Reviews for From Chaos to Calm: How to Shift Unhealthy Stress Patterns and Create Your Ideal Balance in Life

The average rating for From Chaos to Calm: How to Shift Unhealthy Stress Patterns and Create Your Ideal Balance in Life based on 2 reviews is 3 stars.

Review # 1 was written on 2016-02-27 00:00:00 Beverly White Synopsis: Men and women are different. In the event that you have already figured this out after several years of marriage, this book may yet give you some comfort in knowing you are not alone in your frustrations. "Why Mars and Venus Collide" did have some helpful advice. However, I think those helpful nuggets were already lodged in his early book, "Men are from Mars, Women are from Venus." (There appears to be some gratuitous repackaging going on here.) I confess that while I was reading this book, my angry inner feminist occasionally reared her irritated head. Gray tells me that "Making a Man Happy is Easier than You Think." Why, Gray says, *ALL* you have to do is love him unconditionally just as his dog does (yes, he uses his dog as an example) and applaud him vigorously for picking up a single pair of socks after you've spent an hour cleaning up the entire bedroom (actual example). See how EASY it is? Then there's the list of 100 ways I can raise my oxytocin levels and be happier and have more energy: arrange flowers, cook a meal, get my hair done, use my fine china, take a cooking class, buy a new outfit, babysit. . . I'm not sure he could be much more stereotypical if he tried. Where is reading theology in the list of 100? Discussing classical literature? On more than one occasion, he suggests, not quite in these words, but more or less: "There were a lot fewer marriage problems back in the good old days when women didn't expect anything more of their husbands than a paycheck." While I agree that it is easy in these modern times for women to have unrealistic expectations of their husbands, expecting them to be at once provider and girlfriend, I think (at least I hope) there is a happy medium between these two, a something more than provider, a help mate. When reading this, I felt like Gray infantilized men too much. Take, for instance, his use of himself as an example of men needing to have specific projects assigned to them in order to even begin to function in a domestic realm: "When my wife and I go food shopping at the farmer's market, I have my designated job'paying each vendor, pushing the cart, and carrying the heavy bags." Good job, John! What a big boy! You wouldn't want to try to tackle all of the complicated features of food shopping all by yourself, such as writing a list and locating the produce. (My husband must be exceptional. He can go grocery shopping without me.) "Likewise, when I help with the dishes, I like to plant myself in front of the sink and wash dishes while others bring plates over, put things away, and clean tabletops." Yes, John, you wouldn't want to take on such an overwhelmingly detailed task as clearing plates, washing them, AND putting them away. That's really only something women can handle. "Many men," Gray helpfully relates, "tend to lose interest and energy while doing the nurturing, oxytocin-producing domestic routines like laundry, shopping, cooking, and cleaning." Newsflash: So do many women. All of the biological oxytocin gobbledygook aside, laundry and cleaning do NOT increase my energy levels. I do the laundry because it needs to be done. I don't do it because it gives me a boost of the happy drug. I agree that men and women handle and process stress differently. I do agree with him that much stress in modern marriages is owning to women trying to take on two roles at once (by both working full-time and yet still acting as the primary homemaker), but he makes it sound as though men are biologically incapable of cleaning house. One thing I've discovered about marriage books is that they tend to make me really appreciate my husband. And this one in particular inspires appreciation by leading me to believe that while my husband's flaws are common to men, his virtues are exceptional. So you have done him a bit of good after all, John, even if you haven't convinced me that he has a biological imperative to do only one chore a week. I guess I don't have space to mention the constant textual interruptions with advertisements and URLs for his homeopathic remedies... As for women who suspect they may need to become easier to get along with (and don't most of us to some extent?), I think a better book to read is Dr. Laura's "The Proper Care and Feeding of Husbands." It can irritate the inner angry feminist from time to time, too, but I think it's easier to take that kind of truth coming from another woman, and she didn't strike me as quite as stereotypical--or at least not as annoyingly so--as Gray. At least, I got more out of that book than I have out of this one.

Review # 2 was written on 2014-11-17 00:00:00 Deron Abaton A very validating book, and an incredibly fast read. Explains how men and women deal with stress, with real-life examples that ring so true. Talks about the BIOLOGICAL and biochemical differences between men and women, and for me, learning that some things are biological changes my perspecive a lot. Here are some excerpts I liked from the book: "Being aware of our innate biochemical differences frees us from the unhealthy compulsion to change our partners and eventually leads us to celebrate our differences." "Men tend to work best on projects rather than routines, since routines have no clear beginning or end. When a man is tired, a domestic routine is rarely a priority, as it is for a woman." "When a man takes action to support a woman's needs, she feels supported and her stress goes down. But the opposite is true on Mars. WHen a woman does LESS for him and allows him to do more for her, his stress is lessened. A man's stress is reduced when he feels successful in meeting her needs." "Men feel needed and women need to feel they are not alone. Just as a woman is happiest when she feels she is getting what she needs from her partner, a man is happiest when he feels successful in meeting her partner's needs. This is an important distinction." "Just as women need to blet go of expecting men to be perfect, men need to let go of expecting women to think we are perfect. Together we have learned tha our life does not have to be perfect for us to connect and support each other." "The real reason women are tired today is not because they have too much to do. It is b/c they are not producing enough oxytocin to cope with stress." Anyway, there are a definitely more points in the book to share, this is just a glimpse as to what this book talks about. I highly recommend it to everyone, just so you understand the opposite gender that much more. Read the Introduction of the book first...(don't skip it) b/c that's what hooked me in.