The Stress Prescription: Seven Days to More Joy and Ease

Elissa Epel, PhD

Dec 2022 · The Seven Days Series Book 3 · Penguin Random House Audio · Narrated by Elissa Epel, PhD

About this audiobook

“A preeminent expert sheds light on how to handle the daily hassles of life. It’s not just a manual for managing stress—it’s a toolkit for preventing it.” —Adam Grant, #1 New York Times bestselling author of Think Again

From world-renowned psychologist and New York Times–bestselling author Dr. Elissa Epel, a simple yet powerful plan to turn your stress into your strength in just seven days

We can’t avoid stress. But we can embrace it and transform it.

Whether we’re facing deadlines, difficulties with family or friends, personal crises, or just the uncertainty of the world—stress is the ocean we swim in. Even our negative thoughts can trigger our body’s stress response so we rarely experience periods of ease and deep restoration.

In The Stress Prescription, Dr. Epel distills decades of research, infused with wisdom, into a practical yet transformative seven-day plan of science-based techniques that can help you harness stress through more positive challenge and purpose. 

The seven-day prescription will lead you through these exercises:

Day 1: Things Will Go Wrong . . . And That’s All Right
Day 2: Control What You Can . . . And Put Down the Rest
Day 3: Be the Lion
Day 4: Train for Resilience
Day 5: Let Nature Do the Work
Day 6: Don’t Just Relax . . . Restore
Day 7: Start Full, End Full

Dr. Epel shows us how we can “stress better”—by training our minds and bodies to shift towards a flexible, beneficial stress response that can actually enhance health. You will develop a more robust mindset, build the resources you need to turn stress into strength, and fill your days with more joy, connection, and ease.


* This audiobook edition includes a downloadable PDF which contains all the Today's Practice exercises, the Mind States graph, the Your Stress Mindset test, the My Core Values list, the Stress Prescription chart, and the Further Reading and Resources list from the book.

About the author

Elissa Epel, PhD, is a leading health psychologist who studies stress, aging, and obesity. She is the director of UCSF’s Aging, Metabolism, and Emotion Center and is associate director of its Center for Health and Community. She is a member of the National Academy of Medicine and serves on scientific advisory committees for the National Institutes of Health and the Mind & Life Institute. She has received awards from Stanford University, the Society of Behavioral Medicine, and the American Psychological Association. She is the coauthor of the New York Times bestseller The Telomere Effect.