Worried Sick: How Stress Hurts Us and How to Bounce Back

Pinpoints

by Deborah Carr

Comments like “I’m worried sick” convey the conventional wisdom that being “stressed out” will harm our health. Thousands of academic studies reveal that stressful life events (like a job loss), ongoing strains (like burdensome caregiving duties), and even daily hassles (like traffic jams on the commute to work) affect every aspect of our physical and emotional well-being. Cutting through a sea of scientific research and theories, Worried Sick answers many questions about how stress gets under our skin, makes us sick, and how and why people cope with stress differently. Included are several standard stress and coping checklists, allowing readers to gauge their own stress levels.

We have all experienced stressful times—maybe a major work deadline or relocating cross-country for a new job—when we came out unscathed, feeling not only emotionally and physically healthy, but better than we did prior to the crisis. Why do some people withstand adversity without a scratch, while others fall ill or become emotionally despondent when faced with even a seemingly minor hassle? Without oversimplifying the discussion, Deborah Carr succinctly provides readers with key themes and contemporary research on the concept of stress. Understanding individuals’ own sources of strength and vulnerability is an important step toward developing personal strategies to minimize stress and its unhealthy consequences. Yet Carr also challenges the notion that merely reducing stress in our lives will help us to stay healthy. Many of the stressors that we face in everyday life are not our problems alone; rather, they are symptoms of much larger, sweeping problems in contemporary U.S. society.

To readers interested in the broad range of chronic, acute, and daily life stressors facing Americans in the twenty-first century, as well as those with interest in the many ways that our physical and emotional health is shaped by our experiences, this brief book will be an immediate and quick look at these significant issues.

124 pages, Paperback

First published April 15, 2014

About the author

Librarian Note: There is more than one author in the Goodreads database with this name.

Social psychology, aging, gender, and family are the interests of sociologist Deborah Carr. She teaches sociology and social psychology. She is co-director of the National Institute of Mental Health (NIMH) post-doctoral training program at Rutgers’ Institute for Health.
She authored, co-authored and editited a number of books on Sociology.

Reviews

[J's Bookshelves · Rating 4 out of 5]

This is a concise, helpful, introductory, little textbook on stress. Get the ebook so u can search & have it on had with highlighting.