Good Stress, Bad Stress: An Indispensable Guide to Identifying and Managing Your Stress

Gave me a new appreciation of good stress and how to use it to the max. Contains a complete stress assessment inventory, allowing the reader to learn what specific things are stressors in his/her life. The book encourages us to think about how we've handled stress in the past and use those successes to meet current and future challenges. Specific exercises and suggestions are presented - ready to use!There's a lot of insight and wisdom in the book, e.g., there's an "... unspoken belief that through worrying, you will be able to control the outcome of what is about to happen to you. You think you are planning ... but in reality you are obsessing." (p. 133)Lenson makes us feel better about ourselves when we are enduring bad stress. The book is concise, inviting and easy to read. The situational examples are compelling, and sometimes even amusing - this is a book everyone can identify with, understand and benefit from.

A friend recommended this book to me, and lent me a copy, or I might never have been incined to open it up. What a surprise. It is really exciting, offering a very different way to look at stress than many books that offer cookie-cutter advice on deep breathing, meditating and other symptomatic remedies for stress.Lenson's idea is to fully accept the scientific findings that there are good stresses in life (the ones that excite us, energize us, let us try new things and boost our immune systems) as well as the bad stresses we all know about(those that break us down and do us physical damage). He offers a self-test that helps uncover hidden areas of stress in life. Then he gives focused advice on identifying the good stresses among them and using them to get into flow, improve our relationships, perform better and achieve more. Finally, he offers advice on how to minimize the damage done by bad stresses, such as illnesses, dead-end jobs, problems that won't go away. You come away from every chapter with some new ideas to put into practice. I recommend this book highly. It presents a really different, original and practical way of dealiing with stress. I'd give it five stars.