8 Books to Support Your Mental Health
Impactful approaches for working through anxiety disorders, trauma and stress
Impactful approaches for working through anxiety disorders, trauma and stress
Today, we’ve pulled together a selection of highly rated books focusing on mental health. Each read dives into topics surrounding generational trauma, anxiety and depression, self-esteem, how the food we eat affects our brain, and attachment styles along with ways to cope and work through our past wounds to find peace in daily life.
It Didn’t Start With You by Mark wolynn
This book is described as a groundbreaking approach to transforming traumatic legacies passed down in families over generations. The evidence is compelling: the roots of difficulties like depression, anxiety, chronic pain, phobias and obsessive thoughts may not reside in our immediate life experience or in chemical imbalances in our brains— but in the lives of our parents, grandparents, and even great-grandparents. The latest scientific research supports what many have long intuited: traumatic experience can be passed down through generations. It Didn't Start with You builds on the work of leading experts in post-traumatic stress, including Mount Sinai School of Medicine neuroscientist Rachel Yehuda and psychiatrist Bessel van der Kolk, author of The Body Keeps the Score. Even if the person who suffered the original trauma has died, or the story has been forgotten or silenced, memory and feelings can live on. These emotional legacies are often hidden, encoded in everything from gene expression to everyday language, and they play a far greater role in our emotional and physical health than has ever before been understood. Visualization, active imagination, and direct dialogue create pathways to reconnection, integration, and reclaiming life and health. It Didn't Start With You is a transformative approach to resolving longstanding difficulties that in many cases, traditional therapy, drugs, or other interventions have not had the capacity to touch.
The Highly Sensitive Person by Elaine N. Aron
Do you have a keen imagination and vivid dreams? Is time alone each day as essential to you as food and water? Are you “too shy” or “too sensitive” according to others? Do noise and confusion quickly overwhelm you? If your answers are yes, you may be a Highly Sensitive Person (HSP). Most of us feel overstimulated every once in a while, but for the highly sensitive person, it’s a way of life. In this groundbreaking book, Dr. Elaine Aron, a highly sensitive person herself, shows you how to identify this trait in yourself and make the most of it in everyday situations. In this book, you will discover: self-assessment tests to help you identify your particular sensitivities, ways to reframe your past experiences in a positive light and gain greater self-esteem in the process, insight into how high sensitivity affects both work and personal relationships, tips on how to deal with over-arousal, information on medications and when to seek help, plus techniques to enrich the soul and spirit.
Get Out of Your Own Way by mark goulston and phillip goldberg
Self-defeating behavior is the single most common reason that people seek psychotherapy. It is a poison, preventing us from achieving the love, success and happiness we want in our lives. And what really drives us crazy is feeling we have to change and not knowing how - or knowing how but being unable to stick with change. Get Out of Your Own Way is an antidote - it explains why we sabotage ourselves, going back to childhood origins of various behaviors. More important, it offers proven steps of action to transform behavior from self-defeating to life-enhancing. With anecdotes and usable insights drawn from twenty years of psychiatric clinical practice, Dr. Mark Goulston shares ideas that have helped thousands of patients overcome pain, fear, and confusion - to approach life's challenges with dignity, wisdom, courage, and even humor. By encouraging you to reflect upon your behavior - and providing practical steps toward change that you can work into your everyday life - Get Out of Your Own Way shows you how to stop being your own worst enemy - and become your own best friend.
Burnout: The Secret to Unlocking the Stress Cycle by Emily nagoski, PhD and amelia nagoski, DMA
This groundbreaking book explains why women experience burnout differently than men and provides a simple, science-based plan to help women minimize stress, manage emotions, and live a more joyful life. What’s expected of women and what it’s really like to be a woman in today’s world are two very different things, and women exhaust themselves trying to close the gap between them. How can you “love your body” when every magazine cover has ten diet tips for becoming “your best self”? How do you “lean in” at work when you’re already operating at 110 percent and aren’t recognized for it? How can you live happily and healthily in a sexist world that is constantly telling you you’re too fat, too needy, too noisy, and too selfish? Sisters Emily Nagoski, PhD, and Amelia Nagoski, DMA, are here to help end the cycle of feeling overwhelmed and exhausted. Instead of asking us to ignore the very real obstacles and societal pressures that stand between women and well-being, they explain with compassion and optimism what we’re up against and how to approach it all.
The Mind-Gut Connection by Emeran Mayer, MD
We have all experienced the connection between our mind and our gut—the decision we made because it “felt right”; the butterflies in our stomach before a big meeting; the anxious stomach rumbling when we’re stressed out. While the dialogue between the gut and the brain has been recognized by ancient healing traditions, including Ayurvedic and Chinese medicine, Western medicine has failed to appreciate the complexity of how the brain, gut, and more recently, the microbiome—the microorganisms that live inside us—communicate with one another. In The Mind-Gut Connection, Dr. Emeran Mayer, executive director of the UCLA Center for Neurobiology of Stress, offers a revolutionary look at this developing science, teaching us how to harness the power of the mind-gut connection to take charge of our health.
maybe you should talk to someone by lori gottlieb
As Gottlieb explores the inner chambers of her patients' lives: a self-absorbed Hollywood producer, a young newlywed diagnosed with a terminal illness, a senior citizen threatening to end her life on her birthday if nothing gets better, and a twenty-something who can't stop hooking up with the wrong guys— she finds that the questions they are struggling with are the very ones she is now bringing to her own therapist. With startling wisdom and humor, Gottlieb invites us into her world as both clinician and patient, examining the truths and fictions we tell ourselves and others as we teeter on the tightrope between love and desire, meaning and mortality, guilt and redemption, terror and courage, hope and change.
Attached: The New Science of Adult Attachment and How It Can Help You Find - and Keep - Love by y Amir Levine & Rachel Heller
We already rely on science to tell us what to eat, when to exercise, and how long to sleep. Why not use science to help us improve our relationships? In this revolutionary book, psychiatrist and neuroscientist Dr. Amir Levine and Rachel Heller scientifically explain why why some people seem to navigate relationships effortlessly, while others struggle. Discover how an understanding of adult attachment—the most advanced relationship science in existence today—can help us find and sustain love. Pioneered by psychologist John Bowlby in the 1950s, the field of attachment posits that each of us behaves in relationships in one of three distinct ways: anxious people are often preoccupied with their relationships and tend to worry about their partner's ability to love them back, avoidant people equate intimacy with a loss of independence and constantly try to minimize closeness, secure people feel comfortable with intimacy and are usually warm and loving.
This is your brain on food by Uma Naidoo, md
Did you know that blueberries can help you cope with the aftereffects of trauma? That salami can cause depression, or that boosting Vitamin D intake can help treat anxiety? When it comes to diet, most people's concerns involve weight loss, fitness, cardiac health, and longevity. But what we eat affects more than our bodies; it also affects our brains. And recent studies have shown that diet can have a profound impact on mental health conditions ranging from ADHD to depression, anxiety, sleep disorders, OCD, dementia and beyond. A triple threat in the food space, Dr. Uma Naidoo is a board-certified psychiatrist, nutrition specialist, and professionally trained chef. In This Is Your Brain on Food, she draws on cutting-edge research to explain the many ways in which food contributes to our mental health, and shows how a sound diet can help treat and prevent a wide range of psychological and cognitive health issues. Packed with fascinating science, actionable nutritional recommendations, and 40 delicious, brain-healthy recipes, This Is Your Brain on Food is the go-to guide to optimizing your mental health with food.