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Stop Overthinking: 23 Techniques to Relieve Stress, Stop Negative Spirals, Declutter Your Mind, and Focus on the Present (The Path to Calm) [Trenton, Nick] on Amazon.com. *FREE* shipping on qualifying offers. Stop Overthinking: 23 Techniques to Relieve Stress, Stop Negative Spirals, Declutter Your Mind, and Focus on the Present (The Path to Calm)

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Preeminent psychologist Lisa Barrett lays out how the brain constructs emotions in a way that could revolutionize psychology, health care, the legal system, and our understanding of the human mind. "Fascinating . . . A thought-provoking journey into emotion science."--The Wall Street Journal "A singular book, remarkable for the freshness of its ideas and the boldness and clarity with which they are presented."--Scientific American "A brilliant and original book on the science of emotion, by the deepest thinker about this topic since Darwin."--Daniel Gilbert, best-selling author of Stumbling on Happiness The science of emotion is in the midst of a revolution on par with the discovery of relativity in physics and natural selection in biology. Leading the charge is psychologist and neuroscientist Lisa Feldman Barrett, whose research overturns the long-standing belief that emotions are automatic, universal, and hardwired in different brain regions. Instead, Barrett shows, we construct each instance of emotion through a unique interplay of brain, body, and culture. A lucid report from the cutting edge of emotion science, How Emotions Are Made reveals the profound real-world consequences of this breakthrough for everything from neuroscience and medicine to the legal system and even national security, laying bare the immense implications of our latest and most intimate scientific revolution. Product DetailsISBN-13: 9781328915436 Media Type: Paperback Publisher: HarperCollins Publishers Publication Date: 03-13-2018 Pages: 448 Product Dimensions: 5.20(w) x 7.90(h) x 1.30(d)About the Author LISA FELDMAN BARRETT, PhD, is a University Distinguished Professor of Psychology at Northeastern University. She received a National Institutes of Health Director’s Pioneer Award for her groundbreaking research on emotion in the brain, and is an elected member of the Royal Society of Canada. Barrett is the author of How Emotions are Made and Seven and a Half Lessons About the Brain.Read an Excerpt Read an Excerpt 1 The Search for Emotion’s “Fingerprints”  Once upon a time, in the 1980s, I thought I would be a clinical psychologist. I headed into a Ph.D. program at the University of Waterloo, expecting to learn the tools of the trade as a psychotherapist and one day treat patients in a stylish yet tasteful office. I was going to be a consumer of science, not a producer. I certainly had no intention of joining a revolution to unseat basic beliefs about the mind that have existed since the days of Plato. But life sometimes tosses little surprises in your direction.     It was in graduate school that I felt my first tug of doubt about the classical view of emotion. At the time, I was researching the roots of low self-esteem and how it leads to anxiety or depression. Numerous experiments showed that people feel depressed when they fail to live up to their own ideals, but when they fall short of a standard set by others, they feel anxious. My first experiment in grad school was simply to replicate this well-known phenomenon before building on it to test my own hypotheses. In the course of this experiment, I asked a large number of volunteers if they felt anxious or depressed using well-established checklists of symptoms.1     I’d done more complicated experiments as an undergraduate student, so this one should have been a piece of cake. Instead, it crashed and burned. My volunteers did not report anxious or depressed feelings in the expected pattern. So I tried to replicate a second published experiment, and it failed too. I tried again, over and over, each experiment taking months. After three years, all I’d achieved was the same failure eight times in a row. In science, experiments often don’t replicate, but eight consecutive failures is an impressive record. My internal critic taunted me: not everyone is cut out to be a scientist.     When I looked closely at all the evidence I had collected, however, I noticed something consistently odd across all eight experiments. Many of my subjects appeared to be unwilling, or unable, to distinguish between feeling anxious and feeling depressed. Instead, they had indicated feeling both or neither; rarely did a subject report feeling just one. This made no sense. Everybody knows that anxiety and depression, when measured as emotions, are decidedly different. When you’re anxious, you feel worked up, jittery, like you’re worried something bad will happen. In depression you feel miserable and sluggish; everything seems horrible and life is a struggle. These emotions should leave your body in completely opposite physical states, and so they should feel different and be trivial for any healthy person to tell apart. Nevertheless, the data declared that my test subjects weren’t doing so. The question was . . . why?     As it turned out, my experiments weren’t failing after all. My first “botched” experiment actually revealed a genuine discovery ​— ​that people often did not distinguish between feeling anxious and feeling depressed. My next seven experiments hadn’t failed either; they’d replicated the first one. I also began noticing the same effect lurking in other scientists’ data. After completing my Ph.D. and becoming a university professor, I continued pursuing this mystery. I directed a lab that asked hundreds of test subjects to keep track of their emotional experiences for weeks or months as they went about their lives. My students and I inquired about a wide variety of emotional experiences, not just anxious and depressed feelings, to see if the discovery generalized.     These new experiments revealed something that had never been documented before: everyone we tested used the same emotion words like “angry,” “sad,” and “afraid” to communicate their feelings but not necessarily to mean the same thing. Some test subjects made fine distinctions with their word use: for example, they experienced sadness and fear as qualitatively different. Other subjects, however, lumped together words like “sad” and “afraid” and “anxious” and “depressed” to mean “I feel crappy” (or, more scientifically, “I feel unpleasant”). The effect was the same for pleasant emotions like happiness, calmness, and pride. After testing over seven hundred American subjects, we discovered that people vary tremendously in how they differentiate their emotional experiences.     A skilled interior designer can look at five shades of blue and distinguish azure, cobalt, ultramarine, royal blue, and cyan. My husband, on the other hand, would call them all blue. My students and I had discovered a similar phenomenon for emotions, which I described as emotional granularity.2     Here’s where the classical view of emotion entered the picture. Emotional granularity, in terms of this view, must be about accurately reading your internal emotional states. Someone who distinguished among different feelings using words like “joy,” “sadness,” “fear,” “disgust,” “excitement,” and “awe” must be detecting physical cues or reactions for each emotion and interpreting them correctly. A person exhibiting lower emotional granularity, who uses words like “anxious” and “depressed” interchangeably, must be failing to detect these cues.     I began wondering if I could teach people to improve their emotional granularity by coaching them to recognize their emotional states accurately. The key word here is “accurately.” How can a scientist tell if someone who says “I’m happy” or “I’m anxious” is accurate? Clearly, I needed some way to measure an emotion objectively and then compare it to what the person reports. If a person reports feeling anxious, and the objective criteria indicate that he is in a state of anxiety, then he is accurately detecting his own emotion. On the other hand, if the objective criteria indicate that he is depressed or angry or enthusiastic, then he’s inaccurate. With an objective test in hand, the rest would be simple. I could ask a person how she feels and compare her answer to her “real” emotional state. I could correct any of her apparent mistakes by teaching her to better recognize the cues that distinguish one emotion from another and improve her emotional granularity.     Like most students of psychology, I had read that each emotion is supposed to have a distinct pattern of physical changes, roughly like a fingerprint. Each time you grasp a doorknob, the fingerprints that you leave behind may vary depending on the firmness of your grip, how slippery the surface is, or how warm and pliable your skin is at that moment. Nevertheless, your fingerprints look similar enough each time to identify you uniquely. The “fingerprint” of an emotion is likewise assumed to be similar enough from one instance to the next, and in one person to the next, regardless of age, sex, personality, or culture. In a laboratory, scientists should be able to tell whether someone is sad or happy or anxious just by looking at physical measurements of a person’s face, body, and brain.     I felt confident that these emotion fingerprints could provide the objective criteria I needed to measure emotion. If the scientific literature was correct, then assessing people’s emotional accuracy would be a breeze. But things did not turn out quite as I expected. Show More Table of Contents Table of Contents Introduction: The Two-Thousand-Year-Old Assumption ix 1 The Search for Emotion's "Fingerprints" 1 2 Emotions Are Constructed 25 3 The Myth of Universal Emotions 42 4 The Origin of Feeling 56 5 Concepts, Goals, and Words 84 6 How the Brain Makes Emotions 112 7 Emotions as Social Reality 128 8 A New View of Human Nature 152 9 Mastering Your Emotions 175 10 Emotion and Illness 199 11 Emotion and the Law 219 12 Is a Growling Dog Angry? 252 13 From Brain to Mind: The New Frontier 278 Acknowledgments 293 Appendix A Brain Basics 302 Appendix B Supplement for Chapter 2 307 Appendix C Supplement for Chapter 3 309 Appendix D Evidence for the Concept Cascade 311 Bibliograp

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This week’s Top Ten Tuesday topic is "ten books from ____ genre I recently added to my to-be-read list." I’m filling in the blank with “disturbing nonfiction.” Unfortunately, you won’t find a shelf labeled Disturbing Nonfiction in a bookstore, but in my world, it’s totally a genre. My Disturbing To-Be-Read Pile The Psychopath Test: A Journey through the Madness Industry by Jon Ronson When Jon Ronson is drawn into an elaborate hoax played on some of the world's top scientists, his investigation leads him, unexpectedly, to psychopaths. He meets an influential psychologist who is convinced that many important business leaders and politicians are in fact high-flying, high-functioning psychopaths, and teaches Ronson how to spot them. Armed with these new abilities, Ronson meets a patient inside an asylum for the criminally insane who insists that he's sane, a mere run-of-the-mill troubled youth, not a psychopath—a claim that might be only manipulation, and a sign of his psychopathy. He spends time with a death-squad leader institutionalized for mortgage fraud, and a legendary CEO who took joy in shutting down factories and firing people. He delves into the fascinating history of psychopathy diagnosis and treatments, from LSD-fueled days-long naked therapy sessions in prisons to attempts to understand serial killers. Buy it on Amazon Buy it on Book Depository Cannibalism: A Perfectly Natural History by Bill Schutt Eating one’s own kind is completely natural behavior in thousands of species, including humans. Throughout history we have engaged in cannibalism for reasons of famine, burial rites, and medicinal remedies; it’s been used as a way to terrorize and even a way to show filial piety. With unexpected wit and a wealth of knowledge, American Museum of Natural History biologist Bill Schutt takes us on a tour of the field, dissecting exciting new research and investigating questions such as why so many fish eat their offspring and some amphibians consume their mother’s skin; why sexual cannibalism is an evolutionary advantage for certain spiders; why, until the end of the eighteenth century, British royalty ate human body parts; how cannibalism may be linked to the extinction of Neanderthals; why microbes on sacramental bread may have led Catholics to execute Jews in the Middle Ages. Buy it on Amazon Buy it on Book Depository The Indifferent Stars Above: The Harrowing Saga of a Donner Party Bride by Daniel James Brown In April of 1846, twenty-one-year-old Sarah Graves, intent on a better future, set out west from Illinois with her new husband, her parents, and eight siblings. Seven months later, after joining a party of emigrants led by George Donner, they reached the Sierra Nevada Mountains as the first heavy snows of the season closed the pass ahead of them. In early December, starving and desperate, Sarah and fourteen others set out for California on snowshoes and, over the next thirty-two days, endured almost unfathomable hardships and horrors. Buy it on Amazon Buy it on Book Depository They Called Themselves the KKK: The Birth of an American Terrorist Group by Susan Campbell Bartoletti "Boys, let us get up a club." With those words, six restless young men raided the linens at a friend’s mansion in 1866. They pulled white sheets over their heads, hopped on horses, and cavorted through the streets of Pulaski, Tennessee. Soon, the six friends named their club the Ku Klux Klan and began patterning their initiations after fraternity rites, with passwords and mysterious handshakes. 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Buy it on Amazon Buy it on Book Depository Blood at the Root: A Racial Cleansing in America by Patrick Phillips Forsyth County, Georgia, at the turn of the twentieth century was home to a large African American community that included ministers and teachers, farmers and field hands, tradesmen, servants, and children. Many black residents were poor sharecroppers, but others owned their own farms and the land on which they’d founded the county’s thriving black churches. But then in September of 1912, three young black laborers were accused of raping and murdering a white girl. One man was dragged from a jail cell and lynched on the town square, two teenagers were hung after a one-day trial, and soon bands of white “night riders” launched a coordinated campaign of arson and terror, driving all 1,098 black citizens out of the county. In the wake of the expulsions, whites harvested the crops and took over the livestock of their former neighbors, and quietly laid claim to “abandoned” land. The charred ruins of homes and churches disappeared into the weeds, until the people and places of black Forsyth were forgotten. Buy it on Amazon Buy it on Book Depository Royalty’s Strangest Characters: Extraordinary but True Tales from 2000 Years of Mad Monarchs and Raving Rulers by Geoff Tiballs Just as the monarchy has been hereditary in many countries, so insanity has been hereditary in many monarchs. Here are 2,000 years of crazy kings and potty potentates, including such infamous characters as Caligula and Vlad the Impaler. Buy it on Amazon Buy it on Book Depository The Ghost Map: The Story of London’s Most Terrifying Epidemic—and How It Changed Science, Cities, and the Modern World by Steven Johnson It's the summer of 1854, and London is just emerging as one of the first modern cities in the world. 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In this landmark work, V. S. Ramachandran investigates strange, unforgettable cases--from patients who believe they are dead to sufferers of phantom limb syndrome. With a storyteller's eye for compelling case studies and a researcher's flair for new approaches to age-old questions, Ramachandran tackles the most exciting and controversial topics in brain science, including language, creativity, and consciousness.

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A sweeping exploration of the ways in which emotions shaped the course of human history, and how our experience and understanding of emotions have evolved along with us. "Eye-opening and thought-provoking!" (Gina Rippon, author of The Gendered Brain ) We humans like to think of ourselves as rational creatures, who, as a species, have relied on calculation and intellect to survive. But many of the most important moments in our history had little to do with cold, hard facts and a lot to do with feelings. Events ranging from the origins of philosophy to the birth of the world's major religions, the fall of Rome, the Scientific Revolution, and some of the bloodiest wars that humanity has ever experienced can't be properly understood without understanding emotions. Drawing on psychology, neuroscience, philosophy, art, and religious history, Richard Firth-Godbehere takes readers on a fascinating and wide ranging tour of the central and often under-appreciated role emotions have played in human societies around the world and throughout history--from Ancient Greece to Gambia, Japan, the Ottoman Empire, the United States, and beyond. A Human History of Emotion vividly illustrates how our understanding and experience of emotions has changed over time, and how our beliefs about feelings--and our feelings themselves--profoundly shaped us and the world we inhabit. Title: A Human History of Emotion: How the Way We Feel Built the World We Know (Hardcover) Author: Firth-Godbehere, Richard Publisher: Little Brown and Company Date Published: Hardcover – 1 Jan. 1900 Category: Psychology Subject: Emotions Binding: Hardcover Reading Age: Books for Adults No. Of Pages: 336 pages Language: English ISBN-13: 978-0316461313 Amazon Price: £28.00