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4.02 AVERAGE
4.02 AVERAGE
challenging
informative
reflective
medium-paced
emotional
funny
hopeful
informative
inspiring
reflective
medium-paced
The perfect book for a cynic like me, even though I prefer to think of myself as a realist in that regard. Stoicism, Buddhism, mindfulness and a bunch of other things I found worked amongst the plethora of useless advice all make their appearance here, to no great surprise. As the author writes, it is simple, but not easy, and we seem to confuse those words. It all boils down to acceptance, because we really can't control everything, and it is in trying to do so that we make ourselves so miserable.
Trying to think about death, trying to observe that thinking.
reflective
slow-paced
Life, Liberty and the pursuit of Happiness are, apparently "unalienable rights". No, I'm not going to blame the Americans for the whole self-help industry! A quick check on Wikipedia shows that the 1776 definition of happiness was "prosperity, thriving, wellbeing".
No, this "not really a self help book" self help book basically sets out the case that being happy all the time is probably not a good thing and a little bit more expectation management leads to a more stable outlook.
Useful advice, especially in the era of carefully curated and fake virtual personae?
No, this "not really a self help book" self help book basically sets out the case that being happy all the time is probably not a good thing and a little bit more expectation management leads to a more stable outlook.
Useful advice, especially in the era of carefully curated and fake virtual personae?
challenging
dark
reflective
medium-paced
hopeful
informative
inspiring
reflective
medium-paced
I'm not generally one for self-help books, but the title of this one really caught my eye. I wouldn't actually call this self-help so much as a psychological and philosophical look at why so many themes in that genre tend to fail those who seek them out. Arrange into theme chapters, the book covers everything from positive thinking to goal setting to the self to death. Reading it was actually pretty freeing. It articulated so many of the things that I felt about those topics - things that I've often been made to feel are wrong because they go against what people want to believe about happiness, success, and how to achieve them.
REALLY enjoyed this one.
Here are my favorite clips:
And in those situations, motivational advice risks making things worse, by surreptitiously strengthening your belief that you need to feel motivated before you can act.
The problem is that feeling like acting and actually acting are two different things.
Schemes and plans for making things better fuel our dissatisfaction with the only place where happiness can ever be found – the present.
Helping other people is a far more reliable strategy for happiness than focusing solely on yourself.
Turns out to be an awkward truth about psychology that people who find themselves in what the rest of us might consider conditions of extreme insecurity – such as severe poverty – discover insights into happiness from which the rest of us could stand to learn.
Seeing a television report of a terrorist attack on foreign soil, you might abandon plans for an overseas holiday, in order to hang on to your feeling of safety – when, in truth, spending too much time sitting on the sofa watching television might pose a far greater threat to your survival.
Real happiness might be dependent on being willing to face, and to tolerate, insecurity and vulnerability.
We too often make our goals into parts of our identities, so that failure becomes an attack on who we are.
Perfectionism, at bottom, is a fear-driven striving to avoid the experience of failure at all costs.
(There is a greater correlation between perfectionism and suicide, research suggests, than between feelings of hopelessness and suicide.)
Next time you flunk an exam or mishandle a social situation, consider that it is happening only because you’re pushing at the limits of your present abilities – and therefore, over the long run, improving them.
Again and again, we have seen how merely not wanting to think certain thoughts or to feel certain emotions isn’t sufficient to eliminate them. That’s why nobody ever wins Daniel Wegner’s ‘white bear challenge’, why self-help affirmations often make people feel worse, and why confronting worst-case scenarios is almost always preferable to trying to pretend they couldn’t happen.
Sometimes the most valuable of all talents is to be able not to seek resolution; to notice the craving for completeness or certainty or comfort, and not to feel compelled to follow where it leads.
The psychologist Russ Harris suggests a simple exercise: imagine you are eighty years old – assuming you’re not eighty already, that is; if you are, you’ll have to pick an older age – and then complete the sentences ‘I wish I’d spent more time on…’ and ‘I wish I’d spent less time on…’. This
The problem is that we have developed the habit of chronically overvaluing positivity and the skills of ‘doing’ in how we think about happiness, and that we chronically undervalue negativity and the ‘not-doing’ skills, such as resting in uncertainty or getting friendly towards failure.
To use an old cliché of therapy-speak, we spend too much of our lives seeking ‘closure’.
For the Buddhists, a willingness to observe the ‘inner weather’ of your thoughts and emotions is the key to understanding that they need not dictate your actions.
Here are my favorite clips:
And in those situations, motivational advice risks making things worse, by surreptitiously strengthening your belief that you need to feel motivated before you can act.
The problem is that feeling like acting and actually acting are two different things.
Schemes and plans for making things better fuel our dissatisfaction with the only place where happiness can ever be found – the present.
Helping other people is a far more reliable strategy for happiness than focusing solely on yourself.
Turns out to be an awkward truth about psychology that people who find themselves in what the rest of us might consider conditions of extreme insecurity – such as severe poverty – discover insights into happiness from which the rest of us could stand to learn.
Seeing a television report of a terrorist attack on foreign soil, you might abandon plans for an overseas holiday, in order to hang on to your feeling of safety – when, in truth, spending too much time sitting on the sofa watching television might pose a far greater threat to your survival.
Real happiness might be dependent on being willing to face, and to tolerate, insecurity and vulnerability.
We too often make our goals into parts of our identities, so that failure becomes an attack on who we are.
Perfectionism, at bottom, is a fear-driven striving to avoid the experience of failure at all costs.
(There is a greater correlation between perfectionism and suicide, research suggests, than between feelings of hopelessness and suicide.)
Next time you flunk an exam or mishandle a social situation, consider that it is happening only because you’re pushing at the limits of your present abilities – and therefore, over the long run, improving them.
Again and again, we have seen how merely not wanting to think certain thoughts or to feel certain emotions isn’t sufficient to eliminate them. That’s why nobody ever wins Daniel Wegner’s ‘white bear challenge’, why self-help affirmations often make people feel worse, and why confronting worst-case scenarios is almost always preferable to trying to pretend they couldn’t happen.
Sometimes the most valuable of all talents is to be able not to seek resolution; to notice the craving for completeness or certainty or comfort, and not to feel compelled to follow where it leads.
The psychologist Russ Harris suggests a simple exercise: imagine you are eighty years old – assuming you’re not eighty already, that is; if you are, you’ll have to pick an older age – and then complete the sentences ‘I wish I’d spent more time on…’ and ‘I wish I’d spent less time on…’. This
The problem is that we have developed the habit of chronically overvaluing positivity and the skills of ‘doing’ in how we think about happiness, and that we chronically undervalue negativity and the ‘not-doing’ skills, such as resting in uncertainty or getting friendly towards failure.
To use an old cliché of therapy-speak, we spend too much of our lives seeking ‘closure’.
For the Buddhists, a willingness to observe the ‘inner weather’ of your thoughts and emotions is the key to understanding that they need not dictate your actions.