Middleton - Stress: How to De-Stress Without Doing Less

Part 1 Understanding stress:
What is stress and how might it affect you?

Part 2 All about you:
What makes some people particularly vulnerable to stress?

Part 3 Here and now:
How to deal with a high-stress life

In my job I work with all kinds of different people, in lots of different situations in their workplace, in schools, in the community, at work and at home. As I share in peoples lives, I come across a variety of issues. Listening to them as they talk about their journeys, the things they have been through and the difficulties they are struggling with, has given me the opportunity and the privilege of sharing in many peoples experiences of what their own emotions can lead them to. I have learned a lot far more than I ever learned in any of my years of formal studying about what the things life throws at normal people can push them to: the extremes of emotions, difficulties with addictions, traumatic memories, and difficult and unhelpful beliefs about themselves and the world around them.

Writing this book has given me another opportunity to share some of the insights I have gained in my work. But if I am honest, writing this book has been very different for one key reason. Although I understand them very well, on the whole the issues I have covered in my previous books have been things that I do not struggle with myself. They are things I have learned about through sharing the experiences of others, through witnessing their struggles and applying the theory and fact that I already knew. This issue, however, is one that I readily confess I face day to day, like so many other people and no doubt like you, seeing as you are reading this book.

Stress is a modern-day plague, something that very few of us escape something that we probably all have to think about as it follows us every day. Stress is always there in the background, lurking behind us, following throughout our lives and ready to hit at moments we least expect it. Stress can take many forms and come from many sources. Like a lot of people, I am someone who likes to fill life with many different things. I like to achieve things, to accomplish things, to fit plenty into my days. Too easily I see things that need doing and take on the responsibility of doing them! But my own experience, starting with life as a medical student years ago, has taught me (though I have not been quick to learn it!) that if I do want to push myself that hard and achieve the things I aim for, I must not forget to make sure I handle stress well.

Stress can often be an unwanted companion along the road of life. We may not like it but its there! Too many people I have worked with have had months or years stolen by stress, or are facing the risk that they might have to give up things they love or stifle something of the person they are, because stress is having too serious an impact on them. We have to be sensible where stress is concerned. Finding the balance of how much we really can squeeze into life means we have to learn how to fight stress in the best way possible.

This book is about how to deal with stress how to reduce it where we can and live with it when we cant (we may as well accept it is unlikely to vanish completely). It is about how to stop stress from taking over our lives and ultimately taking bits of our lives from us. So join me on a lifelong journey of fighting this battle negotiating with stress and trying to come out as the winner!

WHAT IS STRESS AND HOW MIGHT IT AFFECT YOU?