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    Seeking Serenity: The 10 New Rules for Health and Happiness in the Age of Anxiety
    Seeking Serenity: The 10 New Rules for Health and Happiness in the Age of Anxiety
    Seeking Serenity: The 10 New Rules for Health and Happiness in the Age of Anxiety
    Audiobook6 hours

    Seeking Serenity: The 10 New Rules for Health and Happiness in the Age of Anxiety

    Written by Amanda Enayati

    2.5/5

    ()

    About this audiobook

    In a provocative and practical look at modern stress, Seeking Serenity offers an empowering new message: Stress can serve as a guide to living our happiest and healthiest lives.

    In Seeking Serenity, stress columnist Amanda Enayati challenges our long-held assumptions about stress, painting a groundbreaking picture that separates myth from reality when it comes to what is commonly referred to as the plague of modern life. Weaving together stories, research from science, history, philosophy and diverse faiths, and everyday exercises, she crafts a fascinating tale that begins with the behind-the-scenes machinations of corporate villains and ends in the power of our stories to shape our realities.

    We are living in an era of dramatic highs and lows, with lives that move at a pace and intensity impossible at any other time in history. These contradictions throw us off-kilter, out of harmony and balance, creating what we perceive as never-ending and destructive cycles of stress. But life itself has always been-and will always be-a series of fluctuations: the good days, the bad days, the excruciating days. The key to mastering stress lies in the way we experience it.

    Seeking Serenity presents ten revolutionary principles developed from the emerging science of stress and reinforced by literature, philosophy and age-old spiritual wisdom that help us to differentiate between destructive and constructive stress, and to master stress in the everyday by learning how to:
    Shift our perceptions to interpret inevitable challenges in a way that serves us better;
    Embrace a narrative that casts stress as a pathway to adaptation and growth; and
    Commit to breaks, buffers, and protective practices that will minimize and neutralize the adverse impacts of toxic stress.
    Drawing on extensive research and remarkable case studies, Seeking Serenity presents a clear and accessible action plan to achieving more joyful and productive lives, stronger communities and a better world.
    LanguageEnglish
    PublisherAscent Audio
    Release dateMay 1, 2015
    ISBN9781469092904
    Seeking Serenity: The 10 New Rules for Health and Happiness in the Age of Anxiety

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    Reviews for Seeking Serenity

    2.5/5

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    • 2/5
      Let me start out by saying that I am someone who has dealt with plenty of stress. I have read plenty of self help books, gone to therapy, the whole nine yards. While I may not be an expert, I can tell you to save your money. There are better resources out there. This is not worth the $25 price tag. Save your money as most of her rules can be found on a quick google search. They are nothing new, nothing life altering, and to be honest, the book is bland. The too long, don’t read version of this review is to just research mindfulness or pick up a book on it. That’s the most useful information this book has to offer. The rest is just fluff or quotes that the author shoved in to sell her points. As a self help book, this leaves much to be desired. The rules are not new or novel to most people. The information may be researched and compiled, but it reads as though the author is writing papers trying to persuade the reader of something. Like in a college paper, or even a high school one, not everything is connected in the chapter. It occasionally feels disjointed and disorganized. For example, in the chapter “Be Free”, Amanda spends a good chunk of time talking about aging. It seems rather disconnected from the rule of “being free”. She paints both adolescents and adults in broad strokes as one as not empathetic and the other as more empathetic. However, both groups are more of a mix. Adolescents do not necessarily lack empathy, even if their teenage and young adult lives are still very much self centered. Being self centered does not necessarily mean you lack empathy, something that Amanda does not seem to recognize. She spends time trying to defend that the aging brain is okay and not to worry about it by pulling at small straws. However, there are many other things about aging that she could talk about the positivities of. While I am not saying that being young is better than being older, I am saying that her arguments feel flimsy and out of place in this chapter.This leads to another downfall of this book, the rules. They are sweeping and vague. Rules such as ‘belong’, ‘be resilient’, and ‘be happy’ are vague. Plain and simple. There is no meat to them. There’s no expansion. No explanation of how someone is to attain these rules and follow them. One cannot wave a magic wand and magically be able to follow these rules. While rather simplistic in idea, they are harder to put into practice. Each rule that Amanda lays out takes time, effort, and practice in order to achieve. However, Amanda does not offer the reader much in the way of suggestions on how to achieve mastery on these rules. I will say that she does put a practice section at the end of each chapter. Although, like the rules themselves, they are not entirely helpful. Some are useful and others feel like place fillers. Most of these can be found in a brief googling of information as well. Overall, this book feels like one of those people who tell depressed people to just “be happy” and expects them to achieve this on their own. They don’t really tell you how to do it. They just tell you to do it. Again, I recognize there are practices at the end of each chapter, but they just fall flat. “Exit the echo chamber”, “believe in yourself”, “think unity”, and “reframe and change how you see things”, are not exactly practice. Yes, those are all things that would help one in their path to seeking freedom for anxiety, but there is no how. She simply tells you to do it and that’s it’s good for you. It’s like telling someone to lose weight, but not helping them figure out how to do it. For some people, they are able to figure it out on their own, others need help. Everyone needs a starting place, something tangible to hold on to. I can think unity all I want, but there are no exercises listed in this book to help my mind retrain itself to think that way.The best pieces of information and practices found in this book are on mindfulness and meditation. These are tangible and well researched methods to helping lower stress and be more at peace with the world. Though, it’d probably more interesting, too the point, less like an argumentative paper, and accessible to just go read a book on mindfulness instead.