WORKING WELL

A comprehensive guide to reducing workplace stress.

This latest book from corporate trainer and consultant Berryman (Nine Strategies for Dealing With the Difficult Stuff, 2016) aims to help readers identify the effects of stress in their own lives and in those of the people around them. She then offers ways for readers to change their responses to stress, reduce it, and increase their productivity. Berryman’s strategies draw on the author’s personal experience helping clients in her private practice.She begins with general statistics that bear witness to the widespread, harmful effects of stress on the workplace, and on workers’ physical health, in particular. She then proceeds to carve out a series of strategies that range from the internal (“Just as you would never expect to be able to run without a break for eight hours a day, you wouldn’t expect uninterrupted activity from your brain either”) to the communal (“Approaching a person with curiosity rather than judgment makes our relationships stronger”). In all cases, Berryman emphasizes enhancing self-awareness and taking the time to step back and notice harmful and beneficial patterns. This comes into sharpest focus in a chapter on creating positive new habits; she describes habits, in general, as “the brain’s way of saving energy,” and throws light on the fact that many stress-inducing elements are, in fact, merely bad habits—which are, of course, susceptible to change. She also notes that people often don’t realize how much power they’re giving away to harmful people and situations; in essence, the steps that she outlines here effectively aim at taking that power back.

A thought-provoking and optimistic set of tactics for stress elimination.