Explore and Learn the 7 Stress Strategies to Becoming Resilient to Stress!

A Book Review – Stress Proof: The Ultimate Guide to Living a Stress-free Life

By Dr Mithu Storoni

What is “Stress Proof” about?

“Stress Proof” is a book written by Dr Mithu Storoni, a doctor specialized in neuroscientific research and whom earned a PhD in neuro-ophthalmic surgery. The book is a comprehensive guide to the science of stress and talks about how stress affects our bodies. It also provides practical strategies and techniques for managing stress in daily life.

In the book, Dr Storoni explains how stress can lead to a wide range of physical and mental health problems, including cardiovascular disease, diabetes, anxiety and depression. She also highlights the various ways in which stress can impact our brains and our body’s stress response system.

The book is around 261 pages long and consists of 9 chapters. Within the 9 chapter consists of 7 key “stress strategies” teaching us how to reduce stress and building resilience.

The following are the 7 key stress strategies:

1. Improve Emotional Regulation
2. Getting Stress Hormones in Check
3. Encouraging Healthy Activity in the Rational Brain
4. Tuning Up Your Body Clock
5. Taming Chronic Inflammation
6. Fighting Insulin Resistance
7. Boost Motivation – Pleasure and Reward

The links for purchasing the book are paid links via Amazon which we may receive commissions from qualifying purchases.

Who is “Stress Proof” for?

“Stress Proof” is a Self-Help book written for people who are keen to learn how to manage stress in life. It teaches you related knowledge about stress and offers practical ways to reduce pressure and lead a stress-free life.

Dr Storoni has set up pointers and headers throughout the book for readers to follow easily. However, the nature of stress itself is closely associated to our brain and the brain is extremely complicated. So inevitably the book contains lots of technical (medical) terms which common people like us find difficult to understand.

So personally, this is not an easy book to read. If you do not mind regularly looking up what certain terms and knowledge meant, this book is a Rewarding Read with lots of insights about stress.

When you follow the 7 stress strategies and implement them, you will definitely benefit by leading a less-stressful life.

The 7 Key Stress Strategies

Dr Storoni presents 7 key “stress strategies”, each backed by scientific evidence that you can incorporate into your daily lives. Let me briefly highlight each of the strategies below.

1. Improve Emotional Regulation

The approach is to train and become better at your self-control and emotion regulation. By doing so can help you “contain” your negative emotions when they appear in your life.

Short-term fixes include playing games to divert your immediate attention. Long-term fixes would include attention training and focused mediation. Also, you can try “Self-control training” by trying to resist temptation.

2. Getting Stress Hormones in Check

The idea is that your body releases hormones such as cortisol when you are under stress. While these hormones are helpful to help you boost immediate reaction to stress, they become dangerous if your stress become chronic (long-term). So you will need to closely monitor your body situation to keep hormones in check at an appropriate level.

Some useful tips include not to dwell on the stress itself, do exercise, look at nature and have an appropriate diet.

3. Encouraging Healthy Activity in the Rational Brain

This strategy is quite straightforward. In order to reduce stress, you should engage in activities that can “grow” your brain positively.

Some practical tips include to exercise more, immerse yourself in a learning environment and not to smoke!

4. Tuning Up Your Body Clock

To tune up your body clock means to get your body in good shape. Practical advice offered in this strategy include how to get better sleep, how to eat better and exercise as appropriately.

One interesting knowledge I learnt here is that it is actually fine to eat junk food. The condition is that you are eating them during day time but not at night, which your body will find hard to digest or cope with.

5. Taming Chronic Inflammation

When your immune system is fighting against virus, your body will heat up to defend from these infections. These are what we called inflammation. Developing inflammation is very normal and it is a heathy process inside our bodies. However, many of us unnoticeably lead a state of chronic, low-grade inflammation without being aware of it. This is the part which you needed to pay extra attention to.

In order to lead a stress-free life, you will need to focus on your mental and physical health. Sometimes medication helps but the more natural way would be to reduce inflammation through appropriate diet. Avoid alcohol if possible!

6. Fighting Insulin Resistance

Insulin resistance means our brain cannot function properly by getting the appropriate level of blood sugar. Once again, the key to avoid this would be to have an appropriate diet pattern and doing active exercises.

Eating fish oil and vitamins would have positive effects on your body too.

7. Boost Motivation – Pleasure and Reward

Dr Storoni pointed out that we should actively find our “pleasure” points in life in order to build a “rewarding experience” for our brain. She encouraged us to form “pleasure habits” so that our brains can get constantly motivated to work towards the “rewards”.

Personally, this is an extremely important strategy. This approach suggests that the more motivated you are, the more satisfied you become and therefore the less stressful you will feel.

Conclusion

In summary, “Stress Proof” is a well-researched and comprehensive guide to understanding and managing stress. Dr Storoni has put in enormous effort in sharing her research results making this book an invaluable resource.

As mentioned earlier, this book is not an easy read and I believe some may feel overwhelmed by the wealth of information and struggle to find where to begin.

My personal advice is that you can jump around the book reading parts that are useful and relevant to you according to the headers in each chapter. With so much data and information in this book, I believe this approach can make you learn the most in a more effective way.

I recommend “Stress Proof” as a rewarding read book for anyone interested in building resilience, as well as improving their mental health and well-being.

Thank you for reading this post and I hope you have learnt something new.

Read “Stress Proof”

The links for purchasing these books are paid links via Amazon which we may receive commissions from qualifying purchases.

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