Books on Happiness and the Darksides

This book will always hold an important place in my heart, not only is it a fascinating and mentally stimulating journey into how we confuse ourselves about happiness but it was a key step for me in diagnosing my ADD. Whilst reading about our frontal lobes purpose in plan our future, I started to realise how little of this applied to me. I seldom dwell upon the future, not next year, not next month, not even tomorrow. So I was just hoping happiness would find me, without giving it a moments thought!

Socrates would say in the squares of Athens, "The only I thing I know is that I know nothing at all". He would show the thinkers of his time that though they believed they understood what "justice, happiness and goodness" meant, their understandings were tied to personal agendas and world views, and often contradicted themselves. Tim Lebon is a therapist and chairman of the UK's Society for Philosophy in Practice. He brings ideas and thoughts of philosphy into his therapy sessions, for "those who have tried other kinds of therapy, and want something more cerebral".

In this bestseller, Bradon, a practicing psychologist, argues that self-esteem is an "indirect result" of what you do. He systematically approaches how to gradually improve your self esteem by concentrating and performing exercises on the "Six Pillars of Self-Esteem": Living Consciously, Self-Acceptance, Self-Responsibility, Self-Assertiveness, Living Purposefully and Personal Integrity. The strength of the book is the sentence-completion exercises which take about fifteen minutes a day (there are year's worth in the book).

Our Western-Medicine oriented-World sometimes leads us to believe that only the drug companies, GPs and Psychiatrists hold the keys to health. This is to deny clear evidence that different more natural forms of medicine bring benefits, whether from the past, from other parts of the World and or from alternative approaches. The book lists almost every type of therapy known to cure depression, where available Baumel sites academic research and tells us whether it's an uncontrolled or controlled study.