Taming Your Tension focuses on life's many pressures. According to the American Heritage Dictionary, tension is defined as "the act of stretching or the condition of being stretched." Stretching a rubber band beyond its tension limits will eventually cause it to snap. So it is with all of us. You may lose control on the road with the driver in front of you; you "see red" when a coworker accuses you of not pulling your share of the load; you blow up when you discover your spouse is having an affair. Just like the rubber band, you may eventually snap when tension expands beyond the breaking point. If you let stress get the best of you, though, you may experience more pain than simply the sensation of the rubber band snapping. Methods of coping with stress may be likened to enduring a toothache. You may seek short-term relief with oral analgesics or a topical anesthetic, and perhaps for a while, you may even learn to live with the pain. Nevertheless, when the medication wears off and the pain returns, you still have the toothache. Despite your efforts, nothing short of getting to the "root" of the problem and eliminating the decay will help you for the long term. It is much the same with stress. When the pain from tension persists, you may seek help from a variety of stress management approaches that are valuable to some extent, offering stress relieving techniques, such as meditation, biofeedback, exercise, positive thinking, and prescription medication, to name a few. However, while they may provide temporary relief, they only treat the symptoms of your stress. They may reduce the immediate discomfort, but do not fully address the underlying problems. Taming Your Tension will show you how to reduce stress by getting to the very heart of the issues that cause stress. Like a toothache, reducing stress involves more than relieving symptoms. Taming Your Tension is aimed at helping to reduce stress by discussing its actual causes. It addresses universal issues to which everyone is susceptible. Taming Your Tension is designed as a compendium, a brief but comprehensive body of knowledge that is useful in reducing life's stress. It reaches beyond the area of self-help into an inspirational dimension, as it addresses the core of life's common concerns (e.g., anger, burnout, death, aging, spirituality, etc.) as these topics relate to chronic stress. Each of the chapter topics is grounded in current research, together with timely and pertinent data by experts in the particular fields. Making use of cinema, books, and music will help you further explore your inner self, hopefully mirroring your current stressor. The chapters are a collection of a researched body of knowledge, with pertinent data provided. Taming Your Tension is intended as your personal life trainer, encouraging you daily, chapter by chapter, to readily identify the obstacles toward realizing proper internal nutrition. Taming Your Tension is not necessarily intended to be read at one sitting, but rather to be used as a companion-an owner's manual-so to speak, something to refer to when difficulties arise or to provide the proper maintenance required. In essence, the book provides the resources necessary to gain a fuller perspective of yourself through focusing on the underlying causes of stress in your life.
About the Author: Dr. Jankowski is a practicing clinical psychologist in Chicago. His clinical résumé includes teaching personality assessment and Stress Management at the university level, conducting diagnostic evaluations for the judicial system, and presenting stress seminars in the U.S. and abroad. His previous works include, A Beginner's Guide to the MCMI-III, published by the American Psychological Association, and Your Personality Drives You.