Why Smart People Hurt
A Guide for the Bright, the Sensitive, and the Creative
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- $18.99
Publisher Description
The challenges smart and creative people encounter - from scientific researchers, genius award winners, to bestselling novelists, Broadway actors, high-powered lawyers and academics - often include anxiety, over-thinking, mania, sadness and despair. Specifically, the challenges that smart people face, including: 'racing brain syndrome' living in an anti-intellectual culture finding ideas worth loving dealing with boredom and hypersensitivity finding meaning in their lives and their work struggling to achieve success In WHY SMART PEOPLE HURT, psychologist 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. His thoughtful strategies include using logic and creativity to cope with the problems of having a brain that goes into overdrive at the drop of a hat. With a series of questions at the end of each chapter, he guides the reader to create his or her own roadmap to a calm and meaningful life. WHY SMART PEOPLE HURT is a must-read for parents of gifted children as well as the millions of smart and creative people that are searching for a more meaningful life.
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.
