Review by Booklist Review
Our lives begin when we're dropped into our corners of the world. We are all fragile and lie on the spectrum of mental illness. We are shaped both by our heredity and the daily events that surround us. This combination determines how we react to major traumas or the piling on of small challenges. Scottish-born psychologist Deary recalls how years of schoolyard bullying and the feeling of always being "on the alert" shaped his later life. He shares stories of a care worker whose years of working with suicidal patients has worn him down, and of a probation officer who started having physical symptoms when her home and work lives became more complicated. Each of us is filled with our own stories and our own narratives, and we struggle to remain whole, to not break. Deary describes these conflicts in great detail and offers questions to help readers evaluate their own inner lives. This challenging text, more theory than self-help, will appeal to readers who enjoy digging into the whys of their thoughts and feelings.
From Booklist, Copyright (c) American Library Association. Used with permission.
Review by Publisher's Weekly Review
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. (May)
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Review by Library Journal Review
Deary, a clinical health psychologist at the Fatigue Clinic and Northumbria University, specializes in helping people cope with the challenges and traumas (like illness) that come their way. That makes him the perfect author for this book, which elucidates what happens when people push their bodies to the limit and beyond. Using anecdotes, science, and even reflective questions, his book asks readers to consider what happens to their body when they are stressed and what lies in store. Deary writes that, in the process of explaining how people can break, he can't help but also indicate how people can protect themselves. He reminds readers that their mental and physical well-being are closely linked. Once people fully understand how their bodies are impacted by worries and fears, he says, they have a much better chance of overcoming them. He asserts that through love, positive emotions, rest, kindness, and more, readers can find relief from stressors and start the healing process. VERDICT An enlightening book, for readers who want to protect their bodies as well as their mental health. --Mason Bennett
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Review by Kirkus Book Review
How we respond to life's turbulence. In the second volume of a planned trilogy that began with How We Are, British health psychologist Deary draws on his clinical work, his research, and his own life and the lives of his family and friends to examine what happens to us when we feel pushed past our limits. A practitioner at a trans-diagnostic fatigue clinic, Deary works with patients seeking help for exhaustion resulting from illness--cancer, cancer treatment, or autoimmune disease, for example--or psychological or emotional stress. Offering several empathetic case histories, he considers the varied nature of toxic climates that "can exhaust our energies" or "cause us to devalue ourselves." The author is candid about his own experiences with social anxiety, depression, and the terror he felt as a boy treated as a misfit by his schoolmates. Deary also chronicles the case of his mother, a passionate woman "trapped by circumstances" who became exhausted and despondent after a fall. Although research has found a genetic propensity to develop anxiety and depression, Deary underscores the idea that environments shape us more profoundly. Even siblings, eliciting different behaviors from a parent, necessarily grow up in essentially different worlds. Throughout each chapter, the author asks readers to reflect on the stories they construct about their lives and personalities and on the forces and experiences that continue to shape them. Those forces may include a change in work culture--such as a new boss instituting continuous monitoring; a family crisis; an illness; or a persistent nonvisible disability. "People with autism, trans people, queer people, overweight people, anyone marginalized, anyone who has just arrived in a country," writes Deary, are burdened with the exhausting task of having repeatedly to explain themselves. "Self-befriending," he concludes, is a step toward healing. A compassionate guide to confronting distress. Copyright (c) Kirkus Reviews, used with permission.
Copyright (c) Kirkus Reviews, used with permission.
