Why Smart People Hurt
A Guide for the Bright, the Sensitive, and the Creative (Creative Thinking & Positive Thinking Book, Mastering Creative Anxiety)
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- $12.99
Publisher Description
Make Your Gifted Life Meaningful
"This book will make a smart person even smarter." ―Dr. Katharine Brooks, You Majored in What? Mapping Your Path from Chaos to Career
#1 Bestseller in Counseling & Psychology, Attention-Deficit Disorder, and Mood Disorders
Overcome your unique challenges. The challenges smart and creative people encounter―from scientific researchers and genius award winners to bestselling novelists, Broadway actors, high-powered attorneys, and academics―often include anxiety, overthinking, mania, sadness, and despair. In Why Smart People Hurt, psychology specialist and creativity coach Dr. Eric Maisel draws on his many years of work with the best and the brightest to pinpoint these often devastating challenges and offer solutions based on the groundbreaking principles and practices of natural psychology.
Find meaningful success. Do you understand what meaning is, what it isn’t, and how to create it? Do you know how to organize your day around meaning investments and meaning opportunities? Are you still searching for meaning after all these years? Many smart people struggle with reaching for or maintaining success because, after all of the work they put into attaining it, it still seems meaningless. In Why Smart people Hurt, Dr. Maisel teaches you how to stop searching for meaning and create it for yourself.
In Why Smart People Hurt, you will find:
You are not alone in your struggles with living in a world that wasn't built for you or your intelligenceLogic- and creativity-based strategies to cope with having a brain that goes into overdrive at the drop of a hatQuestions that help you create your own personal roadmap to a calm and meaningful life
Readers of true, natural self-help books for gifted people struggling with life, anxiety, and depression, like Living With Intensity, Misdiagnosis and Dual Diagnoses of Gifted Children and Adults, or Your Rainforest Mind, will learn how to create meaning in their lives with Why Smart People Hurt.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
In his newest book on creativity, Maisel (Making Your Creative Mark), a psychotherapist, expounds on the idea of natural psychology, which holds that the key to a satisfying existence lies in making meaning, a self-defined, self-manifested psychological experience. Accordingly, he views problems such as mania, depression, insomnia, and the behavior of Kafka's "hunger artist" not as psychiatric maladies but as natural consequences of the limited human mind interacting with a complex environment. And smart people, Maisel argues, are especially prone to these kinds of issues their brains are wont to race without an off switch, grind away at difficult problems, create rigorous mental systems to maintain self-control, and become intensely occupied with finding meaning. In other words, smart people are very good at stressing themselves out. To combat the negative effects of these mental exertions, Maisel recommends practicing "brain awareness" (an understanding of the limitations of the mind) and gathering the courage to "stand up," make decisions about what is meaningful for you, and focus your thinking only on what serves that decision-making process. Of course, the intended audience for this book smart people will immediately grasp how reductively simplistic and vague this advice is.
