By opening BEWARE FALSE TIGERS with the story of a prehistoric hunter-gatherer finding himself alone on a predator-strewn savannah, author Frank Forencich establishes the fact that stress has been a bane of the human species since time immemorial. By linking that story with one of contemporary man rapt in the miasma of our modern technological era, he shows that stress is still a debilitating onus on the human existence and as such needs to be addressed for the good of that existence.
Forencich lays out an overview of a program to accomplish just that, dividing his approach into four distinct fields of application. The first of these is an examination of that stress itself, looking at its effects on both the physiology of the body and on the psyched of the stressed. In-depth without being overly clinical this examination reinforces the need for not only coping with this stress but for developing an entire coping stratagem. In developing this stratagem he next focuses on identifying and prioritizing external causes of stress. While there are those stresses which are cultural and common to all, in this the most personal part of the approach those seeking relief are steered toward looking inside as it is the self-examination which provides a context for the stressors and their specific effects. That context, then, affords the specifics to back the next focus ― the possible and probable responses to stress. Established metrics are used to quantify and measure the scale of these responses and to subsequently suggest possible adaptations to maximize their effectiveness. Which leads naturally to an overall strategy for establishing and practicing cognizant remedies to coping with stresses, the “real tigers” of the modern world.
While the conventionality of this process may appear to be nothing but a re-hash of the most common of self-help tropes, Forencich sets it above and apart from that broad genre with one singular aspect. While he does agree that self-help is, by its very nature (if not its name), a process to help the self, he maintains that when dealing with stress one person’s self-help advancement also helps him. And it then helps the next person, and the person after that, and the person after that until it becomes self-evident that in the world-wide “family of man” stress relief for one is stress relief for everyone. Such a universal application of the de-stressing program makes that program so much more satisfying and, as such, BEWARE FALSE TIGERS can be nothing but beneficial for bringing some ease and relaxation to today’s hyper-complex world.
Humanistic in its approach and universal in its application, BEWARE FALSE TIGERS presents a de-stressing program that is bound to appeal to both the self- and the socially-conscious alike.
~Johnny Masiulewicz for IndieReader