100 books like The Extended Mind

Frankl’s concept of finding meaning in suffering and the idea that our primary drive in life is not pleasure but the discovery and pursuit of what we personally find meaningful deeply resonates with me.

The book underscores the belief that even in the most difficult of circumstances, we have the freedom to choose our attitudes and responses, a concept that is central to high-performance psychology.

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.

Reading this book was like a lightbulb going off!

There are many stages of grief that people observe (denial, anger, shock, etc.). But anxiety is a key component of grief as well. I’ve experienced anxiety in my life but had no idea it was connected to my grief.

Seeing and understanding this connection through Claire’s book is like attending counseling and is so important for anyone going through the grieving process.

I heard about Burnout by sisters Emily Nagoski, PhD, and Amelia Nagoski, DMA, on a recent Brené Brown Unlocking Us podcast episode, and it was a happy surprise to learn that we share a literary agent! I listened to the audiobook and found I got something out of every single chapter. The book is aiming high: it wants to end the cycle of feeling overwhelmed and exhausted. I’ve been asked for book recs to help with shaky feelings from my fellow beautiful voyagers, and I often mention Burnout since it delves into how emotions can affect our bodies without us even knowing it’s happening. The book explores some of the core reasons women may be facing the kinds of symptoms described above, and works to systematically break them down.

Among my prescriptions to caregivers – especially those who struggle to find meaning and in creating a typical day that is safe, social, and engaged – is Anne Basting’s book. Basting, a theater arts professor, makes a persuasive case that upends the usual and customary approaches to caring for persons living with dementia. Her central premise is this: Together, caregivers and patients can create. She offers concrete ideas and steps to address some of the most vexing challenges such as when a patient asks the whereabouts of a long-ago deceased relative.

Novelist and journalist Lionel Shriver’s novel is the story of Kay and Cyril, a comfortably settled, middle-aged, middle-class British couple who make plans for their future. The experiences of a decade of caring for Kay’s father with dementia were so unsettling and disturbing that the couple agree to end their lives at 80. They carry on with their lives convinced that 80 is enough. Or maybe not. Or perhaps it depends. This book is required reading for all those planners, those self-controllers, who seize the future and bind their families with the tight contractual grip of a well-composed, gravely worded “dementia advance directive,” such as “In the event I cannot recognize family, I ask that I be euthanized” or “Should I reach a stage when I am unable to feed myself, I ask that all feeding cease.” 

This first-person account of living with a biomarker-defined diagnosis of Alzheimer’s disease is a clearly written story of two very distinct, even antagonistic experiences. There’s the highly subjective experience of being a patient and the highly objective experience of being a physician who has diagnosed and cared for persons with the same disease. In one book is one narrative of two perspectives embodied in one person. The result is an unadorned account of what it’s like to lose one’s mind just a little bit at a time. Case in point is his account of apathy. I’m routinely prescribing this book to my patients. 

This book is a kind of detective story. It returns to the scene of a long-ago committed crime, namely the incomplete diagnosis and substandard care Jerry Weinstein received in an indifferent health care system and a culture haunted by stigmas. The authors are a masterful team. Bruce Miller is a neurologist at the University of California, San Francisco’s Memory and Aging Center. He’s a widely-recognized expert in the diagnosis and classification of neurodegenerative diseases. Cindy Weinstein is a professor of English literature who focuses on the 19th century American novel. Weinstein’s expertise is Herman Melville, the master of narratives of dissection.

Jerry, Cindy’s father, died in 1997 after a years-long struggle with an inadequately diagnosed and neglected dementia. Together, physicians and literary scholars reconstruct what happened. By putting words to the problem, they make sense of what was painful nonsense. This is the book to understand the value of… show more.

Could there have been a more natural and intuitive connection than mine with the Anxiety Sisters? I don't think so. Abbe Greenberg and Maggie Sarachek have built an online community of 200K people and host a popular podcast called The Spin Cycle. In their work, they blend their personal experience with their professional training as counselors, mental health advocates, researchers, and educators. Their book, The Anxiety Sisters’ Survival Guide: How You Can Become More Hopeful, Connected, and Happy is terrific. The down-to-earth, actionable advice that Abbe and Maggie share is dead on. Great work, sisters!

This is a fantastic read if you want to understand not only the why behind why you feel anxious, but more importantly, what you can do about it.

By understanding how the vicious cycle of anxiety can take root, Dr. Brewer does an incredible job of teaching us how we can change our behavioral patterns, particularly through mindfulness and distress tolerance. This is also a great read if you’ve ever wanted to kick a habit, like smoking, and have been unsuccessful in changing your behavior in the past.