Over 40% of British workers feel they experience negative stress all the time or most of the time while at work. Stress is a killer. It is demoralising. It is exhausting. It dehumanises, it robs you of your sense of worth, your sense of humanity. And there are scores of books which endeavour to explain what stress is, how it impacts on you, how you can try to manage it.
Wilson's book is neither a textbook nor a theoretical work, but a series of working tools to help you relax, to find peace and calm, a chance to shut out the world of stress. Wilson is the author of 'The Little Book of Calm', a book which I frankly disliked. But this is a work of a different kidney. I found it a very useful working tool.
What Wilson offers is a calm, analytical assessment of how stress impacts on the individual, the bulk of the book being a series of techniques and methods to cope with stress and minimise its impact. Not all of these techniques will work for you - Wilson makes this clear ... not everything works for everybody, but what is on offer is a portfolio of tools with which you can experiment. Find ones which work for you, and develop your skills and confidence in various techniques to reduce your stress.
Wilson offers useful insights into stress and an understanding of how to counteract its effects - I found his chapter on Visualisation and Affirmation techniques particularly interesting. He looks at how you develop the mental skills to confront and ameliorate stress, offers a toolkit with which you can experiment.
It's very good, it's very useful. It won't, however, stop the stress happening. And that's the weakness of the book. The problem with stress is that we've learned to assume that the employee has to cope with stress - we forget the political lesson, that maybe employers shouldn't be creating stress in the first place. Stress caused by social and economic pressures is made the responsibility of the individual and not of the society and economy which causes it.
Wilson sidesteps the politics and the environmental nature of stress - as does everyone. This book won't stop the stress you're experiencing, it won't end the cause. But is does provide useful tools for dealing with the consequences - your experience and feeling of stress. Well written, very useful, a book you will keep on your shelf and dip into from time to time, but a book which has obvious limitations.