The Fatigue Prescription: Four Steps to Renewing Your Energy, Health, and Life

by Linda Hawes Clever, Dean Ornish (Foreword)

Dr. Linda Clever has developed a do-it-yourself tool kit with The Fatigue Prescription , based on years of medical practice, life experience, and the success of RENEW. Filled with easy self-assessments, informational charts, and sound advice from a physician who healed herself, this book will help you avoid illness, reset priorities, and most importantly, regain your health and happiness.

Are you living your to-do list rather than living your life? Many of us run from task to task and are burning the nearly non-existent candle at both ends. We are sleep-deprived, overworked, overwhelmed, and undernourished in body and soul. We slam energy drinks, gnaw energy bars, and constantly drink caffeine to keep going as our adrenal glands struggle to keep up. Most of us are one health crisis away from financial devastation--and yet, we are hurtling towards physical breakdown each over-scheduled day. Our lives demand too much of us; when everything is a priority, this can make us sick and tired. Dr. Clever discovered the personal cost of this lifestyle and has since devoted herself to helping people renew themselves and regain balance in life.

Genres: Health

186 pages, Paperback

First published January 1, 2010

Reviews

[Krista]

When I was 22, I went to the Caribbean to teach. A year of working against my American instincts and I was finally rested, happy and deprogrammed. This book is a cheaper version of a trip to the Caribbean. Dr. Clever uses a mix of the things that everyone knows are for their own good, (but doesn't do) and some new suggestions. Clever, what a great name for an author.

[Donald Neeper]

This is not just a prescription for overburdened women. As a man, I found it applies to anyone with commitments that grew larger than the tasks the person initially assumed. Linda offers a sectioned list that you fill out according to your tasks and the feelings that arise from your obligations. Writing the details in your own prescription is a way of making your own needs valid. I started enjoying evenings rather than working until bedtime, and discovered that the world didn’t notice my alteration of priorities. Some of my demands became pleasures instead of pains. That’s good medicine.

[RMax]

In the Fatigue Prescription, Dr. Clever lays out 4 steps to renewing — Awareness; Reflection: Conversation; and Plan and Act. Using facts, stories, and questions, you can dig deeper into this critical topic. The easy to use Renew-O-Meter is a helpful gem. The benefits to renewing are enormous — including regaining passion, vigor, and having a sense of accomplishment and success. Highly recommended. Rand Selig, author of Thriving!

[Maria]

This book is not like a prescription for antibiotics, where you get the pills, take them, and get better. It's more like a prescription for physical therapy, where you go to an appointment, the therapist does some work on you, some of it painful, and then you go home and have exercises you must do yourself.

It's not a book to read cover-to-cover in a few sittings. It's more like a workbook. Read a section or a chapter, reflect on it, answer the questions, talk about it with your support system.

Some of it is obvious. You're tired? Get more sleep, relax more, don't over-commit. But there are ideas of what to do to relax, what you might need to change to get more sleep, how you can keep yourself from over-committing.

If you've been working on this at all, then there might not be anything new in this book for you. But if you're just about to embark on self-renewal, then this book might be just the guide you need.

[Bob H]

For a subject as downbeat as this, this delightful book is upbeat, easy to read and quite matter-of-fact. Indeed, there's no magic cure here, nothing arcane, but a series of practical, common-sense tips on life management -- ordinary things like sleep, diet, exercise, health management, lifestyle. If anything, it's a gathering of these methods into a systematic approach to one's life and activity. And, underneath the chatty prose, there seems to have been a formidable amount of research and peer review, judging by her notes and bibliography.

Highly recommend.

[Pauline]

There are some good ideas here, but I found the information was structured strangely. The encouragement to stop doing so much, and to align your activities with your core values, makes sense. I had heard the author speak before reading this book, so had perhaps picked up her key tips already. Well worth a look but don't expect magic.

[Samina]

Tahtsin lugeda, kuna oli palju väsinud ja pealkiri "Elujõu retsept" kõlas paljutõotavalt. Pettusin, sest midagi uut teada ei saanud ja raamat tundus nagu mingite üldiste märksõnade ja nimekirjade suht seosetu kogum.

[Gretchen]

It was nothing new or anything I didn't know. Plus it was more what we do to ourselves than for medical reasons.