This course helps you chart your course, by sharing real-life experiences of extremely stressful situations and how the positive outcome was achieved.

You'll get solid tips on how to reduce stress in your own life, and how to handle it when it comes. This course will have you laughing and thinking, and it will guide you to a higher plateau of being.

• Understand where stress comes from.
• Be able to eliminate stress-causers in your life, while simultaneously reducing "necessary" stress and its impact.
• Be able to employ simple strategies to integrate stress countermeasures into your everyday life.
• Be able to enjoy a fuller, happier, more productive life.

You probably know stress is a leading cause of a long list of physical diseases. You probably have not considered that stress is a leading cause of other "diseases," as well. Consider the stressed-out person whose anger or anxiety shows through in social situations, on the job, in recreational time, and even when trying to sleep.

Stress isn't just something someone else will die from. It affects you, and it affects nearly every aspect of your life. So, it's critical that you understand how to deal with it, how to reduce it, and how to stop spreading it to other people who then circulate it back to you.

Also contains handy checklists to help you identify and remove sources of stress from your life. For good.

To view the complete Table of Contents for this course, click here .

If you need practical advice--plus a few laughs--this course is for you.

Approximate time to completion: 28 hours.

Here is some sample text:

What can I can tell you about handling stress? You be the judge….

I have lived through tornadoes, earthquakes, fire, floods, hurricanes, and IRS audits. I have been out to sea on a small ship (Navy destroyer) in a gale—30 foot waves can be very stressful on a ship that size. I once fell off a 230-ft tower, and—shades of Indiana Jones—found myself dangling from one arm while I held precariously to a small stub of steel (a thermocouple well) while awaiting rescue. I have stood in line at Wal-Mart on Christmas Eve, and I have driven a car in Boston. Yes, I can tell you about stress.

Then there are the more personal things, like being shot at by my (now ex) wife’s paramour (I love the sound of gunfire in the morning?). For a time in my life, too, I seemed to attract muggers (none of whom were successful)—with their various weapons, rottweilers roaming unleashed, and other threats to my person. What about that time in my life when I couldn’t find work for over a year? Yes, that was stressful, especially when my savings were starting to run low. I’ve been betrayed, lied to, heartbroken, scammed, taken advantage of, and generally treated about the way a baby treats a diaper. By people who had no reason other than their own meanness to treat me that way (hold on to that thought—it’s going to come in handy, later). To top it off, telemarketers call me constantly.

I’ve had bad food, been forced to listen to country music, and endured allergic attacks that make breathing almost impossible. I’ve had to work for a company that cheats me every pay check. I worked for one that forced me to work every holiday unpaid, but kept telling me “we pay for holiday work at the end of the year”—they laid me off in November. I’ve had to work for companies that insist I use a computer 8 generations behind what the job requires.

Some of the best friends a guy could ever have died on me. Some of the worst friends a guy could have wouldn’t go away for the longest time! And I have said goodbye to close friends with a series of job-related moves. I’ve had a parade of women through my life—some of whom I have just fallen head over heels for, only to be discarded (by some) like yesterday’s trash—now, that’s stress.

Family stress, job stress, financial stress—I have had it all. Yet, today, people routinely underestimate my age by 10 to 15 years. The stress doesn’t show. What I am going to share with you is how I have handled or mishandled stress, what things work and don’t work, and how you might learn from what I have done. And we’ll look at some ways to improve on that.

Don’t get the wrong impression. I have often mishandled stressful situations. And like everyone else, I have mishandled unstressful situations and created my own stressful situations as a result. You’ll see why we all do this, and maybe you can accept that you are going to make bad decisions. The idea behind this philosophy is you can avoid getting stressed out over the fact you got stressed out. That old saw about being able to accept what you can’t change and changing what you can is good advice you’ll get some specifics on implementing. The main thing you need to know about stress is it can kill you or it can help you, depending on how you handle it. That is, I hope, why you are taking this course: so you can convert stressful inputs into progress rather than debilitation.

What stress is and why we have it

I’m not going to get into an argument about religion vs. evolution, but you need to understand there are evolutionary underpinnings (as well as others) behind stress. This will help you cope with it in a positive, winning manner. Your brain has several major areas. For simplicity’s sake, let’s group them into “upper brain” and “lower brain.” Your lower brain is your primitive, fast-acting, non-thinking part. This is the part of the brain Congressmen use when passing tax laws. Your upper brain is your cognitive area. In humans, this part is something like 3 times the size of the counterpart in chimpanzees.

The lower brain’s ability to handle things quickly makes sense. Think of ancient ancestors who may have pondered, “Do I eat that or does it eat me?” too long. They weren’t able to pass along their genes! When there is danger, then, the lower brain takes over. It analyzes quickly and incompletely, but it acts suddenly and powerfully. It’s also the seat of emotions while the upper brain is the seat of conscious thought. This is why people fly into an angry rage and later can’t believe they did what they did or said what they said.

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