meQuilibrium: 14 Days to Cooler, Calmer and Happier (Book Review)

Book provided by Blogging for Books for review consideration. All thoughts and opinions are my own.

There’s a cloud on the cover of this book that has the following sentence on it: “The clinically proven plan to banish burnout.” This got me very intrigued. When I saw “14 Days…” I was sold. Yes, I would love to be able to change my life in 14 days! I will read this book and amazing things will transpire!!!

You know where this is going, right?

I’m sure your mama taught you that if it sounds too good to be true, it probably is. Mama’s right. meQuilibrium is not going to radically change your life in 14 days, especially not with 15-20 minutes of your time each day, as the book also promises.

Now, that’s not to say that this book doesn’t have very sound advice, and that it doesn’t lay out many different very real stress triggers and some great ideas for ways to diffuse those little ticking time bombs. But the amount of time that they suggest you might need to “fix” these problems strikes me as ridiculous. I actually found myself getting all stressed out after I realized that they were suggesting that I learn how to correctly identify, categorize and then appropriately diffuse my emotional triggers all in one day. Seems like quite the lofty task! Do you struggle with sleep issues? Don’t worry, you’ll fix that in day 2. All you have to do is stuff that you have probably tried 100 times before like do a little yoga, not eat too much before bed, etc. It will fix itself in one night…aren’t you excited?

Ok, I know I’m being a little grouchy. So I want to state what is true again: this book really does do a nice job of uncovering stress trigger points and giving you some long term as well as some short term stress relief ideas. But I think that the promise of being able to radically transform how a person deals with stress in 14 days, 15 minutes at a time, is not realistic, and frankly, it encourages folks (or at least me) to just put the book down and walk away. Why not be honest about the fact that changing decades old habits is just going to take time, but that working slow and steady on making those changes is going to be worth all of the hard work (because it IS hard work…it isn’t 15 minutes of your time work).

Is it worth the read? I would say yes IF you are super stressed out and you can’t even put your finger on what the heck is wrong. If you are lost, this book will shed some light on what might be happening with you. But if you want to be cooler, calmer and happier in just 14 days and with minimum effort, I’m not convinced that this book will help.