Customer Reviews

The End of Stress As We Know It

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This book is cutting edge. It catches up with what the scientific research has found for two decades -- that the origins of stress are not primarily external. It is largely psychological and the good news is that we can avoid the chronic and life threatening health problems caused by the long term activation of the stress mechanism by fostering our own mental health in simple ways. And the first step is to consider the possibility that stress is not the result of what people or events do to us, but is primarily due to our own thoughts, feelings and attitudes about people and events. This book is not based on one man's opinion, but rather on scientific findings. And the evidence is that we can shift our stress provoking attitudes fundamentally through strong social support, which simply means deepening of our connection with one another in meaningful ways, supporting one another in making a mindful shift out of stress. This book sees the stressed-out condition most of us experience as a wake-up call to evolve our consciousness by first taking responsibility for the stress in our lives and next having the courage to join with others in exploring ways of shifting it. It seems, as a culture, we need a 12-step program like AA but devoted to the crisis of stress.

For any person who is under stress and who wants real data to support the theory that stress really does impair your performance, make you feel bad, and make you downright stupid, this book could be the influential force that sets you on a journey to turn your life around.

For as long as you are breathing, you are experiencing some level of stress. Knowing about the stress hormones constantly circulating through your body and bathing your brain, the naturally-occurring chemical balance that generates the sensation that stress really does make you stupid, can make the difference between a life lived on the edge or a life lived in that peak performance zone that we all desire.

As a psychologist,I have traversed diverse terrain. Whether I was working street corners with juvenile offenders, providing peak performance mental training for elite athletes, or consulting in manufacturing plants or Fortune 500 corner offices, stress has always been a constant force in my clients' lives. No matter what the setting--moguled ski slope, Courtroom, or Boardroom, slippery pool deck or muddy sports field--my hard-driving clients have sought strategies to learn to thrive even under the most stress-full conditions. Usually that entailed making strategic changes. To enlist their hearts and minds in order to get their legs moving in the right health-promoting directions, most of them responded to persuasive information. But few had the time to read through lengthy full-blown research reports (though, rest assured, some did).

Dr. McEwen's research on how we respond to stress and the debilitating effects of chronic excess stress is state-of-the-art and compelling. However, you have to really love neuropsych to plow through the original pieces (I have, as a self-proclaimed nerd, and I really did love them.) Now Dr. McEwen has distilled compelling research into a book format that provides a quick read for those who want you to show them the data if they are going to consider shifting from the fast-pace-high-stress lane where time rarely allows for a perusal of the research surveyed in this book.

A useful book, it is a fast sprint for the fast-paced stressed-out person who will benefit the most from just such a read. And it is a great first step to move you to take some health-promoting stress-reducing actions to keep you at the front of the pack and in it for the long run.

This is a very thorough and easy to understand book on the effects of chronic stress on every major body system, memory, mood, etc. It presents many of the same concepts as Dr. Sapolsky's excellent book, "Why Zebras Don't Get Ulcers." However, this resource is aimed more at laypeople.

Dr. Sapolosky's book is very dense for most people without a background in biology, however, he has an excellent sense of humor and goes more in-depth than Bruce McEwen. In short, if you didn't like taking science in school, you will probably get more out of the "The End of Stress As We Know It."

I also found that Bruce McEwen took more time and space to explain essential physiological concepts such as allostasis. This a key concept and Sapolosky seems to take the reader's understanding of this basic concept more for granted.

Overall, this book is well-organized and does a good job explaining the "fight or flight" response, the role of the endocrine system in stress and the impact of chronic stress. It does not, however, have much to say about how to overcome chronic stress that most people already don't know. For this, I would turn to other sources such as "Full Catastrophe Living."

Although this book does not address how to combat stress in great detail, I think it provides essential context for anyone trying to change their lifestyle. In fact, I think it should be required reading for anyone who works in a high stress environment.

If you want to read another good book on the societal and psychological factors that lead to being chronically stressed, then check out "American Mania" which was written by a UCLA psychiatrist and is complimentary to this book in some very good ways. If you read "American Mania" and this book, it will probably change your attitude toward the damaging effects of stress forever!

This is an outstanding work on a most topical issue. Dr. McEwen, of Rockefeller University in New York City, has the gift of communication, articulating the work of neuroscience and behavior to all, particularly accessible to the public. This kind of work serves the public, an extremely important audience, very well. It led me to invite him to speak at the upcoming symposium of The Foundation for Human Potential (FHP), Mental Health and the Brain:Implications for Lifelong Lifelong Learning, Nov. 15-16, 2007, in Chicago., which will include presentations by many outstanding scientists and others with like communication abilities. I recommend it to all and have bought it for everyone I know!
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Bruce McEwen, a brain researcher, combines the big picture, stresses of life in our society, with a very thorough background of supporting research. The book explains how stress normally sets off adrenaline first, and afterwards, cortisol. These are healthy reactions, but later, when they don't know when to shut off, they become detrimental. This book is both informative to the layman, and also college text book material. For this reason, it has earned its way into my stack of books that I plan to reread at least once again.

As a teacher and avid learner in many areas of study, I find this book most disappointing. To begin with, the title is misleading. There is very little here that will teach you how to stop the vicious cycle that eventuates in the resetting of the body-mind's set points to levels far outside those norms safe for its continuting health. It is a dumb and ill-considered title, for, in fact, the book is a hodge-podge that has no audience in mind and no focus of presentation for any audience. The olla podrida I talk of is a mixture of the history of research in this area that might be appropriate to professionals in the medical field, some oversimplified discussion of physiological systems that, at best, would not educate the ignorant, and a jumble in between that might be OK, were it not hidden away where no reader can locate or focus upon it, plus a technical but woefully inadequate appendix, footnotes that meet no reference standards, an incomplete and poorly assembled index, and inadequately proofed text with a number of spelling mistakes, especially in technical words. It is no wonder that a major press would not take this work for publication. The only heart of the book is in the middle in a section called "Stress and the Cardiovascular system." Here we learn about the balance between sympathetic and parasympathetic systems and the "vagus brake." But though there is a reference in the index to "excitoxicity," a fundamentally important concept developed recently, we look vainly on the indicated page for any discussion of the topic. McEwen has difficulty teaching us about basic concepts that relate to the body-mind's drive for homeostasis in its physiological responses. Unfortunately for the field, a term coined in 1987 by University of Pennsylvania doctors (I cannot tell whether one of them was McEwen) is very misleading. "Allostasis" is the buzzword, and the reader will serve herself better by putting this word in the search engine and reading the resultant hits rather than reading this book. Too bad that the etyma in allo-stasis can have no such meaning as the practitioners in this field would have it mean: "The concept of "allostasis" (active responding of biological mediators that maintain homeostasis) leads to the concept of "allostatic load" (the wear and tear on the body due to overuse of allostasis by repeated stress or disregulation of the mediators-failure to shut them off when no longer needed)." Too bad the originators did not seek the help of a classics professor to help them coin the word. Perhaps the etyma in "allelostasis" or the like could be stretched to include what they want: a word of meaning like "homeostasis" but with the added notion that several systems of mediators inter-react to achieve the body-mind's set points.

The author doesn't dumb down the facts and science, making this a great book for those who want more than a "pop medicine" understanding of the inner workings of stress. Fascinating, cutting edge information.

Through his research, Bruce McEwen has made great contributions to our understanding of stress and health. His work has inspired a lot of progress on the social causes of illness. I will use some of his material to explain the connection between stress and diabetes in my new book, "Diabetes as a Turning Point."

Unfortunately, I did not find "The End of Stress as We Know It" to be as valuable as the research that inspired it. It's pretty dryly scientific, a lot of "studies show this," and "studies show that," without many examples or stories to illustrate his points. He says we can do a lot to prevent stress-related illness, but mainly repeats "low-fat diet, exercise, and social support" as his advice. These may be useful suggestions, but people would need a lot more specifics to be able to use them effectively in our toxic environment. Those are the kind of suggestions they'll get from my book.

The main new point here is the terms Dr. McEwen coined to replace the word stress. He talks instead about "allostasis" to mean our bodies' natural stress response, and "allostatic load" to mean the problems that arise when the response gets overloaded. Some social scientists have started using these terms, because the term "stress" does mean a lot of different things. But this new terminology, IMO, does not require a whole book to explain it.

I'm grateful to Dr. McEwen for his important research. His book is worthwhile, but there's nothing here that isn't done better in Robert Sapolsky's Why Zebras Don't Get Ulcers.

David Spero RN, author of The Art of Getting Well: Maximizing Health When You Have a Chronic Illness (Hunter House 2002).

Nurse at davidsperoRN dot com