The Stress Solution: The 4 Steps to a Calmer, Happier, Healthier You
272
The Stress Solution: The 4 Steps to a Calmer, Happier, Healthier You
272eBook
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Overview
FROM THE SUNDAY TIMES BESTSELLING AUTHOR OF HAPPY MIND, HAPPY LIFE
'One of the most influential doctors in the UK (...) I could talk to Rangan all day (...) he's amazing'- Chris Evans
Become a calmer, happier and healthier you with Dr Rangan Chatterjee's The Stress Solution.
In this book, Dr Rangan Chatterjee, draws on two decades of practice to show you how to make easy-to-follow and sustainable health and lifestyle improvements to your everyday life. Top tips include:
· How to breathe to feel happier
· How to schedule in "me time"
· How to become less addicted to your phone
· How to find and ignite your passion
At no extra cost, learn how to slow down and feel calmer and more in control of your life by investing in your long-term health.
'Small changes make a big difference - we can all benefit from reading this' - Jamie Oliver
Product Details
| ISBN-13: | 9780241317952 |
|---|---|
| Publisher: | Penguin UK |
| Publication date: | 12/27/2018 |
| Sold by: | Barnes & Noble |
| Format: | eBook |
| Pages: | 272 |
| Sales rank: | 886,858 |
| File size: | 49 MB |
| Note: | This product may take a few minutes to download. |
About the Author
Dr Rangan Chatterjee is regarded as one of the most influential doctors in the UK. A GP with over two decades experience, Dr Chatterjee wants to inspire people to transform their health and happiness through making small sustainable changes to their lifestyles. Leading the charge on how healthcare and medicine is understood in the UK, Dr Chatterjee has co-created and teaches the widely acclaimed 'Prescribing Lifestyle Medicine' course with the Royal College of GPs, that has now been delivered to thousands of doctors and healthcare professionals.
Dr Chatterjee hosts Europe's biggest health podcast, Feel Better, Live More which is one of Apple's most downloaded podcasts. He is the author of 5 Sunday Times bestsellers and regularly appears on BBC television, national radio and has been featured in numerous international publications including The New York Times , Forbes, The Guardian, The Times, Grazia, Vogue, The Daily Telegraph and The Daily Mail and his TED talk, How To Make Disease Disappear, has been viewed almost 6 million times.
drchatterjee.com
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Twitter: @drchatterjeeuk
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YouTube: drchatterjee.com/youtube
Podcast: Listen to my inspiring weekly podcast Feel Better, Live More on my website, YouTube and all podcast platforms
Read an Excerpt
CHAPTER 1
THE 3 HABITS OF CALM
This chapter is about setting up the practices and habits that will allow you to start shifting your mindset. It involves what I call the 3 Habits of Calm: affirmations, reframing and gratitude. These are simple interventions that I'd like you to try, each at a different time of the day. You don't need to do them all; they're simply tools to try in order to get going. You can use them as they are or tweak them to suit your own life and preferences. Some may appear a little scary and weird, but I'd strongly encourage you to give them a go. Once you get the hang of them, they can be incredibly helpful. They'll help get your thoughts in the right place so that you can start seeing the good that's already there in your everyday life and begin to shift your attention away from the negative (which humans have a natural tendency to do) and into the positive.
1. Affirmations
2. Reframing
3. Gratitude
AFFIRMATIONS FOR BREAKFAST
Whether you happen to be religious or not, it seems pretty clear to me that we have a lot to learn from the gods. Every religion contains a set of guidelines that describe how to live in a way that's in harmony with those around us, good for the planet and good for us as an individual. Whether it is confession, meditation or the practice of forgiveness, many religious traditions are bristling with profound and effective comfort instincts. And not only religions. Many of these practices are culturally embedded all over the world.
Take my mother-in-law, who grew up in India. She's convinced that affirmations have changed her life. An affirmation is a short, powerful and positive statement of intent which you repeat regularly. 'By doing affirmations repeatedly I feel as if I'm actually changing my thoughts,' she told me. 'Because I repeat them so often, I'm laying a new blueprint in my mind.' I asked her about her rules for doing affirmations properly. 'It has to be succinct,' she said, 'because you have to repeat it as often as you can. It has to be positive. It also has to be in the right tense: it is I am instead of I'm going to.' In an affirmation, you're talking to your subconscious mind, programming in what you want out of your life. Your affirmation can be as broad as one my wife used to use – 'I am happy, calm and stress free' – or it can be more specific: 'I help my patients live happier, healthier lives.'
The brain is constantly responding to the world around us, reading it as information. The environment to which we expose our brain determines how stressed we are. Affirmations are a way of directly feeding our brain positive information, programming it for success. Regular practice will set you up for a calm, stress-free day and start changing how you see yourself and the world. If you don't believe my mother-in-law, consider this. US army soldiers who saw benefits in their deployment and agreed with statements such as 'This deployment has made me more confident in my ability' or 'This job allowed me to demonstrate my courage' were found to be less likely to suffer PTSD and depression. Affirmations have even been shown to improve problem-solving performance by undergraduate students.
SEVEN TIPS TO MAKING EFFECTIVE AFFIRMATIONS
1. Write down your affirmation. It should be short, as you will be repeating it over and over again, and it should also be in the present tense.
2. Think about what you may consider to be your negative qualities, e.g. 'I am highly strung.' An affirmation is a powerful way to flip this on its head. For example, your affirmation could be 'I am calm and stress free.' Other examples include, 'I choose to be happy' or 'I am the architect of my own health.'
3. Experiment with different affirmations and see how they make you feel.
4. As you are saying the affirmation out loud, really imagine yourself as that person. If your affirmation is 'I am full of energy' – imagine yourself as a person who is full of vitality.
5. Say the affirmation every morning, even when you don't feel like it. Try to do this at the same time every day to help it become a part of your daily routine. Just before breakfast or as soon as you wake up is ideal. Try to repeat the phrase continuously for about one or two minutes.
6. Repeat the phrase as often as you can throughout the day. This can be done silently in your head, if in company.
7. Feel free to change your affirmations depending on what message you are trying to imprint within your brain.
REFRAMING THE DAY
Our ability to be motivated and purposeful often depends on how we choose to interpret a stressful event. We all know that person in the office (and that person may be you) who always looks on the negative side: Why does that always happen to me? Just my luck! Why do I never get a promotion? It's always me that's being overlooked. The problem with this kind of victim mentality is that it tends to be self-fulfilling. By constantly thinking in this way we're training ourselves to become that negative person. We all have bad things happen to us and reasons to feel disregarded or perhaps even oppressed. But how we frame our particular situation is a choice. This framing is something we all do, all the time, whether we realize it or not. And you'll do yourself an enormous favour if you take control of how you're framing your life and make it work for you rather than against you.
There was an incredibly life-affirming example of reframing in the 2011 film Happy. The opening scene takes us to a slum in Kolkata, India, where we meet a rickshaw driver called Manoj Singh. He wakes at 5 a.m. and, after a small cup of tea, waves goodbye to his family. Then he slips on his flip-flops, jumps on his bicycle and pedals off to the city, where he spends a long, gruelling day on his feet, pulling clients around in his rickshaw. We learn that some customers are abusive to him, especially if they're drunk. But Manoj never complains because, if he does, they won't use his services again.
It's then that the film delivers its staggering statistic: Manoj Singh is as happy as the average American. As he pulls up at his modest home at the end of the day he has an enormous smile on his face as his young son rushes out to greet him. 'In this moment, I am full of joy,' he says. He tells us that he gets to be out in the sun each day and, if it rains, he knows it won't last long and he'll soon dry off. 'My home is good,' he adds. But his home isn't something anyone in the West would regard as good. A plastic tarp covers the roof. 'One side is open, and air flows into the room nicely,' he says. 'During the monsoon, the rain rushes in, and it does get a little uncomfortable' he admits, 'but apart from this, we live well.' Sometimes they can afford to eat meals of only rice with salt. But, he says, 'when I see my children, I don't feel as if I'm poor, I feel rich.' I found Manoj's reframing amazing. He doesn't wish he had a better job. He's thankful for having work so that he can feed his family and that he has two children to look after.
I learned about the power of reframing the hard way, when I was working at a local GP practice that had been taken over by a private company. Previously, I'd had a lot of autonomy, which is a key part of mental wellbeing. But our new owners brought in systems that took a lot of that autonomy away. They insisted on setting standard surgery opening times across all the practices they were running. But some of my patients, who I'd been seeing for years, worked night shifts and had to make appointments on the way home after work. I was very happy to arrive at work at 7.15 a.m. to see them, but my new bosses stopped me, simply because of their insistence on uniformity. Their systems began to control almost every minute of my working life. One of the managers even tried to specify exactly when we had to look through the daily blood results. Any earlier or later than the allotted one-hour window and we'd be in trouble.
This became extremely frustrating for me. I'd find myself coming home feeling wound up and stressed. The first thing I'd do after walking through the door, following a forty-five-minute commute which I'd spent in a state of toxic rumination, was mouth off to Vidh about how bad my day had been, how they wouldn't listen to me and just didn't get it ... and on and on and on. I'd lie in bed all night sighing and stewing, then go back into work the next day feeling worse than ever. Vidh suggested I leave, but we had bills to pay and a mortgage to cover, so I felt I couldn't.
What else could I do? The only thing I could think of were some psychological studies I knew about that indicated people are happier when they're working in the service of others. So, I started going for a walk during my lunch break and thinking back over the morning, focusing on all the good I'd done. I reminded myself that my purpose was service. I wasn't there for myself, or my new bosses, but to relieve the pain and suffering of the people in my community. This reframing of my situation was an incredible tonic and left me feeling refreshed and energized.
There's plenty of fantastic evidence that shows we can gain huge benefits from altering the way we view our daily stresses. One 2012 study found that if we change the way we think about a stressful event we can improve our physical health and also the way our brain reacts to Micro Stress Doses (MSDs). Compared to the group who didn't, the participants in this study who reframed their MSDs had lower blood pressure, higher attention levels and even improved the efficiency of their heart muscle. When we reframe a stressful experience, not only does it feel good but we benefit from powerful physiological changes in our body. We've helped mitigate the damage that MSDs can do simply by looking at the problem in a different way.
It's important, when you're reframing, to try to focus your attention not inwardly, on yourself, but on the wider world. When you're in a stressful place, try looking at the bigger picture. Visualize yourself shooting up into the sky and seeing yourself as just another ant-like speck moving along the pavement. You're just a small part of a big world, and you're there to do some good. For example, if you're a nurse, and overworked and underpaid, try to reframe 'I'm being exploited by the system' to 'I've got the opportunity to care for all these people and help them get better.'
If you're struggling with this, ask yourself the 'three why's' of your job or primary role: Why does it matter? Why does it matter? Why does it matter? Each time you ask that question, go wider with your focus, until you reach the ultimate why. If you're a truck driver, you might answer the three why's this way: Why does it matter that I get this shipment to the supermarket on time? Because I have perishable food in the back that has to be on the shelves. Why does it matter? Because customers are relying on it being there. Why does it matter? Because they're mothers and fathers who want to feed their children, and harassed men and women who want to get home after a long day and relax over a nice meal. In just three steps, the truck driver has radically reframed his situation, transforming himself from being bored and stressed in the slow lane of the M20 into a heroic figure whose efforts will make a real difference to the lives of countless good people.
THE IMPORTANCE OF REFRAMING
When you're in the middle of an MSD swarm, your emotional brain becomes dominant and your rational brain is sidelined so you're unable to look at things logically. Without a proper, practised strategy, you're likely to spiral quickly into a whirlpool of irrational negativity. If you don't actively try to reframe the experience, you'll often find that your stress levels increase during the day as your emotional brain continues ruminating on what's happened to you and keeps finding 'evidence' that your life is a mess, that you're a victim, and that the world is unsafe and unfair. Ruminating is when you tend to dwell on situations that you find distressing or upsetting, or when you replay a problem over and over again in your mind. In the short term, it may feel as though this is helping; in the long term, it will be damaging. You will be training your emotional brain to become more powerful, which in turn makes it more likely that you will spend time ruminating in the future, and so more likely that you will become anxious.
GRATITUDE IN THE EVENING
As we've learned, rumination can be incredibly damaging. Constantly stewing over stressful incidents just makes them seem worse and worse. It activates the stress state and keeps the emotional brain dominant. Gratitude is the antidote to rumination. Because we're programmed to focus on threats we miss so many of the positive things that happen to us all the time, whether it's an email we receive saying thanks for some good work or the fleeting scent of blossom as we're driving to the office.
This intervention is partly inspired by the practice of 'loving kindness' meditation. This type of meditation comes in many forms, but what they have in common is that they help develop goodwill, warmth and kindness. For instance, you might identify two people you know and purposefully wish them happiness. Or you might pick two people you don't know. Next time you're sitting in a café, identify a couple of passers-by and really try to wish for them to be happy, then observe how you feel.
A daily practice can have profound knock-on effects. Studies have found it can trigger a wide variety of positive emotions, including love, joy, gratitude, contentment and hope, as well as reducing the activity of the emotional brain. I was delighted to read a recent analysis of the published research in this area which concluded that 'loving kindness meditation can enhance positive emotions in daily life'. The scientific research backs up what I have seen in my consultation room over many years.
One of my patients, forty-two-year-old Sophie, found this kind of meditation life-changing. She had been suffering from panic attacks for a little while and was struggling to get any relief. I persuaded her to give this form of meditation a try. She decided to do it at the school playground after dropping her kids off, picking two other parents, one she liked and another she didn't. She'd use her whole mind and body to sincerely wish them happiness. A few days into the practice, her husband said, 'What is up with you? You seem to be happier these days, you've got a real spring in your step!' Over the coming weeks and months, she experienced less stress and her panic attacks became much less frequent.
If these practices don't sound like they'll have any effect on you, I challenge you to give them a go. They're really hard to do without starting to smile. You'll feel good about yourself, your focus will be pointed outwards and your stress levels will plummet.
CHAPTER 2SCHEDULE YOUR TIME
My wife used to be a successful criminal barrister. At the age of thirty, she decided she wanted to devote her time to being a mother so she made the decision to give up her career temporarily. We were both shocked when it became apparent that raising children left her feeling more stressed than the high-powered legal work she'd been doing for years. One thing that made her particularly anxious was the feeling that there wasn't enough time in the day. She'd take our son to nursery, and by the time she'd come back, cleaned up, done the washing and popped into town to complete all the jobs that needed doing there, it was time to pick him up again. It just went around and around like this, day after day, and the relentlessness of it all would crush her. 'I just don't get any time to myself,' she'd keep saying. 'I don't get anything done.' This, I now realize, is not an uncommon problem. I've observed it in my practice and also in my own friendship network: incredibly bright, driven and successful women and men who decide to give up their careers to raise children, only to end up suffering with anxiety.
Vidh and I began hunting around for something that would stop her feeling this way. I'd love to tell you that it was me who found the solution, but it was my brilliant wife. She started making a detailed daily schedule that accounted for every single minute of the day. She wrote down: 'Wake up: 6.30, Get ready: 6.45–7.05, Breakfast: 7.05–7.25,' and so on, like this, all the way through until bedtime. This seemed pretty intense to me. Surely this would build anxiety rather than lessening it? But Vidh found that it worked. She felt more in control of her life. She was able to get more things done and at the same time felt fully able to enjoy the time she had scheduled for herself, to practise her yoga, and even to spend time surfing the internet, without feeling any guilt. Whereas she used to think she wasn't getting anything done, she would now see a long, satisfyingly ticked list in her A4 notepad at the end of every day.
(Continues…)
Excerpted from "The Stress Solution"
by .
Copyright © 2018 Dr Rangan Chatterjee.
Excerpted by permission of Penguin Random House.
All rights reserved. No part of this excerpt may be reproduced or reprinted without permission in writing from the publisher.
Excerpts are provided by Dial-A-Book Inc. solely for the personal use of visitors to this web site.
Table of Contents
Introduction, 8,
How to Use This Book, 26,
1 / PURPOSE, 30,
Chapter 1 / The 3 Habits of Calm, 34,
Chapter 2 / Schedule Your Time, 50,
Chapter 3 / How to LIVE More, 68,
2 / RELATIONSHIPS, 82,
Chapter 4 / Human Touch, 84,
Chapter 5 / Get Intimate, 98,
Chapter 6 / Nurture Your Friendships, 114,
3 / BODY, 128,
Chapter 7 / Eat Yourself Happy, 130,
Chapter 8 / Make Exercise Work For You, 154,
Chapter 9 / Reset Your Rhythm, 176,
4 / MIND, 200,
Chapter 10 / Technology Overload, 202,
Chapter 11 / Bathe Yourself in Nature, 216,
Chapter 12 / Take Time to Breathe, 230,
Conclusion, 254,
References, 256,
Acknowledgements, 262,
Index, 264,