Title: Sanity Secrets for Stressed-Out Women
Author: Sue Augustine
Summary: I judged it by the cover: a book recommending bubble baths had to have good stress-relief tips, and it did.

This book begins with the quote: “Some mornings it seems hardly worth the effort to take the cat off your face,” and I could tell it was the book for me! Sue Augustine approaches stress-reduction with practicality and a sense of humor, and I found many useful tips in this book. She certainly hit the old stand-bys (eat right, exercise…) which I usually find singularly unhelpful. That is, when I am stressed out, I don’t have time to exercise and cook, so I tend to do fast food and skip workouts. Thus, when I hear these recommendations, I just think, “Come on! Give me something I can use…”

However, her book is designed for people like you and I – people who may be so stressed, they can’t read an entire book: we need relief and we need it now! She organized the book around 25 “secrets” to reduce stress, with one chapter covering each secret. This way, you can skip right to the chapter that makes sense for you, whether it be “simplify your life” or “celebrate the joys of aging.” If a whole chapter feels like too much, skip to the end of the chapter and read the bulleted list of tips for that topic: you will still get the benefit. In addition, she wrote a number of sections called “the first resort,” in which she points out how to rely on your faith in God to reduce stress, and not as a last resort.

The last section of the book provided a new way to look at stress, and was very valuable. Augustine notes that stress is often caused by how we perceive circumstances, and describes a cycle of stress: (1) Event, (2) Thoughts about the event, (3) Self-talk, (4) Emotional response, and (5) Physical response (i.e. stress). Thus, we can interrupt the stress cycle at any point after the event occurs. She offers a formula called “CPR” – Circumstance + Perception = Result. If we challenge our automatic perceptions, manage how we talk to ourselves about events, and give our emotions only the appropriate amount of weight, we can actually reduce our stress even in the same circumstances that normally cause us problems.

Favorite Tips:

• Dress for comfort: find out what would it be like to dress to feel good rather than to look thin or project the right image?
• Treat yourself to comfort food: if you have a healthy diet most of the time, a few well-timed donuts will not cause a problem.
• Let others take care of themselves: this may be the single most valuable thing for me in the book. It’s my new mantra.
• Stop trying to be chief of everything: get help when you need it, you don’t have to be in charge all the time.
• Change the way you talk about your busyness: Say “there is no hurry, I have enough time, everything is unfolding just as it should”.
• Lower your standards: this is the second most valuable thing – every project doesn’t have to be a work of art!
• Accept your life stage: sometimes, you’ll have to say “no” more often, but it passes.
• It’s not only okay to say no to yourself and others, it’s imperative if we want a stress-free life.
• Conquer procrastination: this entire chapter was written for me, but I especially liked “do the worst part first” and “just get started!”
• Speak nicely about your body – you will tend to take care of it better if you like it!
• Redefine contentment: the illusion that I will be happy and peaceful if I have better/more stuff is … an illusion.
• Alter your stressful talk: Try to identify your experience specifically (i.e. instead of “I feel awful”, are you overwhelmed? insecure? frightened? embarrassed?)

Favorite Quotes:

“I don’t suffer from insanity – I enjoy every minute of it!”
“I can only please one person per day. Today is not your day. Tomorrow isn’t looking good either.”
“It’s not enough if you are busy. The question is, ‘What are you busy about?’ ” – Henry David Thoreau
“You can be pleased with nothing if you are not pleased with yourself.” – Lady Wortley Montagu