Relaxation Revolution – by Dr. Herbert Benson & Dr. William Proctor

Stress management makes a huge difference to a lot of aspects of physical health, yet it’s a very commonly overlooked area for improvement. Everyone’s all “I must eat better and exercise more”, but the truth is that being able to relax is just as important.

The premise of this book is to first do something that we should find not at all arduous or unpleasant to do (that is: relax) and then weaponize that against all manner of ailments.

Of course, it’s not a panacea, but stress makes almost every bodily process worse (aside from some of those actually needed in an acute crisis, e.g. to fight a tiger), which means that relaxation makes almost every bodily process better.

The style of the book is a mix of old-school pop-science, anecdotes, and direct, practical “do this, do that” advice, often in the form of meditative exercises to perform, as well as what doesn’t get called CBT in the book, but it is.

We’ll also mention that there are 22 pages of bibliography at the back, which is sufficiently respectable for a book of this size (good rule of thumb = if the bibliography is at least 10% of the size of the main content section of the book, it’s probably decent).

Bottom line: if you’d like to be walked through the process of leveraging relaxation to improve your body’s ability to look after (and restore and repair) itself, then this book can help with that.

Click here to check out Relaxation Revolution, and indeed relax!