Title: Take stress from chaos to calm
Author: Annika Sorensen
Source: Netgalley, in exchange for an honest review
Tl;dr: Move along, nothing new to see here.
This book felt more as a commercial tool to advertise the methods of Dr. Sorensen, than as a means to apply the tools in the book by oneself. I have read my share of books on self improvement and time management, and this books brings no new great insight. You can summary it as “be honest in what you want and need, in all area’s of your life, and act upon this”. She uses “the wheel of life” to visualise this, which seems to be used by many people in the realm of personal development. After looking clearly at how your life is now (with keeping track of things, like a sleep diary, a food diary, and exercise diary and a stress diary), you set goals on how you want your life to be, and start taking steps towards these goals. So far, so good.
The problem with this book is that it does not tell you how to do this. Yes, it gives a case study (which was interesting to read), but even there it was often not clear how the change in this persons life happened. For example, he and his wifr struggle with intimacy. In the second month it is mentioned she complains he doesn’t try hard enough, but two months later stuff is suddenly better. Probably this happened because he is doing better overall, and has more energy to spend on his family, but this could have been explained more. This goes for all the fields of the wheel. This is also what makes it feel like an advertisement: it seems that to do this well, you need a coach to hand you the tools you’ll need in your specific situation. And I agree with this, but that does make the book a bit useless.
I do agree it is very useful to clearly know where you stand and to know where you want to go and I think the wheel of life can be a useful tool for this. But if you want to do something along these lines, don’t get this book, but check out the many resources to be found on the internet, that can give you the same basic information to get started. You don’t need this book.
Reading the thing 