Drawing upon their years of counseling experience, the bestselling author team of Martha and William Pieper explain how parenting styles based on discipline and excessive expectations condition children to equate unhappiness with love. This often persists into adulthood, leading to behaviors including eating disorders, compulsive gambling, disastrous romantic choices, substance abuse, and more. This book supplies readers with powerful tools, including self-assessments, checklists, diaries, and exercises, to overcome their need for unhappiness.
The author examines the various ways in which codependents "set themselves up" for misery. Through the use of worksheets and self-help experiments, he provides detailed guidelines on recovery.
"Explores how industry has manipulated our most deep-seated survival instincts."—David Perlmutter, MD, Author, #1 New York Times bestseller, Grain Brain and Brain Maker The New York Times–bestselling author of Fat Chance reveals the corporate scheme to sell pleasure, driving the international epidemic of addiction, depression, and chronic disease. While researching the toxic and addictive properties of sugar for his New York Times bestseller Fat Chance, Robert Lustig made an alarming discovery—our pursuit of happiness is being subverted by a culture of addiction and depression from which we may never recover. Dopamine is the “reward” neurotransmitter that tells our brains we want more; yet every substance or behavior that releases dopamine in the extreme leads to addiction. Serotonin is the “contentment” neurotransmitter that tells our brains we don’t need any more; yet its deficiency leads to depression. Ideally, both are in optimal supply. Yet dopamine evolved to overwhelm serotonin—because our ancestors were more likely to survive if they were constantly motivated—with the result that constant desire can chemically destroy our ability to feel happiness, while sending us down the slippery slope to addiction. In the last forty years, government legislation and subsidies have promoted ever-available temptation (sugar, drugs, social media, porn) combined with constant stress (work, home, money, Internet), with the end result of an unprecedented epidemic of addiction, anxiety, depression, and chronic disease. And with the advent of neuromarketing, corporate America has successfully imprisoned us in an endless loop of desire and consumption from which there is no obvious escape. With his customary wit and incisiveness, Lustig not only reveals the science that drives these states of mind, he points his finger directly at the corporations that helped create this mess, and the government actors who facilitated it, and he offers solutions we can all use in the pursuit of happiness, even in the face of overwhelming opposition. Always fearless and provocative, Lustig marshals a call to action, with seminal implications for our health, our well-being, and our culture.
Unrecognized needs for unhappiness are created when parenting styles based on discipline, permissiveness, neglect and/or excessive expectations condition children to equate unhappiness with love. These learned needs for unhappiness persist into adulthood and lead to maladaptive behaviors including eating disorders, compulsive gambling, disastrous romantic choices, substance abuse, problems at work, work-life balance issues, and more. Addicted to Unhappiness supplies readers with powerful tools, including self-assessments, checklists, diaries, and exercises, to overcome their needs for unhappiness.Readers will also learn how to navigate inevitable moments of backsliding without becoming discouraged.This book is an invaluable guide for all those wishing to improve the quality of their lives.
A woman's down-to-earth guide for releasing stress and reclaiming her free-spirit Stress management expert and radio personality Debbie Mandel presents her highly original program for stress reduction. She explains that women who are constantly stressed out have forgotten the dreams of the free-spirited girl living inside them before they became somebody's wife, mother, or workplace colleague. This book, the inspiring and humorous story of successful recovery from stress addiction, outlines her seven steps that have proven to help women overcome daily stressors and reclaim a life of joy and spontaneity. Explores the habit forming pressure principle of stress addiction and how to cure it Provides step-by-step program for self-empowerment, self-care, healthy narcissism, and renewing humor in a woman's relationships Explains the powerful, researched based relationship between food, exercise, and mood Contains indispensable strategies for accepting constructive conflicts with a spouse, partner, friend or colleague to get what she wants Teaches specific techniques for reducing and eliminating stress reduction Addicted to Stress shows how as the addiction to stress is cured, women find it possible to build up an immunity to outside pressure and become their true core self.
WHAT IF we have fallen in love with unhappiness? Although we all wish to be happy, many of us fall into a set pattern of failures when we find ourselves in certain circumstances. On the conscious level, we think we are earnestly seeking happiness, but unconsciously, we may be choosing the patterns of thinking and action that will eventually lead us to unhappiness. According to the author, Ryuho okawa, surprisingly 80 to 90 percent of the people have had symptoms of the "Unhappiness Syndrome" which are patterns of thinking that invite unhappiness. In this book, Okawa diagnoses the 28 common habits of the Unhappiness Syndrome and offers prescriptions for changing them so that we can cure ourselves of this syndrome. The path to happiness begins with becoming aware of the negative patterns that we fall into. Find out whether you fall into any of the 28 patterns so that you can free yourself from worries, distress, and emotional pain. With the prescriptions offered in this book, you can start to think and act in a way that attracts happiness and open a path to a positive, bright, and happy future! Common Symptoms of the Unhappiness Syndrome are: - Envying Other people's success - Struggling with weak enthusiasm - Living in constant fear of being hurt - Feeling trapped by the past - Never having enough time for yourself - Not getting along with your boss - Struggling financially - Fearing death - Constantly having family conflicts ... and more Find the cures and free yourself from unhappiness today
THE INTERNATIONAL BESTSELLER: A radically new way of thinking about depression and anxiety 'A book that could actually make us happy' SIMON AMSTELL 'This amazing book will change your life' ELTON JOHN 'One of the most important texts of recent years' BRITISH JOURNAL OF GENERAL PRACTICE 'Brilliant, stimulating, radical' MATT HAIG 'The more people read this book, the better off the world will be' NAOMI KLEIN 'Wonderful' HILLARY CLINTON 'Eye-opening' GUARDIAN 'Brilliant for anyone wanting a better understanding of mental health' ZOE BALL 'A game-changer' DAVINA MCCALL 'Extraordinary' DR MAX PEMBERTON Depression and anxiety are now at epidemic levels. Why? Across the world, scientists have uncovered evidence for nine different causes. Some are in our biology, but most are in the way we are living today. Lost Connections offers a radical new way of thinking about this crisis. It shows that once we understand the real causes, we can begin to turn to pioneering new solutions – ones that offer real hope.
