Showing results by publisher "Fourth Estate" in Psychology & Mental Health

So many of us feel stressed in our daily lives but lack the ability to respond to life’s hurdles effectively and overcome these challenges. We can build resilience to stress by taking action to live our lives in a more meaningful way. The answer is to become stressilient. Dr Sam Akbar will show you how. As a clinical psychologist with over 10 years of experience, Dr Sam draws from her own professional expertise to provide sensitive and realistic guidance to feel calmer, less stressed and more resilient to life’s challenges.

Helen Russell is an expert on the pursuit of happiness. In How to Be Sad, she combines her powerful personal story with surprising research and warm advice to reveal the secret of finding joy: allowing sadness to enrich your life and relationships. Timely and essential, this book is about how we can better look after ourselves and each other, simply by getting smarter about sadness.

From fake news to conspiracy theories, from pandemics to politics, misinformation may be the defining problem of our era. Like a virus, misinformation infects our minds – altering our beliefs and replicating at astonishing rates. Once the virus takes hold, our primary strategies of fact-checking and debunking are an insufficient cure. In Foolproof Sander van der Linden describes how to inoculate yourself and others against the spread of misinformation, discern fact from fiction and push back against methods of mass persuasion.

As long as she can remember, Maria Konnikova has been fascinated by the tension between luck and skill. But nothing could prepare Konnikova for the string of bad luck that befell her in 2015, when, in quick succession, she was diagnosed with a painful auto-immune disease, her beloved grandmother died in a tragic accident and unexpected layoffs for her mother and husband left the family in financial disarray.

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. In A Human History of Emotion, Richard Firth-Godbehere takes listeners 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.

Clinical psychology Dr Meg Jay sounds the alarm about a problem which has reached epidemic proportions: the over-prescription of antidepressants and anti-anxiety drugs to young people who are in many cases going through normal developmental challenges. Psychologist, Dr Meg Jay makes the point that our twenties are the most challenging time of life and why over-medicating isn’t the answer to the mental health problems facing young people. She goes onto advise how young people can develop the skills needed to navigate work, love, friendship, mental health, and more during that decade and beyond.

From Hadley Freeman, the bestselling author of House of Glass, comes her searing and powerful memoir about mental ill health and her experience with anorexia. This is how the Anorexia Speak worked in my head: ‘Boys like girls with curves on them’ – If you ever eat anything you will be mauled by thuggish boys with giant paws for hands. ‘Don’t you get hungry?’ – You are so strong and special, and I envy your strength and specialness. ‘Have you tried swimming? I find that really improves my appetite’ – You need to do more exercise.

Society tells that us that being shy is a fault, but Annie Ridout says it’s a gift. Shy: How Being Quiet Can Lead to Success teaches us how to embrace this misjudged attribute, instead of trying to fix it. Most of us have some understanding of shyness. From birthday parties as children to office Christmas parties as adults, from an old friend’s wedding to a group presentation, we’ve all experienced it in some form or other. Shyness may be ever-present or it may come and go.

What does it mean to be lucky? How might we mitigate the effects of bad luck and maximise those of good? Is there actually such a thing as ‘luck’—some force that intervenes between desire and its consummation, that impedes or hastens it? To answer these questions, David Flusfeder sets out on a search for the definition of luck.

In all animals, mating is a deal. But few creatures behave as if sex is a simple transaction. Many treat it with reverence, suspicion, angst and violence. In the case of the Black Grouse, the bird at the center of Matt Ridley’s investigation, the males dance and sing for hours a day, for several exhausting months, in an exhausting and sometimes deadly ritual called a ‘lek’. To prepare for the ordeal, they grow, preen and display fancy, twisted, bold-colored feathers.

“There is no good way to state these facts, which must be acknowledged. My husband and I had two children and lost them both: Vincent in 2017, at sixteen, James in 2024, at nineteen. Both chose suicide, and both died not far from home.” There is no good way to say this—because words fall short. It takes only an instant for death to become fact, “a single point in a timeline.” Living now on this single point, Li turns to thinking and reasoning and searching for words that might hold a place for James.

Comedian Sofie Hagen shares how she removed fatphobic influences from her daily life and found self-acceptance in a world where judgment and discrimination are rife. From shame and sex to airplane seats, love and getting stuck in public toilets, Sofie provides practical tips for listeners, drawing wisdom from other Fat Liberation champions along the way. Part memoir, part social commentary, Happy Fat is a funny, angry and impassioned look at how taking up space in a culture that is desperate to reduce you can be radical, emboldening and life-changing.