Relax, Dammit!: A User's Guide to the Age of Anxiety

An entertaining and practical guide to getting through the day with less stress and better health, from the host of the hit TV series A User's Guide to Cheating Death.

We make a ridiculous number of decisions every day—possibly even thousands. We make decisions about when to wake up, how to brush our teeth, what to have for breakfast, how to get our kids to school, the amount of coffee to drink, and on and on.

Making so many decisions is tough. It can cause stock analysts to perform progressively worse over the course of a day. It can lead us to make poor decisions about the food we eat—the more brain fatigue we experience, the more junk food we consume. And the more deliberate the decision—that is, the more we need to think about it—the more fatiguing the process. There are many social forces at work that make how and what we choose an unnecessarily anxious process. But it doesn't have to be.

In Relax, Dammit!, health policy expert Timothy Caulfield takes us through a regular day—from the moment we wake up to when we go to sleep—and shows the underlying science behind our actions and habits. What he reveals is that we make decisions that are based, to a lesser or greater extent, on misinformation. Whether he's studying cell phone use, bike commuting, or raw-milk cheese consumption, Caulfield shows that many of the things we believe to be healthier, safer, or just better, simply aren't. With solid grounding in current and reliable scientific findings, the author points to a less stressful way forward—which means we can all afford to relax a lot more.

Insightful, sometimes controversial, and always entertaining, Relax, Dammit! is a surprising and liberating guide to modern life.