UNWIND YOUR MIND

It is an ordinary Tuesday, and somewhere behind your eyes there is a low, constant hum: a list that never quite empties, a mind that reviews the day’s conversations at 2 a.m. like a manager who does not trust the staff. Unwind Your Mind was written for that Tuesday.

This is not a book of advice that sounds wise. It is a book of instruments: short, specific, testable practices, each shown working in a real life before it is handed to you blank. You will learn to read your own stress with a ten-item Self-Check; to picture your nervous system as a control panel with an accelerator and a brake, and to press the brake on purpose; to use breath, grounding, and mindfulness as steering rather than slogans; to run a two-week Sleep Reset and a nightly download that closes the day’s open loops; to hold a hard conversation with a three-move Listening Protocol; to put your phone under custody with a three-class Notification Audit; and to build, in Chapter 17, a Personal Practice System of small stacked habits that survives bad weeks — with a Setback Playbook for the weeks it doesn’t, and a complete 30-Day Unwind Program that walks the whole book in order, one day at a time.

What’s inside:

– The Stress Self-Check — ten statements, scored honestly, retaken at Day 30 and each quarter, so progress is measured in your own handwriting.

– The Control Panel — your autonomic nervous system in plain language: accelerator, brake, and the zones between, with a Zone Map worksheet.

– Breath, mindfulness, and the body scan — the core practices taught at full length, with filled-in examples before every blank worksheet.

– The Sleep Reset and the Brain-Dump + Sort — the two systems readers use first: one for the night, one for the mind working the night shift as a filing cabinet.

– Calm in real life — work stress and the always-on job, relationships and hard conversations, digital overload, grief and life transitions, food and movement basics.

– 23 worksheets, collected in an Appendix — plus a Resources section with crisis lines and routes to professional support.

The book is honest about its limits. It promises no stress-free life and makes no diagnosis of any person. It is wellness and stress education, not medical advice or mental-health treatment; where a difficulty is severe or persistent, it says so and points to professional help. Everything else, it makes doable: small practices, in the order you need them, starting tonight.

Unwind Your Mind: 354 pages, approximately 102,000 words, from Open Window Press.