Margin: Restoring Emotional, Physical, Financial, and Time Reserves to Overloaded Lives

Life in modern day America is essentially devoid of time and space. Not the Star Trek kind. The sanity kind. Chronic overloading is the culprit: margin is the cure.

This newly revised 2004 update of the original best-seller explains what margin is, why it is important, how it disappeared, and steps to get it back. Margin is the space between our load and our limits and is related to our reserves and resilience. It is a buffer, a leeway, a gap; the place we go to heal, to relate, to reflect, to recharge our batteries, to focus on the things that matter most.

Margin offers seventy-five practical prescriptions for restoring margin in the essential areas of emotional energy, physical energy, time, and finances. Margin restores what culture has taken away: time to listen, strength to care, space to love. 

What others are saying:
Dallas Willard: Dr. Swenson guides us into an intelligent refusal to be overwhelmed by the stress epidemic surrounding us. He presents practical guidance to help us deal with overload. His advice is indispensable for health and sanity today and opens the way for serious discipline and growth in the spiritual life.

Armand Nicholi, Jr., MD: With the experience and insight of an astute clinician, Dr. Swenson offers an abundance of thoughtful, constructive steps to overcome the pressures of contemporary life that impair our efforts to attain balance and find inner peace. Margin provides valuable suggestions to every reader interested in physical and emotional health.

Tim Kimmel: If contentment made house calls, its advice would be 'increase your reserves.' In his timely book, Dr. Swenson offers the perfect prescription for our hurried lives. Margin is a home remedy for people who've run out of time, energy, confidence, and courage.

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The Overload Syndrome: Learning to Live Within Your Limits

The Overload Syndrome is the sequel to Margin, providing additional content and prescriptions formatted in a different manner. It examines sixteen different kinds of overload (accessibility, activity & commitment, change & stress, choice & decision, debt, expectation, hurry & fatigue, information & education, media, possession, work, etc.) and provides 175 practical prescriptions for restoring margin to overloaded lives.

What others are saying:
Jay Kessler: Dr. Swenson is writing directly toward the center of modernity. The pressures of the culture are taking a toll on all that we are and do. This book will restore health, save marriages, reconcile children, prolong careers, and bring the joy of living to those who have ears to hear and the courage and will to act.

John Ortberg: Dick Swenson has a way of surfacing issues we know we should face but would rather avoid. Our pace and style of life have become insane, and his is a needed plea for sanity. If you have time to read this book, you will benefit from it immensely. If you don't have time--then you really need to read this book.

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A Minute of Margin: Restoring Balance to Busy Lives ~ 180 Daily Reflections

This 2003 case-bound book offers 180 daily reflections on the general topic of margin and life balance. Each reflection is two pages and includes a quote, reflective comment, practical prescriptions, and international proverb.

Topical index: availability, balance, boundaries, busyness, contentment, emotional health, expectations, finances, freedom, information, limits, margin, media, overload, pace, physical energy, possessions, priorities, relationships, rest, simplicity, solitude, sovereignty, stress, technology, time, waiting, and work.

What others are saying:
Gordon MacDonald: If you're always seeking (as I am) for encouragement and wisdom to say a few thoughtful yes's and a lot of gutsy no's in order to live effectively and joyfully, you're going to love A Minute of Margin.

Leith Anderson: Imagine: a minute every day to learn to improve for the rest of your life. A Minute of Margin is positive, practical wisdom to make daily life more meaningful.

Paul Meier, MD: A Minute of Margin gets us in touch with the painful truth about our chaotic, busy lives. If you're tired of living like this, you need to read this book.

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Restoring Margin to Overloaded Lives: A Workbook Based on Margin and The Overload Syndrome

This workbook and study guide, co-written by Richard A. Swenson, MD and Karen Lee-Thorp, is a complementary text to both Margin and The Overload Syndrome. It is designed for either individual or small-group use and can also function as a stand-alone volume discussing the margin/overload issues.

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More Than Meets The Eye: Fascinating Glimpses of God's Power and Design

Let the record show: both Science and Scripture reveal a God who is brilliant and wise, powerful and precise, intimate and personal. Every molecule and magnetar demonstrate a vast, rich, and beautiful creation. When we better understand the power and genius of God's creation, it helps us to rest in His sovereignty.

A 2000 Focus on the Family national broadcast based on the information in this book was their most requested tape of that year.

What others are saying:
Dr. Waylon B. Moore: A staggering book about the wonders of the universe and God's creative work in every cell of our bodies. Written in layman's language, this futurist and Professor of Medicine introduces us to both physics and Scripture in a reverent painting of God's splendor and handiwork. Each of us is a miracle of complexity, yet we are His loved children, through whom He is doing His work today.

Bob Kellemen, Ph.D.: More Than Meets the Eye offers exactly what the subtitle accurately promises: fascinating glimpses of God's power and design. Science and faith, when looked at with what Luther called "reason redeemed by grace," consistently connect to show God's handiwork, God's fingerprints, God's footprints everywhere--from the largest star to the smallest particle. This book is a fascinating glimpse for those willing to look at creation and the Creator with intellectual integrity and spiritual authenticity.

Philologos: This book will take you to the smallest known reaches of science and in the process expand your horizons exponentially. Don't be fooled into thinking scientists know everything, for the deeper they dig, the less the established laws of science apply. There are dimensions where the concept of Jesus being here, there and everywhere become relevant and what we consider possible and impossible is thrown on its ear. Properly applied, the study of physics is a gateway to the realm of the Divine and this is the book to start you on your journey.

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See also the Sovereignty DVD page of this website for information on the 2005 four-part DVD based on this book, also titled More than Meets the Eye.

Combined More than Meets the Eye book + More than Meets the Eye DVD = $45 

In Search of Balance: Keys to a Stable Life

        Release date February 1, 2010

"I've interviewed 1,200 people in the last twelve years, and nobody sees the future like Richard Swenson! Read this book. It may catch you off balance, but it will change your future!" Phyllis Wallace, host of the syndicated Woman to Woman show

Click here to read the first chapter:    www.navpress.com/images/pdfs/9781600066986.pdf

BACK COVER: Most of us live lives of “quiet desperation,” as Henry David Thoreau put it, except we’re no longer so quiet about it. When exactly did “all stress, all the time” replace the “green pastures and still waters”? And what can we do about it? We try to manage all the details thrown our way, but we lack a sense of calm and steadiness at the center. Richard A. Swenson, MD, author of the best-selling book Margin, helps us understand the dangers of living in a post-balance world and gives us hope for recovering a foundational sense of equilibrium.

Dr. Swenson offers not only important organizing principles for making sense of our lives but also scores of practical Rx’s for recovering our balance. Having worked out his principles as a physician, author, and speaker, Dr. Swenson gives advice that is grounded in the daily realities we all experience. But his wisdom has been honed by the big-picture perspective of an exhaustive study of the stresses of modern life and progress, the forces that relentlessly give us “more and more of everything faster and faster.”

Let Dr. Swenson be your gentle guide for reaching a new stage of personal balance through In Search of Balance. 

Free Discussion Guide at NavPress.com

Kerby Anderson: I have benefited from the previous books by Richard Swenson on margin and overload, so I was excited to hear about In Search of Balance. In the midst of the aggressive progress of our age, we are no longer in tune with the rhythm of God's creation. Richard Swenson warns us about profusion and provides practical help in connecting balance (equilibrium) with margin (capacity).

Patricia Katz: Thanks to Dr. Swenson for continuing to raise his voice in support of a more sane, more satisfying, more sustainable world. Overload and imbalance are neither desirable nor inevitable. Pushing back will move us forward. In Search of Balance offers both insights and strategies to take us to a better place.

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