How We Break
Navigating the Wear and Tear of Living
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- £13.99
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- £13.99
Publisher Description
‘Exhilarating… Wise and compassionate’ New Statesman
An expert, empathetic guide to the science, psychology and physiology of breaking, from the acclaimed author of How We Are
What happens when our minds and bodies are pushed beyond their limits? Vincent Deary is a health psychologist who has spent years helping his patients cope with whatever life has thrown at them. In How We Break, he has written a book for all of us who sometimes feel we have reached our breaking point.
Drawing on clinical case studies, cutting-edge scientific research, intimate personal stories and references from philosophy, literature and film, How We Break offers a consoling new vision of everyday human struggle. The big traumas in life, Deary points out, are relatively rare. More common is when too many things go wrong at once, or we are exposed to prolonged periods of difficulty or precarity. When the world shrinks to nothing but our daily coping, we become unhappy, worried, hopeless, exhausted. In other words, we break. Breaking, he shows us, happens when the same systems that enable us to navigate through life become dysregulated. But if we understand how the wear and tear of life affects us, then we have a better chance of navigating through times of burnout, stress, fatigue and despair.
By equipping us with a better understanding of what happens to us when we're struggling to cope, and making a bold case for the power of rest and recuperation, How We Break helps chart a path through difficult times.
APPLE BOOKS REVIEW
The second part of the psychologist’s ambitious How to Live trilogy is a standalone look at how our lives can veer off course. People “break” by suffering anxiety, depression, self-doubt, exhaustion—or simply getting stuck in a rut. As a practising therapist with decades of experience, Vincent Deary has treated it all. And with empathy, compassion and a lyrical turn of phrase, he explores how such struggles are a normal part of human nature. Poetic prose mixes ancient philosophy and spiritual thought with contemporary neuroscience—while quoting eclectic sources, spanning from Dune to The Walking Dead, from Terry Pratchett to RuPaul. Rich with warm wit and hard-won wisdom—Deary alludes to his own recent breakdown, as well as the troubles of his patients, ex-partner and late mother—it offers consoling, practical advice on self-acceptance and navigating through life’s low points. Ultimately uplifting, it also sets the scene perfectly for the third and final book, How We Mend.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
Deary, a professor of applied health psychology at Northumbria University, continues his How to Live trilogy (after How We Are) with a cerebral look at how people "break" amid life's "turbulence" and the ways they might traverse "its difficult straits with a little more ease." Genetics, environmental exposures, trauma, and other factors contribute to the body's allostatic load—the "wear and tear that happens when the turbulence is too much"—according to Deary, and if the system tips into "allostatic overload," body and brain can "unravel" into such ailments as insomnia, anxiety, and chronic pain. His thesis sets the stage for complex philosophical meditations on the ways humans metabolize suffering, how language's "system of categorisation" begets self-critique, the nature of the self, and the ways in which people form attachments to their pain. Deary's flexible, "dimensional" approach makes room for varied individual experience ("Our breaking, like our world, will be our own") and lays fertile ground for sensitive, analytical musings, though this looseness may frustrate those seeking direct guidance (vague questions for readers include, "how precarious are you, in your labour, in your home life, in yourself?"). Still, it's an empathetic and searching meditation on some of humanity's deepest psychological questions.
