that can only lead to more depression.

 -Antidepressants: The Flip of the Coin?

There’s a billion dollar debate going on whether antidepressants work or not. On one side of the aisle are the folks in lab coats – the bespectacled researchers who look at brain tissue through microscopes; pharmaceutical executives in blue suits who smoke big-ass cigars; and the psychiatrists – the high priests of all that ails the depressed mind – – who advocate taking medication to treat clinical depression.

On the other side are patients who swear that the meds did nothing to help their depression and just screwed them up and made them feel like zombies. On the other are holistic practitioners who believe depression isn’t caused by a chemical imbalance in the brain, but by lack of proper nutrition, diet and balance (check out Dr. Andrew Weil) and my psychiatrists who believe that medications, while useful, are over-prescribed.

There currently are no tests, other than trial-and-error, to determine what type or types of medication will prove effective for a particular person. It’s really trial or error. Our family owns a big fat rodent. Did I say he was really fat? Anyway, he is black and white and lives in a large cage in a back room of our house. The colors make him look like a magician in a tuxedo. Hence, his majestic name – – Houdini. I felt like Houdini when my psychiatrist tried different medications on me in a quest to get the right one – a lab animal in which he tried this and then that. Some were real duds; some outright blunders. But I stuck with it. And I’m glad I did because the “right meds” were eventually found for me.

People won’t take medication because of the stigma attached to it. Or, they give up on it before the right medication, dosage or combination is found. Even when the right one is found, folks often stop talking it because of the side effects. I know depressed lawyers who would rather drink or drug rather than take antidepressants.

-Why We Won’t Get Moving

People find it hard to exercise because depression screws up their ability to sleep leaving them unmotivated and just too tired to get to the gym. Years ago, when I first was diagnosed with depression, I recall being bone-tired at the end of a work day and falling asleep a 9 p.m., sleeping on and off throughout the night, getting up at 3 or 4 a.m., shaving, getting dressed and driving to an all-night coffee shop to slurp coffee, get ready for work and wonder “Just what the hell is wrong with me?” But I didn’t have any answers back then. In retrospect, truthfully, the only thing that helped me survive it was to keep walking.

Three Quick Things to get you on the Right Track

1.    If you’ve never been to a competent psychiatrist, remind yourself that you can just go for a consultation and hear what they have to say. Whatever their recommendation, you don’t have to agree with it or follow it. But why not get an opinion from someone who has treated hundreds of people with depression and could tell you whether or not you have it and what your options are? You can also get a second opinion. There are “Depression Centers” around the country where you can go for such a consultation and then return to your treating psychiatrist who can prescribe the recommended medication and monitor you. Bring a friend or family member to the appointment. Sometimes, when we’re depressed, we might not truly hear when the psychiatrist has to say. What does your loved one or friend think the doctor said?

2.   If you don’t want to go to a therapist, you really have to ask yourself why not. I usually recommend that people call friends to ask for recommendations for a couple of therapists. Go visit a few for a 1 hour consultation to see if you click with that person. Remember, if you give into your depression, you will tend to isolate yourself and “suck it up.” What you really need to do is talk to a therapist who has treated hundreds of folks with depression who can give you some ideas about whether you can benefit from therapy. A good friend can listen and give you their love and compassion. But, they can’t do what a good therapist can do.

3.   Make it easier to exercise. Here are three quick ideas. First, always keep your gym bag in your car – EVERY DAY. I’ve found that I’m much more likely to exercise at the gym, if only for 20 minutes, if it’s in the car. Second, don’t shave or shower when you get out of bed. Get dressed like you normally do for work and go get a coffee if you like. I find that I have to work out because I now HAVE TO GO to the gym if I want to get a shower and shave – it’s too late to go home now!

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