Are you suffering from chronic stress? Many of us are—whether we’re stressed out by our jobs, complicated relationships, caregiving responsibilities, or the general state of the world.
That’s where Elissa Epel’s new book, The Stress Prescription, comes in. A health psychologist and director of the Aging, Metabolism, and Emotions Center at the University of California, San Francisco, Epel explains how stress affects our bodies and minds—including our health, happiness, and longevity—and how to manage it in the best way possible.
Too many of us are in a constant state of alertness, she argues, which makes us ill-prepared to navigate the everyday stressors and bigger upsets that occur when living a full life. We may think we’re relaxed, but we’re actually maintaining a low-level vigilance that’s hard on our bodies. Constant physiological strain can shorten our telomeres (the caps at the ends of our DNA that protect it from aging)—a process she wrote about in her bestselling book, The Telomere Effect.
Epel emphasizes that not all stress is inherently bad—and that we shouldn’t aim for a stress-free life. We need our physiological stress response to survive, as it can come in handy when we’re gearing up to perform or facing an actual life-or-death threat. [Read more…] about The 7 Habits of Highly Stress-Resilient Minds
Anxiety can feel like a heavy weight that we didn’t ask to carry. Who wouldn’t love to get rid of it?
It’s one of the first things parents and teachers tell a child who gets upset: “Take a deep breath.” But research into the effect of deep breathing on the body’s stress response has overwhelmingly ignored young children – and studies done with adults typically take place in a university lab, making them even less applicable to children’s actual lives.