100 books like The Craving Mind

I recommend this book because it is a deep dive into trauma and how it can impact all of our lives. This book helps the reader understand the consequences of trauma and how to ultimately heal from the trauma. In my personal and professional opinion, everyone should read this book to better learn about themselves.

The key to growing and becoming better daily is to have self-awareness. This book helped me develop self-awareness about others and my clients as well. I have learned how to be more empathetic towards others by reading this book.

Sleep takes up 1/3 of our lives, and it’s only relatively recently we’ve learned that our brains are incredibly active during this seemingly quiescent period.

In The Nocturnal Brain, Guy Leschziner—a renowned neurologist—describes some of the most intriguing cases of sleep disorders he has encountered in the clinic. The result is a fascinating examination of one of the most important parts of our neurological lives.

It’s hard for me to explain just how important this book has been in Western culture. Part autobiography, part meditation manual, this book is what popularized the modern mindfulness movement, beginning with Jon’s first forays into teaching ‘secularized’ mindfulness practices in the basement of a medical school building in the late 1970s.

Rather than staying in that basement, Jon’s combination of scientific training, deep commitment to understanding the mechanisms of the mental joy and suffering, and passion for helping others came together to create one of the first and most influential Western meditation training programs: Mindfulness-Based Stress Reduction. This program has been the foundation for decades of scientific research as western culture as come to appreciate the importance of training ourselves for mental health and wellness.

This book is the story of that program, it takes you firsthand through the rationale and practices that have helped so many people, acting… show more.

I find Lisa Feldman Barrett both riveting and accessible. She’s a neuroscientist who can write lucidly, and she has a new tale to tell about what emotions are.

Far from being universal essences with single, identifiable fingerprints (aka Darwin or Ekman), emotions are constructed in a neuroplastic way by the complex interactions of the brain, body, language, culture, and experience. Emotions are made, not given.

And she gave me one of my favorite ideas:  “emotional granularity,” the notion that the richer our emotional vocabulary and ability to name and describe our experience, the wiser and more flourishing our lives.

This book may seem out of place in a list of psychologically-minded self-help recommendations. And it is long, and hard to read. Don’t even get me started on the use of end-notes in a work of fiction. But it is quite simply one of the best books written in the past 100 years and it is all about people who have gotten stuck, trapped by habit or circumstance, and are yearning for a way to find meaning in life.

To me, this book is a self help book because it is written so powerfully (in a not-so-distance fictional future) that as the characters are inevitably transformed and sometimes freed from their assumed destinies, Wallace somehow illustrates how we too can be transformed in our daily routines and interactions by finding moments of clarity and meaning right where we are, rather than being saved by some outside force that promises liberation… show more.

There is this myth that with a perfect system, strategy, or set of habits, you can live a stress-free life; the trouble is, we adapt to any situation and still find ways to become stressed when the world inevitably changes around us.

I love this book because it starts by acknowledging this point rather than promising that we will never find ourselves overwhelmed. The author, Susan David, does a masterful job in providing practical and engaging anecdotes and advice for learning to pivot with life’s changes, acknowledging the inevitable upsets that occur, and then being intentional about how we can channel our efforts into activity that gets positive emotions flowing once more.

It is a great read for anyone feeling overwhelmed and stuck by the everyday.

Prof. Ethan Kross already had a strong reputation in the world of academic psychology for his work on that little voice inside our head and how it both gives us a sense of purpose but also drives us to despair at times. This book is essential reading for those interested in how to better understand the connection between mental habits and one’s state of well-being.

We so often forget when the voice inside our head recites criticisms and worries; we can easily be in the driver’s seat and direct these conversations. The voice inside our head is part of us, even if it seems deeply informed by the collection of critics we have met in the past. Our challenge, then, is to be a bit more intentional about how we cultivate this inner voice, when do we give it our attention, and how do we respond to the inevitable negative… show more.

As a professional record producer turned neuroscientist, Daniel Levitan drew me in with his yin-yang mind. Was the intersection of creativity and science really navigable? Could he dispel the notion, at last, that inspiration is beamed down from a cloud? And how did a guy who worked with Stevie Wonder and Rosanne Cash get to be such a nerd?

I lapped up his explanations about musical ideas traveling along neurons and brain chemicals and how it’s possible that physical sound waves elicit an emotional response. I also realized that science and art are not so opposite.

I think people who make music recognize it as an experiment with variables and environmental factors and failures along the way, and that we’ll celebrate when we solve it, and that then the questions will change.  

What if addiction isn’t a chronic relapsing disease, as described by the National Institute on Drug Abuse? What if a better way to think about it is as a type of learning disorder? Neuroscientist and author Marc Lewis, himself a recovering addict, makes his compelling argument through the stories of five people suffering from substance use disorders. This insightful book left me believing that the attempt to fit addiction into rigid categories does a disservice to the complexity of this condition.

Motivational Interviewing (MI) is not so much a therapeutic intervention as a technique, a way of talking to another person to help them move in a different direction. The fundamental idea, brilliant in its simplicity, is that people don’t change because you tell them to. They change because they tell themselves to. MI does precisely what Socrates did: question and draw people out, getting them to see the contradictions in their own thinking as a way of motivating them to change their beliefs (and ultimately their life). If Socrates were a therapist (and in a way he was), he’d be doing MI (and in a way, he did).