5 Recommended Reads to Stress Less
Negative stress can be brought on by a myriad of factors. Work, keeping up with the social media Joneses, kids, bills, 24 hour news of the sky falling…everyday, a global pandemic. You get my drift.
But just because the world seems set on piling it on day after day, doesn’t mean we can’t put ourselves in the best position to let all just roll off our shoulders. Books can be one of the best resources for finding new ways to put ourselves in this position.
Here is a list of books that we recommend checking out to take a more proactive approach to reducing stress. They cover a handful of different strategies, so feel free to read them all or find one and start implementing right away. And all of these books make a great addition to a morning or evening routine with our DeStress Kit Bundle.
1) Atomic Habits by James Clear
You’ll hear us talk about habits a lot. This is because positive habits are the one of the best ways to reduce negative stress before it even happens. We all go through life following our ingrained habits, whether we realize it or not. In this book, Clear shows you how to identify the habits that will improve your wellbeing and the best strategies to implement and stick with these habits.
2) Tao Te Ching by Laozi
The Tao Te Ching was written around 2,000 years ago and still remains relevant today. It comprises 81 single page chapters that instruct the reader how to live a life of simplicity, patience and compassion. While the Tao Te Ching can be a quick read due to the short nature of the text, readers can get lost in thought for hours contemplating each passage.
3) Getting Things Done by David Allen
If you feel like you’re constantly busy but not actually making much real progress then this book is most likely for you. David Allen developed a step by step personal productivity plan that members of our team use daily. Oftentimes stress comes down to putting too much energy into reacting and not enough energy into proactively doing the right things based on your goals. This book can help you seamlessly make that change.
4) Meditations by Marcus Aurelius
Another timeless classic. Meditations was written by the Roman Emperor Marucs Aurelius as a way to remind himself how to live according to the Stoic philosophy. It is incredibly relatable even in this day and age. Meditations will give most of us who read it at least a few things to take a way to instantly apply to our own lives.
5) Your Time to Thrive by Marina Khidekel
Your Time to Thrive is both an enjoyable and uplifting read as well as an action plan spread out over 180 pages. It focuses on implementing microsteps, which are small steps that you can implement immediately to start to build healthy habits. One of the great things about this book is that it separates compartments of our lives into chapters so you can go through them all, or start with the ones that you feel will impact your life the most. These categories include Sleep, Unplugging and Recharging, Movement, Nutrition and Hydration and Focus and Prioritization, among others.
As you can see from this list, we at Find Your Steady believe in taking a proactive approach to reducing the effects of negative stress. By building positive habits both in how we go through life and what we focus on in doing so, we can drastically reduce the effects of stress on ourselves, our loved ones and society as a whole.
If you have any book recommendations you’d like to send us, please feel free to do so here.
*We don’t make affiliate revenue on any of these book recommendations.