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Press Contact:
Caroline Sill, Random House PR
P: 212-782-8943 | F: 212-572-6053
csill@randomhouse.com
Bio:
Dr. Rossman, a pioneer in mind-body medicine, is the founder of The Healing Mind, the co-founder of the Academy for Guided Imagery, a Clinical Faculty member at the University of California San Francisco Medical School, and an advisory board member of Dr. Andrew Weil’s Integrative Medicine Program at the University of Arizona. Dr. Rossman’s cutting-edge research in guided imagery has contributed to the current paradigm of holistic health and has influenced the work of many of its prominent leaders, including Drs. Weil, Dean Ornish, and Rachel Remen.
Dr. Rossman has authored numerous books and CDs, including Guided Imagery for Self-Healing and Fighting Cancer from Within, and his work has been featured in academic, trade, and popular national media outlets including O, Self, Body & Soul, and CNN. The Worry Solution (Crown Archetype Books, Dec 2010) is Dr. Rossman’s latest ground-breaking contribution to the field of preventative medicine. It teaches readers how to capitalize on the powerful mental force behind worry – utilizing the imagination to facilitate positive growth, change, and healing, instead of letting it run us into the ground with debilitating stress, anxiety, and disease.
About The Worry Solution:
Nature has wired us to worry, Dr. Rossman explains in The Worry Solution, so it’s futile to try to stop. The good news is that worry itself is a neutral function of our imagination — a reflection of the brain’s ability to look at a problem from many different angles and to identify and tease apart the different pieces of a puzzle. What makes worry negative or positive, Dr. Rossman explains, is the way we use it. Unproductive worry sets us off on a mental hamster wheel of obsessive thoughts — effectively triggering the stress response that is behind a slew of chronic and/or life-threatening illnesses, from fibromyalgia to obesity to heart disease. Productive worry, to the contrary, helps us solve problems, prevent disease, and achieve peace of mind.
The Worry Solution offers not only helpful information but also its practical application — providing readers with numerous hands-on, easy-to-use guided imagery techniques that can be done in the comfort of one’s own home. For those who prefer audio exercises, the guided imagery methods outlined in the book are also available on CDs or audio downloads that can be purchased on The Worry Solution website. Scientific research has demonstrated that these kind of simple, 15-minute guided imagery exercises can reduce anxiety by nearly 90%. As such, The Worry Solution is not just a book about preventative medicine. It is preventative medicine — a manifestation of the holistic, “more skills, less pills” approach to health care.
Areas of Expertise:
¨ Mind-Body Medicine
¨ Worry, Anxiety, and Stress
¨ Integrative Medicine
¨ Relaxation, Mindfulness and Guided Imagery
¨ Complementary and Alternative Medicine
¨ Preventative Medicine
¨ Acupuncture
Interview Topics:
1. Put Your Worry to Work for You! Nature has wired us to worry, so it is futile to try to stop. The good news is that worry itself is a neutral function of our imagination — a reflection of the brain’s ability to look at a problem from many different angles and to identify and tease apart the different pieces of a puzzle. What makes worry positive or negative is the way we use it: Unproductive worry sets us off on a mental hamster wheel of obsessive thoughts — effectively triggering the stress response that is behind a slew of chronic and/or life-threatening illnesses, from fibromyalgia to obesity to heart disease. Productive worry, to the contrary, helps us solve problems and achieve peace of mind. Dr. Rossman shares practical tips on how to develop a “good worry” habit to optimize one’s health and prevent a wide range of illnesses — thereby reducing or eliminating the need for pharmaceuticals and expensive medical treatments.
2. Use Your Brain to Stop The WASI Train (Worry-Anxiety-Stress-Illness) The human brain has three essential components — the hindbrain, which focuses on basic survival; the limbic system, which processes emotions; and the cerebral cortex, which interprets events. Each of these components is inextricably intertwined, one affecting the other in a chain reaction that ultimately impacts the entire body. While we have little direct control over the hindbrain and limbic system, we can step into the driver’s seat of our cerebral cortex — our thinking mind, where worry happens. By consciously shifting our perception and interpretation of events, we dramatically can alter our emotional and biological reactions, rewiring their impact on our bodies. Neuroplasticity research indicates that as we practice these mindful techniques over time, we physically can transform our brain — reprogramming it with thoughts and feelings that support a healthy body. Through mastering a good worry habit, we effectively have the power to think ourselves well.
3. I (Heart) Guided Imagery By repeatedly triggering a stress response in the body, over an extended period of time, a bad worry habit significantly increases the risk of illness as extreme as heart disease. Fortunately, guided imagery has proven to be an effective antidote: As a preventative measure, guided imagery is the most useful tool for developing a good worry habit — which in turn lowers stress and decreases the risk of illness. If you already have heart disease, guided imagery even lowers the risk of complications during heart surgery, speeds up recovery time, and decreases the need for pain medication. It helps calm pre-surgical jitters among patients, with studies indicating that anxiety can be reduced by as much as 90%, through a simple 15 minute guided imagery CD. Lastly, as a performance tool, guided imagery helps surgeons optimize their surgical work on heart disease patients, increasing the patients’ survival rate
4. More Skills, Fewer Pills Research indicates that that 140,000 Americans die each year from adverse effects of drugs, making it the third or fourth leading cause of death. Anti-anxiety medications alone raise the mortality risk by 36%,. While some Americans have bona fide anxiety disorders that may need a certain amount of drug intervention, most of us simply are plagued by everyday worries run amuck. By learning skills for using worry to our advantage, we can reduce or altogether eliminate the need for costly and dangerous medications.
5. Health Care Reform Is In Your Mind Over the past few years, Americans have been passionately engaged in discussions about “health care” reform. What we really have been discussing, however, is “medical reimbursement” reform. Despite the changes taking place with various legislation, our health care system remains exactly the same — a “sick care” industry: We wait until something goes wrong with our bodies, then utilize costly, elaborate, and dangerous pharmaceuticals or surgeries that we could have avoided with simple, preventative measures. True health care reform actually begins in our minds, where we recognize that we are our own primary caregivers and where we understand that we no longer need to outsource the solution to our health.
6. Got Worry? Get Mental Floss. We brush our teeth daily, especially after eating candy, ice cream, or chips. But how many of us engage in a similar hygiene practice, after a generous portion of “mental junk food?” In this high-tech era of Too Much Information, we are exposed to a daily cacophony of negative stimuli — war, poverty, disease, burglary, arson, kidnapping, murder — all triggering feelings like fear, anxiety, and depression. As such, we are more stressed out than ever. But by practicing basic mental hygiene — eliminating exposure to negative information or using a good worry habit to reframe and respond to it — we can regain a sense of control and contentment in our lives.
7. Change Your Mind, Lose Your Weight
Americans spend $40 billion a year on weight-loss programs and products that typically fail. Meanwhile, obesity is growing at staggering rates and is a leading cause of numerous illnesses — some of which are life-threatening. Until we address the root causes of eating disorders, we will continue to fail to treat them effectively. To change the way people eat, we have to change the way they think and feel. A primary cause of overeating is in fact “emotional eating” – turning to food to cope with stress, anxiety, and resulting unproductive worry. Research indicates that when people utilize relaxation and either guided imagery or hypnosis as part of their weight loss program, they lose twice as much weight and keep it off twice as long. By directly interacting with and creatively responding to the emotional part of their brains, people no longer feel the need to take care of themselves by consuming excess sugar and fat. They learn to cope with life without clogging up their arteries.
8. Imagine Peak Performance Research indicates that by visualizing ourselves succeeding, we increase the likelihood of succeeding. We effectively calibrate our mental, emotional, and physical dials to the state of peak performance. It should come as no surprise, therefore, that the most successful athletes, performance artists, and business people routinely use imagery rehearsal. Today, in fact, imagery rehearsal is a standard part of sports training, especially at the higher levels of competition — where the mental game determines success as much or more than the physical characteristics of competitors who are all athletically gifted. By focusing on a positive outcome instead of engaging in doom-and-gloom thoughts about everything that can go wrong, we use the gift of worry to our advantage – channeling our imagination to optimize the ability to accomplish our goals.
Interview Questions:
1. What is the difference between “bad worry” and “good worry”?
2. How are worry, anxiety, and stress related?
3. Out of these three states of mind, why do you focus on worry as they key?
4. How is worry related to imagination?
5. Please talk about recent discoveries in brain science neuroplasticity and how those discoveries relate to your work around guided imagery and worry.
6. How does a bad worry habit cause illness? What kinds of illness can it cause?
7. How can a good worry habit prevent illness?
8. Why do you think people are so worried today? What aspects of that worry do you think are positive, and what aspects do you think are negative?
9. How can we develop a good worry habit, if we are living with very real worries — like facing eviction or not having health care or having family in a war-torn country?
10. Why do women worry more than men?
11. Please talk about the use of guided imagery in heart operations and how that research can be applied to daily life situations.
12. In some communities, obsessive worry seems like a pasttime — an activity that brings family and friends together. Do you think that in some cultural contexts “unproductive worry” can have positive value?
13. What are the similarities and differences between the concepts you outline in The Worry Solution and the book The Secret or the idea of “The Law of Attraction?”
14. How can a good worry habit optimize performance — whether in sports, in business, or in parenting?
15. How long would it take for someone to see a difference in their worry habits, using the techniques taught in The Worry Solution?
