Kindle Edition Amazon Sliding Otter Publications Category:  Action/Thriller Publisher: CreateSpace Type: Non-Fiction Pages: 180 Copyright: 11/8/2014 ISBN-13: 9781502950161 Price: $6.99 (eBook) Learn to recognize and understand your physical, mental, emotional stress. Learn to manage it in order to live a peaceful and productive life.  The American Psychological Association has been conducting a yearly nationwide survey of stress among Americans. In 2013, seventy-two percent of adults felt that their stress had increased over the past five years. Twenty percent of them felt under extreme stress.  About a third of people feel they are doing a good job managing stress. The top sources of stress are reported as money, work, the economy, family responsibilities family health issues and personal health concerns. Most of these people have difficulty finding good ways to manage stress.   I don’t know for sure why you are here or what you expect from me and this book, although I have some ideas. I am sure you have questions about stress in your life or you wouldn’t be here. I am glad you stopped by. Stress affects everyone today. It has become a national epidemic. Complaints about it are common and solutions not so easy to come by. Thank you for trusting me enough to see what I have to say. I will work hard to keep your trust on your way to understanding and managing stress in all aspects of your life. Let me start with a few questions others have asked about stress. Maybe some of them occurred to you when you decided to give my book a try.   • Why is stress such a big deal for everyone these days? In Chapter 1, we will visit the controversy over whether we have more or less stress than our ancestors and whether stress is an epidemic. I will share a little about my personal journey with stress. We will also consider dealing with stress as a way to a more peaceful life.   • What is stress and how can I recognize it? In Chapter 2, I will consider with you the dictionary definition of stress and early research on stress. You will also learn how to recognize that you are under stress even if it doesn’t feel that way. • Can stress overtake my life when I am not looking? In Chapter 3, you will come to understand stress which finds you in your daily life without your invitation. Anything new in your life is somewhat stressful to some degree at least for a while and life is a series of changes.   • Am I responsible for my stress? You choose a certain degree of stress with each choice you make in life as you will see in Chapter 4. You might not like stress, but sometimes it comes attached to changes you make in order to better your life. You will see which of your choices come with a stress price tag attached.   • What does stress do to my body? Your body has a whole range of responses to stress and an arsenal of ways to combat stress. In Chapter 5 you will learn about the connection between stress and your body and how it reacts to stress.   • What about my mind? If you think back to the last time you felt under stress, you will recall your mind working furiously for a solution. In Chapter 6, you will learn more about how stress affects your thinking.   • How does stress affect my feelings? Under stress, all sorts of troublesome feelings make themselves painfully known. Learn to understand your feelings and emotions as they relate to stress in Chapter 7.   • How about my soul? Lately people have come to realize that their bodies and minds are not the only victims of stress. Making sense of your life, including stress, may well involve finding a spiritual context for it. See how in Chapter 8.   • Is stress ever a good thing? Learn how it can save your life. Stress can also help motivate you to accomplish things you might not otherwise attempt. See how to use stress to your benefit in Chapter 9.    • Can I avoid stress? You can, but there are healthy and unhealthy ways of doing so. Learn the difference in Chapter 10.   • If I can’t avoid stress, how can I take it on and defeat it? You already have most of the tools you will need lying around. In Chapter 11, you will learn how to find and use them.   • Can I change stress into something more useful in my life? Yes you can. It takes a little imagination and work, but you can do it. Learn how to transform your stress in Chapter 12.   • Will my life keep getting more stressful in the future? Not necessarily. It depends on choices you make for yourself and for the world you live in. Learn what they are in Chapter 13. Excerpt Stress Over the Ages What does stress feel like in your life? Do people these days suffer more stress than their ancestors? You can idealize the past when life was not so complex and consider earlier centuries as idyllic. You can name all the pressures of modern civilization and feel more beset by stress than those who preceded you by several decades or even centuries. Or you can view your ancestors as at a disadvantage due to the lack of modern conveniences on which we have come to rely. In the past, people did not worry about stress. Survival and the demands of daily life absorbed most of their energy. They had little time for worry. Yet over the years, fretting about stress seems to have become a national pastime. It is almost a contest to see who is under the most stress. My Major Stressors I would like to share with you four major stressors which I have encountered during my life. You might think these would create significant stress for you or perhaps not. I have discovered that one person can be thrown off balance by something which another person might take in stride. Maybe my experiences will bring to mind experiences which have been difficult for you to handle. Yours might be very different from mine. The first major stressor in my life and the only one I recall from my childhood was my circumcision at age eight. The controversy over circumcision was in full swing when I was born. My father was in Guam in the Navy during World War II. My mother did not want to make the decision by herself, so she put it off. When I was eight, my parents decided it was time for me to be circumcised. I never got a satisfactory explanation for why this was necessary, either then or later. I have never been comfortable discussing it openly and never asked for an explanation from my parents who are now both deceased. I was just told it was scheduled. I was left in the hospital the night before surgery and did my best to dodge questions by my roommate about why I was there. I was terrified my whole time in the hospital. The only things I remembered the next day were shots which I had always dreaded and the horrible smell of ether after I was wheeled to the operating room. I woke up in a ward full of children recovering from their own surgeries. The hardest part of the whole ordeal was returning to school and trying to find a satisfactory explanation for being in the hospital without admitting why. All I could do was hang my head and blush. For years after that, I wondered why the Catholic Church celebrated the circumcision of Jesus on January 1. I eventually learned about its religious significance for Jews. But I was not Jewish. I had no choice about this stressor appearing in my life. My second major stressor appeared when I was thirteen years old and my grandfather died suddenly. He had lived with a heart condition and took nitroglycerine pills. One day he decided to shovel snow, felt some chest pain and made his way back inside but didn’t make it to his pills in time. He was the kindest person I ever met and he acted as my father for the first few years of my life since my father was off in the Pacific for World War II. At his funeral, our family sat in the parlor sharing stories of my grandfather. Someone asked whether he had ever been angry. After considerable deliberation and head scratching, My Aunt Helen recalled one time when two of my uncles chased each other through the house while my grandfather sat in his chair with his beer and limburger cheese. On their third pass through the house, my grandfather told them to stop running through the house. They kept running. On the fourth pass he got out of his chair with the intention of stopping them. He realized he would never catch them and sat back down in his chair with his customary laugh. If I could have chosen one person to be like when I grew up, it would have been my grandfather. His death left a deep hole in my heart, a loss I have never forgotten. This was the first close relative of mine to die that I could remember. I have never found anyone to replace him but still live my life as I imagine he would want me to. The third stressor I want to share with you was when I was twenty-two. I had spent nine years in a seminary and monastery starting at age thirteen with hours set aside every day to reflect on myself, my relationship with God and how I should live my life. Extended time for reflection allowed me to put stress on the back burner for the most part. I had a schedule to follow so I did not even need to decide what to do each day. My food, clothing and housing were of no concern to me. I had no need to worry about how to make a living. In some ways this might sound like an ideal world. Why I am not still there is a long story. If you are interested, you can find my account in my memoir, Young Man of the Cloth. The transition back to life in the larger world left me feeling like a fish out of water. I left the monastery and switched from having ample time for reflection to facing pressing questions about where to live, how to survive and what to do about my military draft status which immediately became 1A. I went from a life in which I had no decisions to make to one for which I was ill prepared. Before I faced many of the stressors I will address in this book, the stress of leaving the only life I had known since I was thirteen descended on me. I made the choice to dive back into an unknown world, not knowing what to expect. The fourth of my major stressors was my divorce after twenty-nine years of marriage. Mental illness had torn my family apart to the point that marriage was no longer tenable for me. After working for so many years helping others preserve their marriages, I felt embarrassed that I was not able to hold my own together. I had always seen myself as a man of my word. What about my promise to stay married “until death do you part?” The only way I could make sense of it and live with myself was to realize that my marriage was dead and that we needed to part, or at least I did. This stressor was partly thrust on me and partly my choice. Stress and My Career You might wonder whether writing this book caused me stress. Several people have asked me this question. The short answer is no. I find myself living in a world riddled by stress, everyone complaining about how difficult they find life. Well, maybe not everyone, but it sure seems that way. Why is life so stressful? Is it worse now than it ever was? Does stress fall on you like a ton of bricks or do you bring it on yourself? As a psychologist, I worked with many people over the years, most of whom viewed stress of one sort or another as chief among their concerns. Parents dragged in their children, their families crumbling under stress. Teens considered suicide as a way out. Young adults stewed and fretted over their future. Couples complained of the burdens arriving with their marriages. Older people reeled from the onset of aging, retirement and the changes both required. Stress seems universal although descending upon us in many different forms. People seeking help do not always admit suffering from stress at first or even recognize it, but they usually discover its impact on their lives before too long once they start talking about their lives in counseling. Most of them do not really care what stress is. They just want it to go away. They want quick answers involving as little disruption to their routines as possible and easy steps toward a less stressful life. Stress seems like an epidemic. Why? Our culture encourages us to demand everything immediately if not sooner, especially anything that keeps our busy pace of life rolling along as fast as possible. Fast food, next or same day service and turbo speed Internet service have become our birthright claim. Yet, the faster our lives spin, the less time we have to stop and think about what our lives are all about. Ever stop to think about your pace of life? People these days tend to get caught up in the whirlwind of life in the twenty-first century and keep moving as quickly as possible, seldom looking back to see where they have been or even where they are now. What You Can Expect From This Book So, why did I write this book? Dealing with stress is a lifelong undertaking in my opinion. Still learning to cope with stress which arose with each new life experience, I worked for quite a few years helping one individual or family at a time with their particular stress. I found myself listening to the same stories and repeating the same advice over and over. I came to realize that stress is almost a universal condition of life in modern society. Now that I have retired from my psychology practice, I thought it might be time to share what I have learned over the years for the benefit of more people than I could reach one at a time. I do not see myself as having the ultimate answers to stress. I think I have learned how to make sense of stress, understand where it comes from and how it affects people as well as what can be done about it. My goal is to help you understand stress and why it is in your life as well as to arm you for your battles with stress. Hopefully you will begin to see them instead as challenges which make you better equipped for the succeeding steps in your life journey. First we will consider what stress is and how it came to be of importance to psychologists. Along the way, you will see how stress affects your body, mind, emotions and your spirit, or soul if you prefer. We will explore the causes of stress, both those you choose and those dumped on you for one reason or another or sometimes for no particular reason you can see. We will look at what you can do to avoid stress, make your life less stressful and even transform stress into something useful to you. I invite you to share this journey toward a more peaceful life. I have no quick answers. But I can suggest tools for you to use in understanding and managing your stress. We will also look at choices which increase or decrease your stress. Take a deep breath, relax and let’s get started. But first, let’s take a little break from our journey. In my Sliding Otter Newsletter, I always end each article with Life Lab Lessons, reflections on what you can learn from your experience and reading. I will end each chapter with a few things for you to think about. Here are some for right now. Life Lab Lessons • When did you first discover stress? When do you remember first experiencing stress in your life? You may recall feeling lonely, afraid, or maybe angry? Were you one of the lucky ones who had a wonderful childhood? Perhaps you were and can’t remember any stress as a child. You might have felt lonely, scared or angry. These feelings all indicate stress. • What troubled you most as a child? I told you about one childhood experience of mine which thoroughly humiliated me. Did anything like that happen to you? Write down what you remember about it. • Who helped you deal with past stress? Were you left to handle your stress by yourself or did someone recognize how you felt, help you to understand what was happening and learn how to get past it. If you had someone help you as a child, I am sure you are grateful to have had him or her in your life. • What major trials have you faced as an adult? List them and think about how they affected you. Have you gotten past them or do they still bother you? • Are you burdened by any major stressors right now? If you are currently struggling with major stressors, they may be hard for you to face calmly right now. We will get to what you can do about them later in the book.

Outstanding read
Joe Langen’s Release Your Stress and Reclaim your Life is an outstanding work. Interestingly the author begins by asking – Do we living in modern America suffer more from stress than our ancestors did?
While I, of course, can’t answer that question within the broad scope of history, I can confidently say that during my lifetime the types of stress that come from concerns like: finding and keeping a satisfying, well- paying secure, long term job; facing large medical bills without filing for bankruptcy; and paying for our children’s college expenses and maintain the hope of enjoying a financially comfortable retirement, has certainly increased dramatically (except among those fortunate enough to be among the wealthiest .01 % in our economy) over the last two generations.
For such reasons this book is imperative reading for the countless millions who frantically try to weave their way through the cultural maze that constitutes life in America today.
The book is clearly written, understandable, comprehensive, and composed by an expert in many aspect of stress – Issues such as: What is stress? How can we identify it in ourselves?, and How can we effectively avoid, manage and/or attack our own stress?
For me, the chapter on spirituality was especially helpful. I almost skipped it because I don’t consider myself spiritual. I never could, for example, grasp the idea of a soul - one that exists in the after- life. (I can’t say souls don’t exist. Maybe they do, but if so I have no idea, what they are like.) But now I’m glad I read that chapter because, if, as suggested by the author, one’s soul is the part of you that acknowledges, you are not the center of the universe, and are instead, an integral part of the human race, and as such you have a duty to act responsibly to assist your fellow man, to achieve the highest common good, then I must be spiritual, because, that responsibility, in my opinion, defines the essence of humanity.
Bob Fussell

Personally and professionally...
Thanks, Dr. Joe, for the compelling, easy-to-understand book about stress, its origins, how to minimize negative aspects of it, and how to manage inevitable stressors of daily life. Personally and professionally I have found great value in consistently disputing irrational beliefs and perceptions that probably cause more of our stress than external stressors. Experience indicates that embracing more sensible perceptions about life issues leads to low-stress functioning for us. While perfection seems unattainable for humans, significant improvement, even occasional excellence, is achievable. Your book offers so many useful, doable strategies to achieve positive results for holistic health, and in stress reduction/elimination.
I too envision a pattern of healthier coping with life stress when folks consistently reduce raging anger to annoyance, reduce abysmal depression to occasional sadness, reduce crippling anxiety to mere concern, reduce burdensome guilt to regret, and many other examples of changing disabling emotions and related stressors. I urge all interested people to read through your whole book, enjoy the warm, empathic encouragement that is vintage Joe Langen, and DO the "Life Lab Lessons"!
Mike B.

What Joe knows
Reading Joe Langen's latest book is like having a conversation (one-sided as it may be) with an old friend. Not entirely one-sided, however. I found myself reading and and saying to myself or maybe responding to Joe, "That's what I was thinking;I just didn't know how to say it," or "I sort of knew that but didn't know the psychology behind it."
A retired psychologist, Joe obviously knows his subject matter--the ways in which stress can rob us of time and energy. His warm style of writing makes us trust him like an old friend. He gives us the stressors many of us face, background and examples, and then goes on to provide ways of dealing with them and getting on with our lives. Joe also gives many examples from his own life, allowing us to see his vulnerability. And if a psychologist is vulnerable and has stressors in his life, he might be just the person to help us with ours.
Reading this book will take only a few hours of your time, but it may very well result in improvements to your physical, mental, and emotional health.