Is It Worth Dying For?

A groundbreaking examination of stress and its effects on health and disease Cardiologist Robert S. Eliot identifies “hot reactors”—apparently healthy people who overreact to such common occurrences as losing a tennis game or missing a train. If you are a “hot reactor,” you may be responding to stress with an all-out physical effort that is taking a heavy toll on your health . . . without your even being aware of it. Based on more than twenty years of research with thousands of patients, Is it Worth Dying For? takes stress management out of pop psychology and puts it into mainstream medicine. Dr. Eliot identifies the ways in which stress affects the heart, the blood vessels, and the body and gives us new, objective ways of detecting stress before any damage is done. He offers a complete program for recognizing, reducing, and reversing the hidden effects of stress in your life—to make stress work for you, not against you. You’ll learn: • How to take your own “stress temperature” (the results may surprise you) • Whether you are a “hot” or “cold” reactor • How to relieve work-related stress • How to reduce your dependency on alcohol, drugs, and tobacco • How to keep your sense of control and self-mastery in practically any situation • Plus a complete stress-reducing nutrition plan; relaxation therapy techniques; and a twenty-minute-per day, three-day-per-week aerobic fitness program to strengthen your heart