Social: Why Our Brains Are Wired to Connect


Matthew D. Lieberman - 2013
    It is believed that we must commit 10,000 hours to master a skill.  According to Lieberman, each of us has spent 10,000 hours learning to make sense of people and groups by the time we are ten.  Social argues that our need to reach out to and connect with others is a primary driver behind our behavior.  We believe that pain and pleasure alone guide our actions.  Yet, new research using fMRI – including a great deal of original research conducted by Lieberman and his UCLA lab -- shows that our brains react to social pain and pleasure in much the same way as they do to physical pain and pleasure.  Fortunately, the brain has evolved sophisticated mechanisms for securing our place in the social world.  We have a unique ability to read other people’s minds, to figure out their hopes, fears, and motivations, allowing us to effectively coordinate our lives with one another.  And our most private sense of who we are is intimately linked to the important people and groups in our lives.  This wiring often leads us to restrain our selfish impulses for the greater good.  These mechanisms lead to behavior that might seem irrational, but is really just the result of our deep social wiring and necessary for our success as a species.   Based on the latest cutting edge research, the findings in Social have important real-world implications.  Our schools and businesses, for example, attempt to minimalize social distractions.  But this is exactly the wrong thing to do to encourage engagement and learning, and literally shuts down the social brain, leaving powerful neuro-cognitive resources untapped.  The insights revealed in this pioneering book suggest ways to improve learning in schools, make the workplace more productive, and improve our overall well-being.

How to Win Every Argument: The Use and Abuse of Logic


Madsen Pirie - 2006
    Each entry deals with one fallacy, explaining what the fallacy is, giving and analysing an example, outlining when/where/why the particular fallacy tends to occur and finally showing how you can perpetrate the fallacy on other people in order to win an argument. Originally published to great acclaim in 1985 as "The Book of Fallacy", this is a classic brought up-to-date for a whole new generation.

The Cow in the Parking Lot: A Zen Approach to Overcoming Anger


Leonard Scheff - 2008
    Domestic violence. Professionally angry TV and radio commentators. We’re a society that is swimming in anger, always about to snap. Leonard Scheff, a trial attorney, once used anger to fuel his court persona, until he came to realize just how poisonous anger is. That and his intense study of Buddhism and meditation changed him. His transformation can be summarized in a simple parable: Imagine you are circling a crowded parking lot when, just as you spot a space, another driver races ahead and takes it. Easy to imagine the rage. But now imagine that instead of another driver, a cow has lumbered into that parking space and settled down. The anger dissolves into bemusement. What really changed? You—your perspective.Using simple Buddhist principles and applying them in a way that is easy for non-Buddhists to understand and put into practice, Scheff and Edmiston have created an interactive book that helps readers change perspective, step by step, so that they can replace the anger in their lives with a newfound happiness. Based on the successful anger management program Scheff created, The Cow in the Parking Lot shows how anger is based on unmet demands, and introduces the four most common types—Important and Reasonable (you want love from your partner); Reasonable but Unimportant (you didn’t get that seat in the restaurant window); Irrational (you want respect from a stranger); and the Impossible (you want someone to fix everything wrong in your life).Scheff and Edmiston show how, once we identify our real unmet demands we can dissolve the anger; how, once we understand our "buttons," we can change what happens when they’re pushed. He shows how to laugh at ourselves—a powerful early step in changing angry behavior. By the end, as the reader continues to observe and fill in the exercises honestly, it won’t matter who takes that parking space—only you can make yourself angry.

Daily Habit Makeover: Beat Procrastination, Get More Productive, Focus Better, and Become Healthier in Body and Mind (Daily Habit Series Book 1)


Zoe McKey - 2019
    Learn to identify, prioritize, and focus on your most important tasks and get them done. Unlearn bad habits and build powerful, helpful ones. - Learn various ways to increase productivity in your life, - Easily learnable and executable solutions that will make your day more organized and focused, - Why is willpower your enemy when it comes to changes, - Two valuable philosophies to help you maintain your habit changes for the long haul. Living as our best selves depends on our day-to-day habits; the small everyday activities we aren’t always conscious about. Daily Habit Makeover will teach you how to adopt tailor made habits to your lifestyle. Optimize your life: become more productive and less stressed. - Acknowledge and start acting against procrastination, - Learn 5+ scientifically proven ways to increase focus, - Quick methods to rank the importance of your tasks, - Why multitasking sabotages you and better alternatives. Control your habits, own your life. - Finish what you start – every time, - The best habits of three world leaders to enhance motivation, - 15+ signs that help you prevent procrastination, - 50 small, quickly applicable strategies to build a better life today, - The best apps and programs that help you stay productive. Daily Habit Makeover helps you reach your maximal productivity and greatest potential by teaching you how to think in a system that excludes procrastination. Know how to identify your most important tasks following a simple mathematical formula and stay disciplined to build productivity habits. Never feel the numbing pressure of unfinished tasks and threatening deadlines again. Don’t sweat over calling your boss to ask deadline extension. Never again be the excuse maker who can’t divide his time well. Be the most productive version of yourself.

Come as You Are: The Surprising New Science that Will Transform Your Sex Life


Emily Nagoski - 2015
    So where is it? Well, for reasons this book makes crystal clear, that pill will never exist—but as a result of the research that’s gone into it, scientists in the last few years have learned more about how women’s sexuality works than we ever thought possible, and Come as You Are explains it all.The first lesson in this essential, transformative book by Dr. Emily Nagoski is that every woman has her own unique sexuality, like a fingerprint, and that women vary more than men in our anatomy, our sexual response mechanisms, and the way our bodies respond to the sexual world. So we never need to judge ourselves based on others’ experiences. Because women vary, and that’s normal.Second lesson: sex happens in a context. And all the complications of everyday life influence the context surrounding a woman’s arousal, desire, and orgasm. Cutting-edge research across multiple disciplines tells us that the most important factor for women in creating and sustaining a fulfilling sex life, is not what you do in bed or how you do it, but how you feel about it. Which means that stress, mood, trust, and body image are not peripheral factors in a woman’s sexual wellbeing; they are central to it. Once you understand these factors, and how to influence them, you can create for yourself better sex and more profound pleasure than you ever thought possible.And Emily Nagoski can prove it.

The Best Advice I Ever Got on Marriage: Transforming Insights from Respected Husbands and Wives


Jim Daly - 2012
    The names of these husbands and wives, like their experiences, will be familiar to anyone who's ever said 'I do.' But the transforming advice these couples received when they needed it most is what will motivate newlyweds as well as golden-years couples to strengthen their ties and keep their lifelong bond growing.

How to Do the Work: Recognize Your Patterns, Heal from Your Past, and Create Your Self


Nicole LePera - 2021
    Nicole LePera often found herself frustrated by the limitations of traditional psychotherapy. Wanting more for her patients—and for herself—she began a journey to develop a united philosophy of mental, physical and spiritual wellness that equips people with the interdisciplinary tools necessary to heal themselves. After experiencing the life-changing results herself, she began to share what she’d learned with others—and soon “The Holistic Psychologist” was born.Now, Dr. LePera is ready to share her much-requested protocol with the world. In How to Do the Work, she offers both a manifesto for SelfHealing as well as an essential guide to creating a more vibrant, authentic, and joyful life. Drawing on the latest research from a diversity of scientific fields and healing modalities, Dr. LePera helps us recognize how adverse experiences and trauma in childhood live with us, resulting in whole body dysfunction—activating harmful stress responses that keep us stuck engaging in patterns of codependency, emotional immaturity, and trauma bonds. Unless addressed, these self-sabotaging behaviors can quickly become cyclical, leaving people feeling unhappy, unfulfilled, and unwell.

The Social Animal: The Hidden Sources of Love, Character, and Achievement


David Brooks - 2011
    Now, with the intellectual curiosity and emotional wisdom that make his columns among the most read in the nation, Brooks turns to the building blocks of human flourishing in a multilayered, profoundly illuminating work grounded in everyday life.This is the story of how success happens. It is told through the lives of one composite American couple, Harold and Erica—how they grow, push forward, are pulled back, fail, and succeed. Distilling a vast array of information into these two vividly realized characters, Brooks illustrates a fundamental new understanding of human nature. A scientific revolution has occurred—we have learned more about the human brain in the last thirty years than we had in the previous three thousand. The unconscious mind, it turns out, is most of the mind—not a dark, vestigial place but a creative and enchanted one, where most of the brain’s work gets done. This is the realm of emotions, intuitions, biases, longings, genetic predispositions, personality traits, and social norms: the realm where character is formed and where our most important life decisions are made. The natural habitat of The Social Animal. Drawing on a wealth of current research from numerous disciplines, Brooks takes Harold and Erica from infancy to school; from the “odyssey years” that have come to define young adulthood to the high walls of poverty; from the nature of attachment, love, and commitment, to the nature of effective leadership. He reveals the deeply social aspect of our very minds and exposes the bias in modern culture that overemphasizes rationalism, individualism, and IQ. Along the way, he demolishes conventional definitions of success while looking toward a culture based on trust and humility.The Social Animal is a moving and nuanced intellectual adventure, a story of achievement and a defense of progress. Impossible to put down, it is an essential book for our time, one that will have broad social impact and will change the way we see ourselves and the world.

Coping with Difficult People


Robert M. Bramson - 2012
    Robert Bramson's  proven-effective techniques are guaranteed to help  you right the balance and take charge of your  life. Learn how to: Stand up to anyone --  without fighting. Blunt a sniper's  attack. Get a clam to talk. Cut off a  Sherman tank at the pass. Manage  bulldozers. Get stallers off the dime.  Move a complainer into a problem-solving  mode. Learn the six basic steps that allow you to  cope with just about anyone. Reclaim the power  the rightfully belongs to you in any relationship!

Born for Love: Why Empathy Is Essential--and Endangered


Bruce D. Perry - 2009
    Perry and award-winning science journalist Maia Szalavitz interweave research and stories from Perry's practice with cutting-edge scientific studies and historical examples to explain how empathy develops, why it is essential for our development into healthy adults, and how it is threatened in the modern world.Perry and Szalavitz show that compassion underlies the qualities that make society work—trust, altruism, collaboration, love, charity—and how difficulties related to empathy are key factors in social problems such as war, crime, racism, and mental illness. Even physical health, from infectious diseases to heart attacks, is deeply affected by our human connections to one another.As Born for Love reveals, recent changes in technology, child-rearing practices, education, and lifestyles are starting to rob children of necessary human contact and deep relationships—the essential foundation for empathy and a caring, healthy society. Sounding an important warning bell, Born for Love offers practical ideas for combating the negative influences of modern life and fostering positive social change to benefit us all.

Will I Ever Be Good Enough? Healing the Daughters of Narcissistic Mothers


Karyl McBride - 2008
    The first book for the millions of daughters suffering from the emotional abuse of selfish, self-involved mothers, Will I Ever Be Good Enough? provides the expert advice readers need to overcome debilitating histories and reclaim their lives.

The Book You Wish Your Parents Had Read (and Your Children Will Be Glad That You Did)


Philippa Perry - 2019
    Yet for so many families, these relationships go can wrong and it may be difficult to get back on track. In The Book You Wish Your Parents Had Read (and Your Children Will Be Glad that You Did), renowned psychotherapist Philippa Perry shows how strong and loving bonds are made with your children and how such attachments give a better chance of good mental health, in childhood and beyond.She'll help you to:- Understand how your own upbringing may be impacting upon your parenting style- Contain, express, accept and validate your own and your child's feelings- Understand that all behaviour is communication- Break negative cycles and patterns- Accept that you will make mistakes and what to do about themAlmost every parent loves their children, but by following the refreshing, sage and sane advice and steps in this book you will also find yourselves liking one another too.

Why We Make Mistakes: How We Look Without Seeing, Forget Things in Seconds, and Are All Pretty Sure We Are Way Above Average


Joseph T. Hallinan - 2009
    Our eyes play tricks on us; our stories change in the retelling; and most of us are fairly sure we’re way above average. In Why We Make Mistakes, journalist Joseph T. Hallinan sets out to explore the science of human error—how we think, see, remember, and forget, and how this sets us up for wholly irresistible mistakes.In his quest to understand our imperfections, Hallinan delves into psychology, neuroscience, and economics, with forays into aviation, consumer behavior, geography, football, stock picking, and more. He discovers that some of the same qualities that make us efficient also make us error prone. Why We Make Mistakes is enlivened by real-life stories--of weathermen whose predictions are uncannily accurate and a witness who sent an innocent man to jail--and offers valuable advice, such as how to remember where you’ve hidden something important. He explains why multitasking is a bad idea, why men make errors women don’t. This book will open your eyes to the reasons behind your mistakes and have you vowing to do better the next time.

How to F*ck a Woman


Ali Adler - 2015
    As a gay woman, she has both the equipment and the experience to give straight men (and the women who love them) advice on both how to get more sex and how to get this job done right. In her day job as a comedy writer and TV producer, Ali is sometimes the only woman in a room full of comedy writers. She became legendary for offering frank, sometimes insightful, often bossy reality checks and for translating female sexuality into words a man could understand. In her book, How to F*ck a Woman -- 20 percent explicit instructions, 80 percent relationship advice, and 100 percent hilarious -- she brings together essential advice for men (even the ones who insist they could write this book) and the women who want their lovers to truly understand them, both mind and body. With illustrations by New Yorker cartoonist Liza Donnelly.

The Little Book of Calm: Tame Your Anxieties, Face Your Fears, and Live Free (The Little Book of Series)


Aaron Balick - 2018
    From exercises to help you put your worries into perspective, to relaxation methods for when anxiety attacks, Dr Aaron Balick shows you how to feel more at ease and sustain a sense of calm