Breaking the Stress Cycle: 7 Steps to Greater Resilience, Happiness, and Peace of Mind

Where does stress come from? Financial pressures? Looming deadlines? Conflicts at work or at home? For more than half a century, we’ve been told that stress comes from circumstances like these, that it’s a by-product of our ancestors’ fight-or-flight response to danger, and that the best we can do, given the fast pace of life today, is to breathe, try to relax, and accept that life is hard.

All of this, according to Andrew Bernstein, is wrong. Spurred by the death of several family members ...