Book and Movie Reports by Ed

Book report: The Myth of Stress by Andrew Bernstein I’m not big on self-help books. I certainly need the help, but I’m skeptical. Too often, the book claims to be the absolute solution, and it can’t be: people are too different. Or it demands some absurd commitment of belief and energy that I’m not going to invest. Or it simply doesn’t work. So, for me to pick up, read, and recommend a self-help book is very unusual. But “The Myth of Stress” is an unusual book. It starts by introducing the explanation behind stress that we’ve all come to know – and then debunking it. As we all know, stress is caused by the fight-or-flight response to danger that we evolved to survive. Saber-tooth tiger shows up: we either run, fight the tiger, or become lunch. Only the runners and fighters survived. Now, whenever the modern equivalent of the saber-tooth tiger shows up, we have the same response, but it’s no longer helpful. We can’t run from our work or families. We can’t battle the other commuters