Reddit reviews The Relaxation and Stress Reduction Workbook (A New Harbinger Self-Help Workbook)
We found 15 Reddit comments about The Relaxation and Stress Reduction Workbook (A New Harbinger Self-Help Workbook). Here are the top ones, ranked by their Reddit score.
New Harbinger Publications
I notice that you immediately responded to my first comment, but then didn't respond to my follow up comment (which asked where your anxiety comes from.) I think this is very likely because you're not sure of the source of your anxiety. That's totally fine -- no problem in the world.
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Based on this post and your past posts on this subreddit, it seems like your struggle is really with anxiety. You find different things to sort-of 'hang' that anxiety on -- fear of aging, fear of 'not being enough' -- but it all boils down to anxiety. The worst part is that you've created inescapable anxiety traps for yourself. What I mean by that is that you're anxious about things that are unsolvable. You're anxious about aging, but can you stop aging? You're anxious about not having enough, but how much is enough? 'Enough' is a goalpost on wheels as far as our minds are concerned -- as soon as you think you've reached a goal, your mind will move the goalposts out to a larger goal forever and ever and ever, and so you'll always feel inadequate.
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So it seems like the thing to attack directly is your anxiety. Working with a therapist or counselor is one good option. You can also look into other ways to manage anxiety. I recommend this workbook as one way to get started.
https://www.amazon.fr/Relaxation-Reduction-Workbook-Harbinger-Self-Help/dp/1572245492
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EDIT: Slightly more recent edition available in the US, for US readers -- this is a great book for anyone who wants to learn to master their anxiety: https://www.amazon.com/dp/1684033349
I hear you on so many levels. I HATE cleaning but I like a clean house. I've been doing a purge and repainting for about a year and a half. Slow steady progress because like anything else it's one step forward two steps back. Good on you for finding a list that works for you! I made a weekly schedule a long time ago. It's pinned to my fridge but I don't use it. Daily goals is the way to go. Take it easy tho you're growing a baby and nobody could fault you for doing what you can. And your husband? He's a damn champ!
And yes that negative self-talk is a bitch. My issue is with anxiety and a little depression (about being anxious mostly). This might sound crazy but what works for me is using that bitchy voice to tell my anxiety to fuck off. It's the enemy not you.
Been in counseling about four years now for this and before I even had my first appointment they recommended me this book and about a year later therapist recommended this one. They're both great in that they have those checklists you were talking about. The second one is a bit daunting. It's about as thick as a Stephen King novel but they're not meant to be read cover to cover. I skipped around finding chapters that applied to me. They're both quite helpful if you're looking to do a little "homework" on your own.
And yay for cleaner! Someday I hope to be able to have everything in order and just have someone come in to maintain the clean. One mess at a time :)
I'm a meditator as well and have been dealing with anxiety over the years, I'd like to offer some suggestions which have helped me:
Most fundamentally you want to be sure there aren't any schemas that are causing a lot of this tendency to experience negative emotions. Schemas are enduring negative patterns that determine how we see the world (they're basically what you could also call "core beliefs"), and are usually formed in childhood, often (but far from always) at the hands of parents. The psychologist Jeffrey Young created Schema Therapy, and pointed out 18 different schemas, which can be found here: http://www.davidbricker.com/clientsguideSchemaTherapy.pdf (note: ignore the first few pages which talk about personality disorders). If you find any of the 18 that really hit home, then I'd highly recommend the best "self-help" book I've read as a therapist, Reinventing Your Life by Young and Klosko, which delineates eleven of the eighteen schemas, including a presentation of how your life might be like (including interpersonally), how schemas form, and how they can be changed.
Schemas are ultimately deep belief filters that get activated by relevant stimuli (e.g., a person experiences intense anger because of underlying hurt -- anger almost always being secondary to a softer primary emotion -- at a person's neutral statement which was interpreted to mean this person was incompetent or a failure, which stands for the failure schema). In psychology cognitions are the roots of emotion, so to attempt to change emotions you have to look at cognitions.
You also have to look at physiological and behavioral ways of managing your emotions, like deep breathing, progressive muscle relaxation, mindfulness meditation (technically a cognitive approach, and one that needs 10-20 minutes of sitting and if needed walking practice in order for it to generalize to everyday life situations), exercising, leaving the room (when angry), asserting oneself (particularly one's needs if one has a difficulty doing this, which can lead to resentment, anger, isolation, etc.), and being more socially involved with others.
Another overall excellent workbook that covers a myriad of emotions and cognitive ways at changing them is Thoughts and Feelings by McKay, Davis, and Fanning (two of whom are PhD psychologists).
For another great book more focused on the relaxation response (which will overlap at least a bit with the book just mentioned), check out The Relaxation and Stress Reduction Workbook.
Does that seem like a lot of work? It really isn't. Even if you identify with a few schema and get the Young/Klosko book, that book and the other two aren't meant to be read cover to cover, and you can easily get by with reading half of each book at most to get the best parts that might be most applicable to your emotional needs.
Clinical/mental health counselor, MA, LPC here. This shit works.
This is a great suggestion! Be sure to practice when you're NOT anxious--and possibly when you are engaging in other relaxation techniques--you can condition your body to associate the diaphragmatic breathing as almost like hitting a physiological reset button. I also have OCD and ADHD (with occasional major depressive episodes), and I've realized if I can calm my body down when I'm at my most anxious, my mind will typically follow suit.
When I was trying to figure out what stress reduction techniques worked for me, this workbook (recommended by my therapist) came in handy:
https://www.amazon.com/dp/1572245492/ref=cm_sw_r_cp_api_UttwybNTN6NW4
(I have the fifth edition, but I'm sure the sixth is fine.)
it looks like you already got a lot of great advice but just want to chime in that ive been there too. it sounds like youre having recurrent unwanted thoughts - give that phrase a google and read up on how you can take back control. i also got a lot of help from this workbook. im now on cycle 8 and just got kind of tired maybe of stressing out so its dulled a little. but want to echo what others have said about therapy and possibly meds. my psych said that studies show that stress and anxiety is worse for the baby than specific antidepressants. ive been off my meds for a year and am actively managing it with yoga, therapy and exercise. its not easy and requires dedication but overall i feel much better than i did 8 months ago, and if i can do it, im sure you can too. take care of yourself <3
I'm...working on it. I went to therapy last year for it and the first therapist I saw told me that with what I told her, I really needed to get on medication or I would never take control of it. I did not like that, so I found someone else that would be interested in working with me and doing cognitive behavioral therapy. I didn't want to get on medication and just call it a day. I wanted to learn coping skills and add tools to my mental toolbox to help me break down my cycles of binging.
After I got with another therapist, I was assigned a book -
https://www.amazon.com/Relaxation-Reduction-Workbook-Harbinger-Self-Help/dp/1572245492
And I also got this one - https://www.amazon.com/Binge-Eating-Compulsive-Overeating-Workbook/dp/1572245913
Brain Over Binge is recommended here quite often, but I haven't read that one.
As for recovery? Well, as I said before, I'm still working on it. Currently I am 5 days binge free. My longest streak so far has been about 65 days and I'm proud of that. Am I going to slip up again in the future? Maybe. Am I going to binge today? No. That's the important part. I'm not going to binge today and tomorrow morning I'm going to wake up and do it all over again.
this book has helped me "The Relaxation and Stress Reduction Workbook"
The comprehensive resource is The Relaxation and Stress Management Handbook, put together by doctors from Kaiser Permanente.
I use progressive muscle relaxation to enter a relaxed mental state. Sometimes I also use self-hypnosis for a deeper effect, especially during a panic attack. (I didn't have the patience for yoga, and meditation scripts were too active for my mind to relax, but those might work for someone else.) I do 2 sessions a day of 20 minutes each, more than 20 minutes and you could fall asleep during the session, which is bad. I do one session upon awaking when my body is already very relaxed, and the second at lunch or after. I sit upright and put my feet up (if this fails, I'll get into the autogenics pose, sitting forward, head bowed, arms at sides.) I put on a Brain Sync track like this one. Then I clench my toes for five seconds, then unclench them and force them to relax, until I have them in a fully relaxed state, then I repeat with other muscle groups all the way up. Once my body is relaxed, I try to pick out the deepest note in the music. In an anxiety or panic situation, I'll skip that and run through a self-hypnosis protocol; I use this because the context automatically lightens my mood. The relaxation effect is always stronger when I'm mentally envisioning myself commanding the body parts to relax.
My progression went like this. Initially, I did not even know what relaxation felt like. Progressive muscle relaxation works directly with that, it's a gateway technique to help you master the other ones. Once I got the body relaxed, I had what is called "monkey mind". I would go through my techniques, but my mind would be in full ADHD mode, imagining every possible thing in a mad stream of consciousness. This is not failure, it's actually success- the mind needs to get these off its queue. Eventually the flow became slower and I'd reach a creative state, where I'd have good problem-solving ideas during my session, and I'd have to stop and write them down. But now I've got to a state where the ideas are just mild and I'm disciplined enough to just sort of let them go.
I also use progressive relaxation to fall asleep in bed at night in cases of insomnia.
These techniques should not interfere with anxiety/depression medicine.
To test whether these really work, I trained myself in this protocol over four years while taking various health supplements and being on an allergy-reduction diet. Then I quit everything, and within two and a half years I was in a very terrible state mentally and physically. Since then I resumed the protocol for five years without doing anything else. Based on my health condition and reactions to real world stress, I feel I am now stabler than I have ever been. The only other thing I am doing for my health is taking a daily multi vitamin/mineral pill.
I measure my progress by my reaction to real world events, such as whether I'll grab for the dash when someone else is driving clumsily. There are still things that set me off, I still have room to grow.
If you look at some of the diagnostic criteria for different phobias or anxieties and things, it seems like there's always a line for "and these thoughts/fears cause the person significant distress." I think it's normal for most people to feel shy and awkward and fear judgement. But, if it's causing you distress or you think that figuring out a way to get past it would significantly improve your life, then it would probably be worth it to talk to the counselor. Some places pro-rate based on income, so it's worth looking into. When I was looking into treatment for a phobia, it seemed like it would cost ~$1000 which seemed like too much. But when I thought about it, I realized that if I could spend $1000 and never have to spend time worrying and feeling sick about it again, that would be the best money I'd ever spent.
So, it's really subjective in the end. If you think about your quality of life right now, is it pretty good or do you think it could significantly improve? If you think it could be a lot better if you no longer had to deal with anxiety, then it's probably worth getting help. The counselor is a good step. My university publishes the statistics for how many people talk to the mental health clinicians at some point and it is a huge proportion of the student body. It's not weird to talk to a counselor and it doesn't mean something is wrong with you, because it's absolutely normal to have at least some period of your life when you're confronted with something challenging.
If you decide that your life could be better if you were able to get over some fears, you should talk to the counselor before worrying about how to manage the treatment costs long-term. Until you start looking into it more, you can't predict how much it will cost. And, even if you do find out later that it's too expensive or the affordable places are inaccessible by public transportation, there are books and online programs that can be useful. I found this one to be useful in the time I was waiting to get an appointment. It gave me some strategies to use in the meantime, and it also meant that once I started seeing a therapist I had a little bit of a head start.
tl;dr You have to just think for yourself about what your fears are costing you and what your life might be like without them. If you think your life would be better without anxiety you should look into treatment because it will be worth it.
I found this book insightful, it explains a few different types of meditation, it gives guidance and some work sheets that help reflect and track progress. It also has a bunch of other mental/physical well being guidance.
Breathing exercises are good (you can just type that into YouTube) also progressive relaxation where you tighten certain muscle groups and then relax them. There are lots of cognitive behavioral techniques that are great for reducing worries. I have no affiliations with it but highly recommend this book and it goes over several techniques: https://www.amazon.com/Relaxation-Reduction-Workbook-Harbinger-Self-Help/dp/1572245492
Formal relaxation methods are recommended by the doctors of Kaiser Permanente in The Relaxation and Stress Reduction Workbook, which has decades of research into these problems. http://www.amazon.com/Relaxation-Reduction-Workbook-Harbinger-Self-Help/dp/1572245492
Been using these methods for years and I'm getting better all the time, and the methods don't interfere with medication. This is not mere positive thinking, I am just unsure what to call it.
Anxiety is the symptom that occurs when exercise is indicated- the body is trying to get you to take physical action to address the fight-or-flight stimulus. When you come off the adrenaline rush, you crash, forcing you into a deeply relaxed state of one type or another. Depression indicates that the body doesn't feel that the time is right for exercise (such as when you are physically sick) but that you still need to obtain a "mental reset".
I bought this book years ago and really like it. https://www.amazon.ca/Relaxation-Stress-Reduction-Workbook-Sixth/dp/1572245492
I also bought a book called meditation for dummies and it had great meditations that were super easy. http://m.dummies.com/how-to/content/meditation-for-dummies-cheat-sheet.html
He definitely has spells where he'll go a period of time with little to no anxiety, and seemingly out of no where it'll come back. Sometimes him just sitting next to me just BEING anxious makes me feel uneasy so he'll go into the bedroom, lie down and just do some deep breathing to calm down. We bought him this workbook so he has something to learn/focus on while he's anxious. When his anxiety was really bad he devoted an hour a day to this workbook. Being proactive about trying to calm down always makes both of us feel better.