The Blurb On The Back:

Knowing how to stay on top of stress is a vital life skill.

Manage Your Stress equips you with practical, effective techniques to manage life at uni in a stress-free way.

– recognise and understand your body’s response to causes of stress  

– learn techniques for changing stressful thinking patterns

– build your resilience so you can handle stressful situations

Succeed at university with Super Quick Skills.

Giving you the tools and advice you need to progress your skills and excel in your studies and life. 

You can buy MANAGE YOUR STRESS by Clare Wilson from Amazon UK, Waterstone’s or Bookshop.org UK.  I earn commission on any purchases made through these links.

The Review (Cut For Spoilers):

Clare Wilson is a lecturer in Applied Psychology at Portsmouth University. This is a broad guide to dealing with stress that’s aimed at university students and offers a combination of techniques and exercises plus a variety of further resources.  It’s a useful starting point that I think can be used by people in the workplace as much as students but the illustrations are incredibly random and some of the graphics difficult to read.

Wilson takes a very logical approach to the topic, starting with an explanation of what stress is, what it does to your body and what mindsets it leads to plus how you deal with the same.  I particularly liked how Wilson emphasises that it’s impossible to eliminate stress and it can be beneficial if you learn how to deal with it.  Where this book differs from other books on stress that I’ve read is that there’s a section that specifically looks at stress caused by loneliness, annoying people and relationship conflict and although this is aimed at students, there’s some useful stuff here for life in general and I also found the section on procrastination all-too-easy to relate to and it had some useful tips – including emphasising to students that they should look into their university resources and facilities to help.

It’s a short book and while Wilson does go into some of the physiology of stress the language is straightforward.  There are also a number of exercises and questionnaires plus a glossary of terms used and a helpful section of extra resources.   My main issues with the book are the same as for others in the Super Quick Skills series, namely that the illustrations are random stock pictures that often don’t have a lot to do with the text they’re next to (e.g. a picture of pancakes next to text on meditation).  The use of coloured text boxes was also a little difficult to read in places (it’s white text in a cursive script on a blue background) and I think the layout could have been a little better.

All in all though this is a useful book that anyone off to university – or even to their first full time job – would get a lot out of and on that basis, it’s worth a look.

Thanks to the Amazon Vine Programme for the review copy of this book.