Slow Down and Lighten Up: Letting Go of Stress and Tension

by Bob Van Oosterhout

What if you could see stress coming and knew how to stop it from interfering with your work, rest, and relationships? What if you could effectively respond rather than impulsively react to pressure and loss? What if you could see where your thoughts are leading you and redirect them to where you really want to go? These are not distant fantasies but something you can accomplish by applying what you read in “Slow Down and Lighten Up.” It involves understanding how body, mind, and emotion interact, what goes wrong, and what you can do about it. The key is learning to restore and maintain physical, mental, and emotional balance and then remove common obstacles to solving problems. Slow Down and Lighten Up explains how this works in clear, simple terms using stories and metaphors based on the experience of the author and thousands of students, workshop participants, clients, and patients who made significant improvements in their lives by applying what is described in this text.

172 pages, Paperback

First published January 8, 2001

Reviews

[Elijah Zech · Rating 5 out of 5]

Read for college, Helped in real life a TON

Huge fan of this book. My current professor worked with the author and they both give off similar energy.
This book is easy to read, gives you helpful tips and tricks to make your life less stressful and helps you understand where you are at in your journey.
It may sound corny but doing what the author suggests actually works. Having been a full time student and working full time for a couple of years, I’ve accumulated some unwanted stress and tension lingering throughout my day to day…. Everyday.
Even after just two days of practicing the methods the author gives us, I felt better. Now after 2 weeks of practicing, I realize how much I was missing in my life because of things I can’t control or by getting in my head about things that dont need the extra energy.
I highly recommend this easy to ready, fun and calming book. It’s in-depth, easy to understand and provides great real life examples of people like us going through the authors methods and succeeding.

[Zaskerpie · Rating 5 out of 5]

So far, so good. This book touches on stress and tension, providing brief easy-to-understand information about what we can do to make our lives less stressful and tense.

I get easily frustrated so the techniques in this book have helped me, such as "grounding" to counter the physical effects of tension. Most importantly it reminds me that it is mostly about our perception of the world around us that determines whether we view a thing as stressful.