Authors: Robert S. Eliot, Dennis L. Breo, Michael E. Debakey
ISBN-13: 9780553344264, ISBN-10: 0553344269
Format: Paperback
Publisher: Random House Publishing Group
Date Published: April 1989
Edition: REV
Is It Worth Dying For? is the most important examination of stress and its effects on health and disease in years. In this groundbreaking book, cardiologist Dr. Robert S. Eliot identifies "hot reactors"-apparently healthy people who overreact dangerously to such common occurrences as losing a tennis game or missing a train. If you are a "hot reactor," you can be responding to stress with an all-out physical effort that is taking a heavy toll on your health...without your even being aware of it. Based on more than twenty years of research with thousands of patients, Is It Worth Dying For? takes stress management out of pop psychology and puts it into mainstream medicine. Dr. Eliot identifies the ways which stress affects the heart, the blood vessels, and the body and gives us new, objective ways of detecting stress before any damage is done. He offers a complete program for recognizing, reducing, and reversing the hidden effects of stress in your life-to make stress work for you, not against you.
Acknowledgments | xi | |
Foreword | xix | |
Introduction | 1 | |
Part 1 | Stress and the Hot Reactor | |
1 | Stress: The Modern Epidemic | 13 |
2 | Stress in Action: How Your Body Responds | 23 |
3 | The Hot Reactors | 36 |
4 | Hot Reacting, High Blood Pressure, and Heart Attack | 56 |
5 | Are You a Hot Reactor? | 66 |
Part 2 | Learning to Manage Stress | |
6 | Changing Your Self-Talks | 95 |
7 | Clarifying Your Values | 112 |
8 | Relaxing Your Body | 121 |
9 | Increasing Your Fitness | 136 |
10 | Making the Most of Support and Leisure | 154 |
11 | Eating Right | 165 |
12 | Managing Alcohol, Cigarettes, Caffeine, and Pills | 194 |
13 | Relieving Stress on the Job | 209 |
14 | Maintaining a Healthy Heart | 223 |
Epilogue: It's Not Worth Dying For | 233 | |
Notes and Sources | 236 | |
Recommended Reading | 243 | |
Index | 248 |