We are living in a stressful world, yet despite our familiarity with the notion, stress remains an elusive concept. In The Age of Stress, Mark Jackson explores the history of scientific studies of stress in the modern world. In particular, he reveals how the science that legitimates and fuels current anxieties about stress has been shaped by a wide range of socio-political and cultural, as well as biological, factors: stress, he argues, is both a condition and a metaphor. In order to understand the ubiquity and impact of stress in our own times, or to explain how stress has commandeered such a central place in the modern imagination, Jackson suggests that we need to comprehend not only the evolution of the medical science and technology that has gradually uncovered the biological pathways between stress and disease in recent decades, but also the shifting social, economic, and cultural contexts that have invested that scientific knowledge with meaning and authority. In particular, he argues, we need to acknowledge the manner in which enduring concerns about the effects of stress on mental and physical health are the product of broader historical preoccupations with the preservation of personal and political, as well as physiological, stability.

Being "so stressed" has to be the most common description for a woman today -- no matter your age or marital status, whether you have a career or work inside the home. Stress is the gift of modern life that keeps on giving, because, even after you've gotten through a stressful day or week, the effects on your body and mind linger, whether you're aware of them or not. And they can build up and make you sick -- unless you do something to stop them. That's where So Stressed, a landmark new guide to women's health, can help. The realization that stress was the most common cause of all the different symptoms and ailments that their patients were coming to them for was a eureka moment for internationally renowned OB-GYN physicians Stephanie McClellan and Beth Hamilton. To find out how stress could be the root cause of diseases as disparate as chronic pain, gynecological disorders and depression,asthma and metabolic disorders, Drs. McClellan and Hamilton embarked on a unique medical quest -- they wanted to find the latest discoveries emerging around the world in the science of stress and put them all together in treatments to help their patients now. Their urgent mission took them to the leading researchers at the best medical centers around the world, where they learned the exciting findings that they reveal in this fascinating new approach to women's health, So Stressed. With information from the medical and psychological sciences of stress that no other practicing physician or clinician has implemented, So Stressed shows you what stress is doing to every cell in your body, how it disrupts the intricate balance of your body's systems, and most important what you can do, starting today, to restore your body's health and prevent yourself from getting sick. Drs. McClellan and Hamilton -- who are widely sought after for their compassionate manner and educational approach to their patients -- have treated more than 16,000 women in their shared three decades of medical practice. Through their timely research and unique, integrative approach to patient care, they have developed four groundbreaking stress types, each with unique patterns for potential illness and disease -- presented here for the first time -- that you can use to identify the ways that stress is affecting your body and mind. Once you know your unique stress profile, the doctors help you learn new ways to see and respond to stress, reduce it and its effects on your body, and even prevent the life-threatening illnesses it causes. You'll find the right program -- specifically designed for the way you fit into your stress type -- with prescriptive advice for the best mental relaxation techniques, nutrition, exercise, and restoration practices for you. Filled with instructive and inspiring case stories from their patients' and their own life experience, Drs. McClellan and Hamilton bridge the gap between the lab bench and the bedside in this comprehensive program for total health.

Drawing from groundbreaking research, psychologist and award-winning teacher Kelly McGonigal, PhD, offers a surprising new view of stress—one that reveals the upside of stress, and shows us exactly how to capitalize on its benefits. You hear it all the time: stress causes heart disease; stress causes insomnia; stress is bad for you! But what if changing how you think about stress could make you happier, healthier, and better able to reach your goals? Combining exciting new research on resilience and mindset, Kelly McGonigal, PhD, proves that undergoing stress is not bad for you; it is undergoing stress while believing that stress is bad for you that makes it harmful. In fact, stress has many benefits, from giving us greater focus and energy, to strengthening our personal relationships. McGonigal shows readers how to cultivate a mindset that embraces stress, and activate the brain's natural ability to learn from challenging experiences. Both practical and life-changing, The Upside of Stress is not a guide to getting rid of stress, but a toolkit for getting better at it—by understanding, accepting, and leveraging it to your advantage.

From two leading child and adolescent mental health experts comes a guide for the parents of every college and college-bound student who want to know what’s normal mental health and behavior, what’s not, and how to intervene before it’s too late. “The title says it all...Chock full of practical tools, resources and the wisdom that comes with years of experience, The Stressed Years of their Lives is destined to become a well-thumbed handbook to help families cope with this modern age of anxiety.” — Brigid Schulte, Pulitzer Prize-winning journalist, author of Overwhelmed and director of the Better Life Lab at New America All parenting is in preparation for letting go. However, the paradox of parenting is that the more we learn about late adolescent development and risk, the more frightened we become for our children, and the more we want to stay involved in their lives. This becomes particularly necessary, and also particularly challenging, in mid- to late adolescence, the years just before and after students head off to college. These years coincide with the emergence of many mood disorders and other mental health issues. When family psychologist Dr. B. Janet Hibbs's own son came home from college mired in a dangerous depressive spiral, she turned to Dr. Anthony Rostain. Dr. Rostain has a secret superpower: he understands the arcane rules governing privacy and parental involvement in students’ mental health care on college campuses, the same rules that sometimes hold parents back from getting good care for their kids. Now, these two doctors have combined their expertise to corral the crucial emotional skills and lessons that every parent and student can learn for a successful launch from home to college.

The secret to reducing your stress is not a better work-life balance, nor is it in meditation or mindfulness. Chronic high stress—the kind contributing to heart disease—is not caused by an inability to decompress, but rather external factors that are out of our control—namely, overwhelm and uncertainty. So, while most people are focusing on either eliminating or coping with their stressors, they should be working to become immune to unavoidable stress. Stress-Proof Your Life leverages insights from Eliz Greene’s 17 years of research, including a 4,000-person study, to provide the reader with stress management techniques that actually work. Through data-driven health insight and actionable exercises, this book teaches readers how to: Quantify and assess their current stress level Overcome overwhelm by practicing stress ecology Combat uncertainty and the paralyzing loop of anxiety that accompanies it Offset the physical impact of stress Recover from the emotional toll of stress Cultivate resiliency in the face of crisis and change Eliz also shares insights from her research on generational and gender differences, leading high-performance teams, and cultivating a purpose-driven organizational culture that is immune to external and internal pressures. Once you implement the strategies detailed in this book, you’ll elevate your quality of life, enhance your productivity, boost your capacity for critical and creative thought, and attain heightened levels of personal and professional success. After experiencing a near-fatal heart attack at the age of 35 while 7 months pregnant with twins, Eliz Greene committed herself to uncovering and combating the preventable risk factors for heart disease, which led her to focus on job stress as a deadly and underexamined cause of heart attacks. For nearly two decades, Eliz has been on a mission to inspire busy people to pay attention to their heart health by identifying and taming their stress environment so that they can increase their vitality and create a purpose-driven and enjoyable life. Don’t let job stress hold you back from the fulfillment and wellness you deserve or cause you to miss those special moments that make everything matter. Stress-proof your life and discover the secret to weathering adversity and uncertainty and improving your overall well-being!

Stress. Everyone is talking about it, suffering from it, trying desperately to manage it-now more than ever. From 1970 to 1980, 2,326 academic articles appeared with the word "stress" in the title. In the decade between 2000 and 2010 that number jumped to 21,750. Has life become ten times more stressful, or is it the stress concept itself that has grown exponentially over the past 40 years? In One Nation Under Stress, Dana Becker argues that our national infatuation with the therapeutic culture has created a middle-class moral imperative to manage the tensions of daily life by turning inward, ignoring the social and political realities that underlie those tensions. Becker shows that although stress is often associated with conditions over which people have little control-workplace policies unfavorable to family life, increasing economic inequality, war in the age of terrorism-the stress concept focuses most of our attention on how individuals react to stress. A proliferation of self-help books and dire medical warnings about the negative effects of stress on our physical and emotional health all place the responsibility for alleviating stress-though yoga, deep breathing, better diet, etc.-squarely on the individual. The stress concept has come of age in a period of tectonic social and political shifts. Nevertheless, we persist in the all-American belief that we can meet these changes by re-engineering ourselves rather than tackling the root causes of stress. Examining both research and popular representations of stress in cultural terms, Becker traces the evolution of the social uses of the stress concept as it has been transformed into an all-purpose vehicle for defining, expressing, and containing middle-class anxieties about upheavals in American society.

“Though life occurs in events, it must be written about in moments.” Today’s youth are growing up in an age of stress and trauma, and nowhere is that more apparent than in the classroom. Absenteeism, emotional distraction, passivity, and unresponsiveness are all signs of children in need. Thankfully, it turns out that the workshop classroom, with limited but essential tuning, can be just the environment students in the grip of trauma need to become comfortable in themselves and break through into active learning. In The Mindful Writing Workshop: Teaching in the Age of Stress and Trauma, Professor Richard Koch offers clear, comprehensive, guided lessons that help teachers gain the insight necessary to adapt their instruction of writing to incorporate restorative and healing practices—practices that can improve the quality of learning and writing for all learners. Accessible, straightforward, and empowering, the approaches presented in The Mindful Writing Workshop will help previously indifferent or distracted students become engaged, increase their effort, deepen their resilience, and soon raise the quality of their writing, all while guiding teachers in creating a positive, collaborative, “doing” classroom.