5 Weeks to a Stress-Free Life [A]Who will you be this year Will you be a better, wiser version of yourself by the time the calendar flips again Or will you add to your potbelly, downgrade your mood, and move one risk factor closer to your first heart attack Every day of your life, you answer these questions—in the ways you handle stress. That’s not a joke. Stress is one national disaster that strikes each of us where we’re most vulnerable: brains first, and bodies later. Unless, that is, you learn to control it. Not by means of will, but by employing lab-tested strategies that can truly calm you down. And unless you’re getting a rubdown from Evangeline Lilly every night, we’re guessing you could use them. So here’s your 5-week plan, complete with our full anxiety-back guarantee. Week 1: Separate the stressors from the energizers. [B]Some stress is unavoidable. Some is not. "The trick is learning to distinguish between the two," says Paul Rosch, M.D., president of the American Institute of Stress. He can’t identify your sources of stress for you, because one man’s stress is another man’s joy. So you’ll have to do that part yourself. Divide your stresses into two lists: "accept" and "change." [C]As you draw up your lists, you’ll naturally pay attention to what your brain knows about your sources of stress, but make sure you listen to your body’s complaints as well. When are you experiencing those headaches Or back pain Is there a pattern to your heartburn, or a particular stretch of your commute that provokes road rage "Learn how your body, responds so you can detect early warning signs of stress," says Dr. Rosch. [D]Your activities during these first 7 days are not merely a prelude. Simply sitting down to identify all the things that stress you out, and deciding to do something about them, is a powerful stress buster in itself. It’s been known since the 1950s that stress is aggravated if a person has no sense of control and no hope that things will get better. Having goals, and reaching those goals, is the healthy opposite of that. "Too often, we are adrift on the sea of life," says Dr. Rosch. Drop anchor. Week 2: Hands off the hot buttons. [E]Some men are perfect specimens of mental health. They calmly apply their considerable problem-solving abilities to the sources of their stress. Then there are the rest of us who don’t deal very well. According to one survey, 46% of stressed adults don’t care what they eat, 57% stop exercising, and 53% lose sleep. In short, we need a week(at least!)just to rid ourselves of our self-destructive old ways of coping. Consider these five: alcohol, junk food, television, the Internet, and tobacco. We reach for them out of habit, and that’s exactly what they become: bad habits. [F]Alcohol is obviously a risky way to self-medicate. But here’s an interesting finding: Alcohol doesn’t really take the edge off stress. Just the opposite: Stress takes the edge off alcohol, according to University of Chicago researchers. Although stress increases our desire to drink, those drinks make us feel sluggish, not high. You’ll end up drinking more and enjoying it less. [G]As for junk food, yes, the high-fat, high-carb content of so-called comfort foods actually does give short-term comfort by signaling the brain to stop the discharge of stress hormones. But in the long run, it will add stress to your waistband. An Ohio State University study found that stress causes triglycerides to linger longer in the bloodstream, thus interfering with the body’s normal metabolism of fats. [H]And television Go ahead, watch My Name Is Earl. Many studies have shown that laughter is stress medicine—even the anticipation of a good laugh lowers stress hormones in the blood. But don’t watch 4 hours of old Survivor episodes beforehand. Same goes for hanging out in online casinos. Those hours should be spent with your friends. Social ties are tied to lower stress, longer life, and quicker recovery from illness. [I]Tobacco The more you use, the greater your chances of impotence, and there is perhaps no calm more profound than the postcoital one. Why risk messing with that Week 3: Stop multitasking. [J]"It’s the death of people," says Jeff Davidson, author of 36 self-help books, including The Complete Idiot’s Guide to Getting Things Done. People think they have to accomplish multiple tasks simultaneously in order to be productive and profitable. "Just the opposite is true," he says. When Davidson gives speeches, he performs an onstage experiment: He takes two people from the audience and gives each 15 pennies, 15 paper clips, and a pen and paper. He tells one person to stack the pennies, link the paper clips, and draw 15 stars—in that order. He tells the other person to switch back and forth among the tasks. Guess who finishes first. [K]What Davidson calls "sharp attention" is possible only if you focus on one task at a time. "Breakthrough thinking doesn’t happen when you’re multitasking," he says, noting that our society’s current fascination with "faster, better, more" adds to our stress in ways people couldn’t have imagined a generation ago. He agrees that some multitasking is inevitable. But for this week, cut the cord, take notes about what does and doesn’t work, then reintroduce the multitasking only when it benefits you. Week 4: Release the demons. [L]It’s always the quiet ones, the men who bottle it up inside, who end up going on chain-saw massacres, right Maybe quiet is the enemy. In an experiment regarding "emotional disclosure," students suffering from post-traumatic(外伤后的)stress at Temple University, in Philadelphia, were asked to write—longhand, not on computers—for 20 minutes a day. After only 3 days, those who repeatedly wrote about a single traumatic event showed fewer physical and mental signs of stress. Even 8 weeks later, they felt better and were sick less often than students who wrote about emotionally neutral events. [M]The results surprised the clinical psychologists who conducted this recent research. "Knowing how hard it is for people to change, we were impressed that this could work," says Denise Sloan, Ph.D. But it does work, Sloan says, because "often, people who have survived trauma try not to think about those events. And the more you avoid something, the more intense and stressful it becomes. It’s good to be expressive." So sit down 3 nights this week and get it out there on paper, where it won’t hurt you. Week 5: Find a release valve. [N]Now we’re ready to dive into all the relaxation techniques you were probably expecting to read about in this chapter. Here’s the thing: There are literally hundreds of them. They can be grouped into six categories: stretching exercises, also known as hatha yoga; progressive muscle relaxation; deep-breathing exercises; autogenic training, in which you quietly suggest to yourself that various body parts are getting heavy, or warm, or whatever, imagery, wherein you daydream of peaceful settings; and meditation or mindfulness, two distinct mental activities that both restrict attention and calm the mind. [O]Should you arbitrarily sign on for one of these methods No way. You have to find which works best for you. "No one shoe fits all," says Jonathan C. Smith, Ph.D., director of the Roosevelt University stress institute, in Chicago. Each technique produces a different state of mind, he says, from the energized mental state of yoga to the disengaged frame of mind that comes with autogenic training. But they all work to lower stress.An experiment found students were more likely to be relieved from physical and mental stress when they repeatedly wrote about a single traumatic event.