The Don't Sweat the Small Stuff Workbook: Exercises, Questions, and Self-Tests to Help You Keep the Little Things from Taking Over Your Life - Softcover

In one exercise, "Lower Your Tolerance to Stress," Carlson suggests that we'd be better off if we didn't brag about how much stress we can handle. People who do brag about their stress tolerance, he says, are usually stressed out all the time. To help you reduce your tolerance, he lists 20 signs of stress (among them: allergies, anxiety, depression, frequent headaches and restlessness) and asks you to put a check mark next to the ones you've experienced. The next time you feel any of these symptoms, he says, you should analyse and write down how you might change your behaviour in order to alleviate or prevent these problems in the future. In another exercise, "Create "Patience Practice Periods," he first asks you to analyse your level of patience (Do you drive above the speed limit? Grow furious when stuck in voice mail mazes? Feel like everyone else at the mall walks too slowly and gets in your way?). He then gives a series of hypothetical patience-killing situations--a long line at the supermarket, or slow, tricky traffic--and leaves space for you to write about how these situations would make you react.

Some exercises are true/false, some are of the never/sometimes/often/always variety. Others require thoughtful written responses. A few are by nature harder to handle than others ("Imagine Yourself at Your Own Funeral"), so the workbook therefore shouldn't be devoured in one sitting, but dipped into a bit at a time. This is a fine way to nurture the much underrated concepts of empathy, forgiveness, tolerance, and kindness.