Creating Well-Being: Four Steps to a Happier, Healthier Life

This book presents scientifically-supported guidance for people who want to replace stress and painful emotions with a sense of well-being and contentment.

With empathy and unfailing good humor, Dr. Pamela Hays outlines a four-step process that has proven successful in her professional clinical psychology practice as well as in her own life. She invites readers to step onto the path of well-being by recognizing their stressors, avoiding negative thought-traps, re-examining their thinking, and taking action wherever possible, using environmental change, better communication skills, social support, and self-care.

Each chapter demonstrates how taking small, manageable steps adds up, over time, to real and permanent change. Packed with tips and tools for self-reflection and behavioral change, this book shows readers how to build well-being from the ground up.

Acknowledgments

Introduction

Step 1: Stepping Onto the Path of Well-Being

1. Finding Your Path
2. Tapping Your Hidden Strengths

Step 2: Understanding Your Stressors

3. How Stress Hurts
4. The Mind–Body Connection
5. Distinguishing Internal From External Sources of Stress

Step 3: Using Thoughts to Feel Better

6. Thought Traps That Can Block Your Path
7. Countering Negative Thinking
8. Compassion Voice
9. Well-Being Boosters

Step 4: Taking Action

10. The Power of Thought and Action
11. Create a Healthy Environment
12. Learn and Practice Well-Being Behavior
13. Assertiveness, Conflict Resolution, and Other Communication Skills
14. Social Engagement, Meaning, and Purpose
15. Self-Care for Staying on the Happy, Healthy Path

Afterword

References

Index

About the Author

Pamela A. Hays, PhD, is the author of Addressing Cultural Complexities in Practice: Assessment, Diagnosis, and Therapy, and Connecting Across Cultures: The Helper's Toolkit. She is coeditor of the book Culturally Responsive Cognitive—Behavioral Therapy.

She holds a doctorate in clinical psychology from the University of Hawaii and from 1987 to 1988 served as a National Institute of Mental Health postdoctoral fellow at the University of Rochester School of Medicine. From 1989 to 2000, she worked as a core faculty member of the graduate psychology program at Antioch University Seattle, where she continues to teach once a year as adjunct.

Dr. Hays's research has included work with Vietnamese, Lao, and Cambodian people living in the United States and with Arab Muslim women living in North Africa. Since 2000, she has been back in her hometown of Soldotna, Alaska, working in private practice and as a supervisor for the Kenaitze Tribe's Nakenu Family Center in Kenai, Alaska.

She conducts workshops internationally and can be reached at Dr. Pamela Hays.

In Creating Well-Being: Four Steps to a Happier, Healthier Life, clinical psychologist Pamela Hays draws upon her many years of experience and expertise to write this 224 page instruction manual that will enable the non-specialist general reader wanting to improve the quality of their emotional and social life through the implementation of four basic "user friendly" steps that begins with tapping into hidden strengths and qualities, a recognition of the impact stress has upon the mind-body relationship, how to counter negative thinking, and to take positive, effective action with respect to improving our behavior, self-care, and social interactions. Insightful, astute, practical, and accessible, Creating Well-Being: Four Steps to a Happier, Healthier Life is very strongly recommended reading for anyone seeking personal self-improvement and would make an enduringly popular addition to community library Self-Help instructional reference collections.
—Midwest Book Review