The ' Don't Sweat the Small Stuff...and It's All Small Stuff Workbook : Simple Ways to Keep the Little Things from Taking over Your Life - Softcover

Richard Carlson

Softcover

ISBN 10: 0340738332 ISBN 13: 9780340738337

Publisher: Hodder & Stoughton, 1999

Synopsis

In his bestselling "Don't Sweat the Small Stuff", Richard Carlson encouraged us to live our lives in a calmer and less stressful way. Now, in this companion book, he makes it even easier to incorporate these suggestions into your daily life. Including exercises to ensure you confidently act upon decisions you take, tests to help work out your strong and weak points, and guidance on real-life situations, "The Don't Sweat the Small Stuff Workbook" will encourage us above all to never let the little things in life get us down.

About this title

Review

Sure, Richard Carlson's bestselling Don't Sweat the Small Stuff... contains plenty of sensible advice, but it's not always easy to follow. Enter this intriguing workbook with its universal appeal: it's aimed at anyone interested in reducing stress and improving their relationships. Designed to help you put the many peace-promoting, "just let it go" principles of Don't Sweat the Small Stuff into active practice, it's bursting with fun quizzes, checklists, self-tests, questions, and activities. If this doesn't instruct and inspire you to make concrete personality and life improvements, there's nothing much that will!

In one exercise, "Lower Your Tolerance to Stress," Carlson suggests that we'd be better off if we didn't brag about how much stress we can handle. People who do brag about their stress tolerance, he says, are usually stressed out all the time. To help you reduce your tolerance, he lists 20 signs of stress (among them: allergies, anxiety, depression, frequent headaches, and restlessness) and asks you to put a check mark next to the ones you've experienced. The next time you feel any of these symptoms, he says, you should analyze and write down how you might change your behavior in order to alleviate or prevent these problems in the future. In another exercise, "Create 'Patience Practice Periods,'" he first asks you to analyze your level of patience (Do you drive above the speed limit? Grow furious when stuck in voice mail mazes? Feel like everyone else at the mall walks too slowly and gets in your way?). He then gives a series of hypothetical patience-killing situations--a long line at the grocery store, or slow, tricky traffic--and leaves space for you to write about how these situations would make you react.

Some exercises are true/false, some are of the never/sometimes/often/always variety, while others require thoughtful written responses. A few are by nature harder to handle than others ("Imagine Yourself at Your Own Funeral"), so the workbook therefore shouldn't be devoured in one sitting, but dipped into a bit at a time. This is a fine way to nurture the much-underrated concepts of empathy, forgiveness, tolerance, and kindness.

About the Author

Richard Carlson, PhD, is the author of the bestselling Don't Sweat the Small Stuff. He lives with his wife and children in northern California..

Edition details

• Publisher: Hodder & Stoughton
• Publication date: 1999
• ISBN 10: 0340738332
• ISBN 13: 9780340738337
• Binding: Paperback
• Language: English
• Number of pages: 240