christopherm

Don’t judge this book by its title

Revisado: 01-27-25

I liked the title, but it was basically downhill from there. The book starts off with a lot of feel-good fluff, pretty harmless cliche advice…the kind of generic stuff you might hear on social media from influencers peddling tips for healthy living. But as his recommendations pile up, it begins to feel less harmless. For one thing, he undermines the initial premise of embracing imbalance. Instead, he seems to be saying something like, “Just try harder! And you too can learn to master juggling these 100 healthy habits seamlessly! Then you’ll finally have a life you love!” His laundry list of tips is (if you hadn’t already guessed) stuff most people already feel they *ought* to be doing. His cheerleading isn’t adding anything to the conversation. If you’re not a fan of the power of positive thinking, things only get worse in the final third of the book.

All that said, I think he’s well intentioned. But I think there are much better self help options out there.

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101 on mindfulness

Revisado: 05-20-23

If you’re new to mindfulness, this might be a good intro for you. I was hoping for techniques, theory, and research specific to the adaptation of mindfulness practices for an ADHD population, but I found it pretty disappointing on this front. Admittedly I chose to stop reading halfway through, so maybe the author does a deeper dive later on in the book.

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Close but no cigar

Revisado: 02-08-20

He has some generally good recommendations (like inviting feedback at work), and he incorporates sound, evidenced based approaches like Motivational Interviewing and Acceptance and Commitment Therapy (ACT), but — at least for those two methods — his interpretation seems like a simulacrum, a gross oversimplification, a simplification that’s not in the service of making it easier to understand, but in a way that completely loses the essential spirit of those methods. At one point he acknowledges the ‘myth’ that we’ll change our behavior the moment we see how our behavior is irrational or ineffective. Well duh - I think most people know they can’t always simply will themselves to change behavior, that we do things despite reason and intention all the time. It’s the subtleties, the spirit of ACT that would actually be helpful in addressing this challenge, but seems to be very much missing from this book. I’d say it’s an overly mechanistic, top down understanding of the mind, one that presumes reason is (and should be) dominant to our emotions. It’s my understanding that contemporary psychology does not support this view, and that taking this approach to behavior change is going to be very limited in terms of efficacy.

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Dated inaccurate information that may misguide you

Revisado: 09-17-19

I really wanted to like this book.

Some of the reviews on here complain of too much theory and historical fluff, but in my view, the real problem is that so much of the theory is bad, largely debunked. Though it might be temping to view rationality and emotion as opposed -- that the limbic system is a "beast" to be tamed by the prefrontal cortex -- this dated understanding of the brain and the mind does a disservice that risks leading people down the wrong path when trying to address problems like procrastination. If you view the rational mind as good and the emotional mind as immature, child-like, and impulsive, and you try to solve procrastination by controlling the emotional mind, you're going to get entrenched in a fairly pointless war that can't be won. The few solutions that may come out of this approach will be less effective, adaptive, and flexible when compared with other approaches out there.

Antonio Damasio—"one of the world’s leading neurologists" (The New York Times)-- made a similar point as early as 1995 with the publication of Descartes’ Error.

I also highly recommend looking at the evolutionary psychologist Robert Wright's writing on the modular theory of mind in his book Why Buddhism is True (2017). He's talking about secular Buddhist ideas of how the mind and motivation work, and he shows how contemporary science now backs many of those claims.

If you're looking for something you can really put to use, Acceptance and Commitment Therapy, an evidence based modality of psychotherapy, also offers a more accurate and helpful approach.

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Great summary of the research, but...

Revisado: 09-10-19

....but I'm not sure about a core premise -- that it's a question of states versus traits when it comes to understanding the benefits of meditation.

Practicing meditation and mindfulness seems more analogous to learning a foreign language or a musical instrument -- If you don't practice, you'll get rusty, but you also can pick it back up with relatively ease at any time. If there is in fact some kind of latent mental muscle memory when it comes to mindfulness, this book doesn't seem to account for it.

That said, the question of states vs traits was still useful in its own way, and I appreciated the review of the research. There are scientific claims about meditation everywhere, and this book seems genuinely invested in helping the reader sort out the good from the not so good.

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