Breaking the Stress Cycle: 7 Steps to Greater Resilience, Happiness, and Peace of Mind

Originally published as The Myth of Stress, this revolutionary 7-step program will help change how you think about stress and show you how to easily transform and eliminate stressful thoughts from your personal and professional life. Where does stress come from? Financial worries? Health issues? Conflicts at work or at home? For more than half a century, we've been told that stress is caused by outside pressures and that the best we can do is to breathe, try to relax, and accept that life is hard. According to Andrew Bernstein, this is all wrong. Spurred by the death of several family members when he was young, Bernstein began a quest to understand the real dynamics of stress and resilience, and discovered that stress doesn't come from your circumstances--it comes from your thoughts about your circumstances. Consequently, the true antidote to stress is not exercise or physical relaxation, but uncovering these stress-producing thoughts and dismantling them. Bernstein created a simple 7 step-process that helps you do this faster, often with life-changing results. In Breaking the Stress Cycle, Bernstein shares solutions for how to stop managing stress and break the cycle of ups and downs at its source. Guided worksheets and step-by-step coaching show you how to reframe your thinking on relationships, money, work-life balance, weight loss, discrimination, regret, grief, and more. With compassion, intelligence, and humor, Breaking the Stress Cycle offers a complete re-education in the nature of stress, and can permanently change the way you handle challenges in all areas of your life.